Click here to read the full article.
LOCARNO, Switzerland — Cross ocean love story “Spring Story” and false miracle comedy “The Surubí,” won big at Locarno’s 2026 pix-in-post First Look focus on Uruguay, sharing its top five prizes at a Sunday evening
awards ceremony.
The industry awards went to two of its most substantial offerings, underscoring the range of productions on offer from a offbeat crime thriller (“Maltrato Animal”) to kids’ adventure (““Our Little Band Of Justice”) and two doc-features tracing family relations (“Perkal,” “The Other Side of the Net”).
For director-producers Gabriela Guillermo and Irina Raffo, based out of L’Avventura Cine, “Spring Story” is a case of fourth time lucky: the film No. 4 in a series of four movies, each set in a different season, scooping both First Look’s Bright Side of the Moon prize of complete colour grading and Le Film Français Award of advertising work €5,600.
In “Spring Story,” Bruno, a botanist’s assistant, and Agustín, a philosophy student, enjoy a fleeting tryst in Montevideo’s Botanical Garden. Bruno returns to Venice but their passion remains, sidelining Yumani, a Spinoza philosophy professor, with whom Agustín has been having an affair.
A brief, elegant love story, “Spring Story” sports loving shots of flora from a bird of paradise bush to spider plants awhile its character’s actions are undescored by a telling use of philospher Spinoza’s sometimes contradictory ethics of rationality and love.
Spring Story” has an air of films from Eric Rohmer, his irony and sense of simply structured but ironic fables. Frequently quoted Spinoza propositions lends a universal dimension to Agustín’s ethical coming of age story. Marking the film apart, the characters, even when swept by passion, behave far better towards each other than in most cinema. Germán Ormaechea’s Animista Cine co-produces “Spring Story.”
The most extensive of First Look’s six titles, weighing in at a rough cut of over two hours, “El Surubí” won La Mayor Cine Award, consisting of total sound post-production, as well as a Music Library &SFX/Acorde Award, made up of music supervision services at Music Library & SFX’s labs to a value of €45,000. The film also snagged a third prize, the Jannuzzi Smith Award, offering The design of an international poster worth €10,000 ($11,500).
Kicking off like an Ealing or Luis Berlanga comedy, “The Surubí” is set in the rural town of El Surubí, devastated by the closure of the local Pezur plant in the 1980s, now on its last legs.
When 70 chickens at a local farm lay 128 eggs in just one night, after the arrival of a red helmet biker Emanuel, the event is described as a miracle and Emanuel hailed by the local priest as a prophet of divine powers. Whether this is tie or the so called miracles can halt El Surubí’’s terminal decline is another matter.
“El Surubí” marks director Lorenzo Tocco’s feature debut, behind “The Anniversary” (2019), a best Ibero-American short film at Guadalajara. Prominent Uruguayan prod co Monteloni produces.
“’El Surubí’ is an ensemble story featuring a distinguished Uruguayan-Brazilian cast; that with humor and sensitivity, it portrays a hopeless community clinging to an illusory hope out of a need to survive,” producer Pancho Magnou Arnabal told Variety.
