Page - 128 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

Review: 71st Locarno Film Festival | 127www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 127–131 Dietmar Adler and Charles Martig Festival Review: 71st Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland, 1–11 August 2018 Religion, Politics, and Transcendence in New Cinema – Highlights One Year after #MeToo Religion is once again a robust topic in international filmmaking. Several films in the competition at the 71st Locarno Film Festival (1–11 August 2018) dealt ex- plicitly or implicitly with religion, politics, and transcendence. Outstanding films were A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua, SG/FR/NL 2018), which won the Golden Leopard, and M (Yolande Zauberman, FR 2018), which deals with child abuse in a strictly Orthodox Jewish community and was awarded the Special Prize of the International Jury. The Ecumenical Jury of Signis and Interfilm decided to award its prize to Sibel (Guillaume Giovanetti / Çağla Zencirci, FR/DE/TR 2018), the story of the emancipation of a young woman in Turkey. In general, women played a prominent role in the festival’s program, not least because a pledge of gender parity was signed by festival officials, a sign of where we are one year after #MeToo. In this festival review, Dietmar Adler from Interfilm and Charles Martig from Signis offer a taste of the film program at Locarno, explore reli- gious, political, and social aspects of the films, and provide insight into the work of the Ecumenical Jury. THE WINNER FROM SINGAPORE The Asian film A Land Imagined, directed by Yeo Siew Hua, was considered an extraordinary elaboration of its topic by both the International Jury (it won the Golden Leopard) and the Ecumenical Jury. The film is set in Singapore, where migrant workers labor on land reclamation sites. A worker demands his wages and disappears. Another one, Wang, is killed. It was he who had discovered the body of the other worker. Only Lok, an honest policeman, starts looking for the missing worker: a dreamlike non-logical storytelling starts into a film-noir mystery. The film shows how dependent the migrant workers are: they can- not return to their home countries, they are indebted to their employer, and, moreover, they don’t have their passports. The film uses the aesthetic conven- tions of dreams and internet games to blend time and space through artistic DOI: 10.25364/05.4:2018.2.9