The Locarno Film Festival celebrated its 75th birthday this year.

For this occasion, Giona A. Nazzaro, the artistic director, asked several of his predecessors, from Frédéric Maire to Olivier Père to Carlo Chatrian, and some of their collaborators to report on the most beautiful moment of their tenure in front of 6,000 spectators in the Piazza Grande .

Maire said that after a performance a band played and people danced, someone else recalled the house disco after "Berlin Calling" in 2008, where the main actor Paul Kalkbrenner hung up records after the performance.

The desire to move triumphed over the desire to see.

This is also what makes Locarno so fascinating.

Nazarro is a movie buff who loves genre cinema.

Already with the violent farce "Bullet Train", which opened the festival on the Piazza Grande a week and a half ago, he set an accent that ran through several films in the competition.

The most frightening example was "Bowling Saturne" by Patricia Mazuy.

A man and a woman meet at a bowling alley.

They go to him and soon they have sex, which becomes more and more rough after the first passion.

Until the man hits the woman in the face with his fist, over and over again, for several minutes.

Then he breaks her neck with the bedside lamp.

“How can you tell about violence?” the director asks in the catalog text.

"Not like that!" one wants to call out to her, because the brutality of the scene covers the film like a nightmare.

"Stone Turtle" receives award

One of the exaggerated screenplay inventions is that the investigating police officer is, of all people, the half-brother of the murderer.

They inherited a bowling alley from their father, where the deceased's friends, all hunters, still meet.

The hunt for a woman killer is equated with the hunt for wild animals, and that is - in this forced parallel guide - an extravagant short circuit.

The fact that the film isn't interested in either the female victims or the resolution of the case doesn't make it any better.

"Stone Turtle" by Malaysian director Ming Jin Woo also begins with a shock: a man drops a huge stone on the head of the woman kneeling in front of him.

A scene whose meaning is not immediately apparent.

Because this is about something else, about a woman who lives as a stateless refugee with her little daughter on a small remote island in Malaysia and keeps her head above water by selling turtle eggs.

The encounter with a researcher who supposedly wants to document the island's folklore leads to a game of deception and duplication in which suddenly nothing seems certain anymore.

An uncertainty that corresponds perfectly with the beauty of the landscape and the wildness of the sea.

"Stone Turtle" received the International Film Critics' Award for it.

In the competition entry “Tengo sueños eléctricos” by Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel, which actually deals with the consequences of a couple's divorce for their sixteen-year-old daughter Eva, there is always a subliminal element of violence.

The father, actually a sensitive writer, sometimes reacts so uncontrollably in his anger about the separation that he irritates and frightens Eva.

Hatred and love, attraction and repulsion are close together here, the violence of the father is transferred to the daughter when she pulls her little sister's hair mercilessly.

But at the end there is a look of reconciliation that gives the film something poetic.

It's one of the strongest entries in the competition.

Valentina Maurel rightly received the Leopard for Best Director,

Daniela Marin Navarro and Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez won Best Actress and Best Actor awards.

The main prize, the Golden Leopard, went to the film "Regra 34" by Brazilian director Júlia Murat.

The eponymous “Rule 34” formulates the maxim that there is a pornographic way of treating every topic.