Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial sequel “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due” is lastly right here, by means of Locarno 2025 — six years after the director prompted a firestorm at Cannes with the earlier movie within the trilogy. The 78ᵗʰ version of the Locarno Movie Pageant contains 220 movies, with Kechiche’s long-awaited third installment one of the notable picks within the Concorso Internazionale part. The competition takes place from August 6 to 16.
The polarizing “Blue Is the Warmest Colour” director first debuted “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno” in 2017. The movie facilities on Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), a younger screenwriter who travels from Paris to his Mediterranean hometown for the summer season in 1994. Whereas there, he meets a producer who affords to finance his first movie… for a price. The story is predicated on François Bégaudeau’s novel “La Blessure, la vraie.”
That characteristic spurred an notorious 2019 sequel, “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” which included infinite twerking pictures and an unsimulated oral intercourse scene lasting for greater than 10 minutes, resulting in walkouts at Cannes. (Learn the scathing IndieWire overview right here.) Then allegations of misconduct on-set surfaced. A supply near the manufacturing claimed to Midi Libre on the time that Kechiche insisted on the non-simulated intercourse scene, however that the actors “didn’t wish to do” it. The sequence was later nonetheless filmed “with alcohol being recurrently consumed” to allegedly coerce the celebs. “Intermezzo” went on to land at Rotten Tomatoes with a uncommon 0 % rating from eight critics.
Kechiche reacted to the poor reception for the movie at Cannes 2019, saying that he needed to “strive one thing totally different” with “Intermezzo” and that “not everyone seems to be open to that new expertise.”
“Not everybody shares the way in which I have a look at others,” he stated of the backlash to the movie. “Not everybody likes this or that sort of movie for instance so, no, it doesn’t hassle me within the least. If what I see is what I wish to see and if that doesn’t attraction to everybody, effectively, that may be very lucky, it will be a catastrophe if everybody watched a movie in precisely the identical approach.”
Kechiche beforehand received the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2013 for lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Colour.” The movie was plagued with on set allegations of exploitation from actresses Lea Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Kechiche was later accused of assault by varied girls in 2018.
In 2019, Kechiche denied that “Mektoub” was “a movie to reply the critics” of “Blue Is the Warmest Colour.” He added, “Crucial factor for me, and that is what I wish to say instantly, was to have a good time life, love, want, breath, music, the physique. I needed to strive a cinematographic expertise that will be as free as doable.”
Kechiche’s “Mektoub My Love: Canto Due” is likely one of the many stunning additions to Locarno. Fabrice Aragno’s “Le Lac” and Radu Jude’s “Dracula” are additionally among the many program. The Locarno Inventive Director Giona A. Nazzaro stated in a press assertion that the 2025 competition has a theme of aspiration.
“The cinema that presents itself on the crossroads with historical past for the 78th version of the Pageant is a cinema that, on the one hand, doesn’t flip its gaze away from actuality, and, on the opposite, explores the nonetheless doable types of the picture with out forgetting to smile on the absurdities of our lives,” Nazzaro stated. “A cinema that’s playful, takes dangers, desires, and provokes; a cinema that stubbornly stays on the earth. Wanting onward, alongside all human beings.”
Take a look at the complete program right here.