Perhaps such a triptych is emblematic not only of a specific Swiss landscape, but the topsy-turviness of our 21st-century sensibilities. Instead of basking by the lake under August’s blue skies, I find myself yearning for the landscapes of the cinema screen. A pixelated image of a Georgian football pitch in the filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025) feels more sublime than the Swiss vistas before me. What does it mean to long for images rather than for the real?

Dry Leaf, which follows a father searching for his daughter, Lisa,  a sports photographer who vanishes while documenting football stadiums in rural Georgia, was shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson W595 and renews the form of slow cinema through a visceral material tactility. Even in the most static compositions, the image shimmers with motion: pixels quiver with light, shadows ripple in black and grey, the sky itself seems alive. Slow cinema, since its (contested) inception in the 1970s, has long been the golden child of festival auteurism, formally constructed as a counterpoint to commercial cinema, with its demands for observation instead of propulsion. I must admit that, of late, I’ve grown weary of its supposed political form, which feels increasingly out of step with the frenzied, erratic rhythms of our post-digital world. Dry Leaf, however, rekindles my sense of wonder: its cumulative pleasures accrete frame by frame, each pixelated surface a reminder of cinema’s capacity to astonish.

Dry Leaf, among a few other films at Locarno, seem to circle back to ideas disseminated by Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2009) with its choice of low-res imagery. Steyerl writes about the proliferation of endlessly reproducible images on the internet becoming part of the circulation of “poor images”, ones that are rip-offs, constantly reproduced, circulated on the web’s no man’s land. They often form counter-archives, or hold onto the vestige of the real. Steyerl adds: “Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable – that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.”

A fuzzy goalpost as seen in Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025).

Watching Dry Leaf, I find myself observing the image anew, perhaps shocking my sensorial capacities against the paradoxical proliferation of smooth 4K, where its pleasant, smooth surface camouflages a certain form of insipidness. The pixelation, on the other hand, often calls into question what exactly one is seeing – is that the sky, or a reflection in the lake? By troubling the indexicality of images, Koberidze reminds us how rare it is to look with curiosity at what could be termed the “obvious”, and to marvel at the construction of fiction, even at the level of the reproducible image.

The three-hour film is a road film of sorts, following Irakli (the director’s father David Koberidze) and his daughter’s friend Levan (Otar Nijaradze) on a hapless Beckettian pursuit, as each trail is met with Lisa’s absence. She is nowhere to be seen – and indeed, many daughters and sons seem missing from their home villages too, having left for the cities. We only catch glimpses of the elders and the children. The football pitches stand empty, their silence a gentle metaphor for the cannibalising pull of urbanisation in Georgia.

As in Koberidze’s debut, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017) – also filmed on a Sony Ericsson – moments of poetry permeate the everyday. That earlier film uses distorted classical romantic melodies to elevate typical street scenes in Tbilisi to a grand symphony; in Dry Leaf, the score by Alexander’s brother Giorgi Koberidze is playful yet baroque, as electronic synths are accompanied by what sounds like a harpsichord. Did I mention invisible characters also exist alongside the visible characters in what is otherwise a realist framework? Levan himself is invisible, and Koberidze provokes quiet laughter with various reverse shots between Irakli and his invisible companion. Whether this is a budget constraint or a waggish conceit, the invisible character also function as a synecdoche for loss – for a nation under change; for the growing distance between a father and a daughter.

Above, a still from Dry Leaf (2025). Alexandre Koberidze discovered the cinematic potential of the Sony Ericsson W595 by accident: “The person at the store told me it was a good gadget to listen to music on.”

Below, Locarno sits on the shore of Lake Maggiore, once ruled by the Mazzardi brothers, a notoriously bloodthirsty 15th-century pirate gang.

Above, a still from Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025) in which the count quotes Goethe’s dying words, “Merh Licht!” (“More light!”).

Below, a psychoanalytically-loaded mid-morning snack of ombre egg and normal-coloured banana.

I’ve been affectionately plugging Dry Leaf as a “sports” film to some of my friends, as the image of football pitches become the central refrain of the work. Yet, the Sony Ericsson camera refuses the logic of the constantly mobile professional football camera which utilises the most advanced technology in the production of moving images, attempting to render an event in perfect clarity in real-time, reproducing a singular shared reality for millions of viewers. Instead, Koberidze’s blurry, static football fields lean towards still life painting. Derelict of players, these goal posts appear like looming gods of a forgotten religion, appearing more like monuments to a civilisation we can no longer recognise.

Harun Farocki wrote: “It is common knowledge that football is our life. And, just like life, we are always trying to improve our grasp of it.” At a film festival, one realises something similar: cinema too becomes our life – sometimes to our detriment. You can speak about films without ever having to speak about yourself; they function as a currency, form part of an initiation ritual about identity and belonging. Dry Leaf is not a “football” film, but it grapples with the seemingly stochastic ways that we choose – and then leave behind – the things, and the people, we love. Cinema, then, is not an object or an ornament to be studied, but perhaps the inverse. It offers a logic through which we can re-contextualise our lives and learn how to exist in the world.

Each day of the festival, I open my eyes first at the local Ibis Hotel, where you can find sunset ombre boiled eggs on the breakfast menu, before venturing out to the cinema. Each evening ends with a midnight swim in the Lago Maggiore, with the moon illuminating the warm waters. So few people are out at night that it feels like you’re a child sneaking around at curfew. The days are perhaps less cinematic – often, it involves a gruelling walk under the August sun to Palexpo, the largest screening space with a capacity of around 3,000 seats, without enough windows and with very little air conditioning. On one of the final days of the festival, armed with a bamboo fan and a boiled egg, I spent the afternoon watching the rudest film of the year: a three-hour-long reinterpretation of the Dracula myth by the Romanian enfant terrible-cum-edgelord Radu Jude, and perhaps the most provocative film of the year.

Hen eggs can appear ombre due to changing levels of pigmentation as the egg forms in the oviduct. These eggs, however, appear to have been dyed.

Divided into roughly 15 chapters, Jude’s Dracula (2025) takes the Romanian folktale to new extremes – casting the vampire as a metaphor for the cannibalistic state of our relationships under late capitalism, and, at other moments, as a fantastical, sexualised ideal. I can’t say I enjoyed the film, but I appreciated it as a provocation of what cinema could be. Dracula is punk, singular, crude and often deliberately ugly. A narrator – Jude’s stand-in, played by Adonis Tanța – guides us through each chapter, agonising over his writer’s block and even enlisting AI to help write a “commercial” box-office-friendly version of the story. However, it’s clear that such deranged visions could’ve only been invented by Jude’s twisted brain.

There is something Chaucer-esque in the narrator’s interjections: where our poets once invoked the sacred muses for inspiration, we now turn to their technological counterpart. In Jude’s account, the AI idol is mistaken for a god, and each of its deranged visions is received as if it were a revelation. As Tanța notes, all the ingredients needed for this filmmaker’s commercial film are sex, nudity, gore, feelings and slapstick humour. Dracula lurches between genres and cinematic forms: reappropriated archival footage of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is reimagined as lewd advertisements, while Ilinca Manolache (from Jude’s 2023 Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World) plays a medieval widow who buys a dildo harvested by a young farmer. He thought he had harvested corn, but what sprouts instead is a field of phalluses in Jude’s crude twist on Jack and his beanstalk. Much of the film’s spectacle, however, is outsourced to AI. Jude explains during the press conference that, faced with budget constraints, he turned to generative tools to visualise scenes too costly to stage: a violent shoot-out at a gaming company’s office during the workers’ strike, and most of the explicit sex scenes.

In Hito Steyerl’s new book, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (2025), she writes that the “poor image” in its 2009 form has all but disappeared, making way for the “burnt-out image” where most images circulating on the internet will no longer be indexical freeze-frame shots of real life, but a statistical form of image-making, born from AI tools such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E which “mine” datasets for representations of reality. In other words, AI is Jude’s own vampire – with a parasitic desire for extraction, or as Steyerl calls it, “the large-scale kidnapping of data”. Throughout the film, AI-generated pornographic sequences are lurid and grotesque, as vaginas pulsate into tooth-like forms, limbs twist in superhuman contortions, and erect penises dominate the frame as its longest objects. Yet these images are hardly new; they are exaggerations of what we already know from pornography and from a tradition of misogynistic horror cinema like 2008’s Teeth, reflections of an internet – and a reality – constructed by a culture of continued exploitation.

The non-AI segments, shot on an iPhone, are blurry, shaky, and often infuriatingly shambolic: autofocus flickers unpredictably, low-lit images glow orange in night sequences, and the camera rarely settles. Gradually, these live-action scenes in real locations give way to an empty theatre stage – stripped back, minimal, lit only by in-house stage lights. This slow emptying of the film into a purely performative space feels like a challenge to filmmaking itself, to realism, and to the tools we rely on to sustain it.

Perhaps Jude is provoking the very idea of what a national cinema should portend. Dracula, after all, springs from a popularised Transylvanian folktale, inspired by the medieval prince Vlad the Impaler. Dracula similarly subverts the prestigious European festival circuit’s constructed narrative for non-Western selections: one can usually expect a social-realist drama of adrift working-class characters, rendered in sombre, stylish tones, designed to elicit a sanctified empathy from an international audience. What makes Dracula’s final chapter so striking is its uncanny mimicry of this very formula. In a tender vignette, a bin-collector father slips away from work to watch his daughter recite poetry as part of a school performance; he keeps to the fences so as not to shame her with his uniform. Cynical though it may sound, Jude seems to know exactly what the industry’s vampires crave: to gorge on such moments and distil them into a single, consumable image of a nation – precisely what his fractured, unruly vision resists.

Perhaps, what makes Locarno so strange is its constant self-revelation of its unevenly constructed nature – it does not try to suggest that cinema can change the world, like many other programmes would like to suggest. As a mix of the profane and the sacred, the city mirrors the crisis of contemporary culture: a space where commerce and critique, false idols and provocateurs coexist without resolution. .

Above, the poster for Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025), an assemblage of peppers, pomegranate seeds, parsley and olives.

Below, on the train from Milan to Locarno. Switzerland has the densest rail network in Europe, over 5,200km in length.