Brazil

Leonardo Martinelli’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Neon Phantom is surprisingly as entertaining and watchable as it is urgent and harrowing.

Lillah Halla’s third short film opens underwater, below sea level, a place that has become the victim of relentless pollution. Though never in the foreground, Halla makes the topic sufficiently tangible to allow Menarca to be grounded in ecocritique.

Cross-referencing politics and body politics, reproduction and pandemics, Isadora Neves Marques creates a juxtaposition between a warning dystopia and a dangerous reality.