'Carno Knowledge (Patreon)

I reviewed a couple of Locarno competition titles for InReview Online. Here they are. Please excuse the formatting / kerning issues.

Tommy Guns (Carlos Conceição, 2022)

"The film is a changeling, constantly revising and reversing its apparent  intentions. Although it bears many of the hallmarks of a war film, it  also depicts the military mentality as a form of group pathology, and  eventually a Kafkaesque double-bind. Conceição’s primary focus is on a  wayward platoon of Portuguese soldiers, whose spiritual leader is Zé  (João Arrais), a contemplative young man who intuits that something is  wrong with their mission, although he cannot say exactly what. Despite  this interest in the minds of the colonizers, Tommy Guns  operates squarely from the Angolan perspective, going so far as to stage  the achievement of independence as a return of the repressed, the  revenge of actual zombies." [full review here]

Stone Turtle (Woo Ming Jin, 2022)

"Zahara (Asmara Abigail) is a young woman  who is raising her dead sister’s child, Nika (Samara Kenzo). As we  eventually learn, they left the mainland for a desolate life on the  island, largely to protect Nika from the sorts of dangers that befell  the girl’s late mother. Alas, civilization finds the pair, as Samad  (Bront Palarae) suddenly appears on the shore one day. He claims to be a  turtle researcher from the national science academy, but Zahara  suspects right away that he is not quite what he seems. The two begin a  tenuous struggle of wills, as Nika’s safety hangs in the balance." [full review here]