At the Locarno Festival, cinema dares to tell sulphurous stories, on personal or political grounds.

To hell with the corset and the calibrated scenarios. Is the ^78th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival, which takes place from August 6 to 16, succeeding in opening up the programming game a little, which tends to calm down, in Venice, Cannes or Berlin, for fear of scandal? The artistic director of the Swiss event, Giona A. Nazzaro , took the risk of selecting a certain number of works where things are said that we no longer hear, where bodies breathe in front of the camera, the filmmakers finding the right form to remove any voyeuristic ambiguity.

This year, Locarno is all about the fishnet rather than resilience, a very fine word, certainly, but one that has ended up being used in every possible way in often predictable stories. Halfway through the festival, Radu Jude's Dracula , in the running for the Golden Leopard, takes the prize for the most sultry work, imagining a vampire film made by AI, spiced with sex and regressive, a real firebrand against the prevailing vulgarity, but not only that.

With this admittedly excessive "B-movie homage film," the Romanian filmmaker sought to reinvent himself: "Cinema is a bit down on the question of narratives. People are afraid of AI, but if AI makes a better film than me, then OK, I'll retire!" Radu Jude declared at the press conference on Sunday, August 10. Alongside him, the lead actress, Oana Maria Zaharia, dressed in a fishnet bodysuit, spoke about her role and her erotic performance in terms that would seem unimaginable in French cinema: "I thank Radu Jude, I was able to express all my perversity and my dark corners, to be myself."

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