Denise Fernandes wins revelation award at the Locarno Film Festival

It is the first feature-length movie by the Portuguese director of Cape Verdean origin film-maker Denise Fernandes, who was trained in Switzerland.

Director Denise Fernandes won the revelation prize at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland with ‘Hanami’, a project filmed on the island of Fogo in Cape Verde, it was announced on Saturday 17 August.

Set on a remote Cape Verde volcanic Island where most people are looking for ways to leave, “Hanami” is the story of Nana. Suffering from a strange illness, the young girl catches a fever and must journey to the foot of a volcano for treatment. There, she finds a world that blurs the lines between dreams and reality. Years later, when Nana reaches her teens, her mother reappears in her life.

Fernandes was born in Lisbon to parents from Cape Verde and grew up in Switzerland. A filmmaker for over a decade, her breakout came with 2020’s “Nha Mila,” which screened in competition at festivals such as Locarno and Uppsala and was nominated for best short at the Portuguese Film Academy Sophia Awards.

Of “Hanami,” Fernandes said, “Growing up in Europe, I noticed that Cape Verde was often omitted from world maps and globes because of its small size. As one way to make it visible, I made Cape Verde and its people the central theme of my first feature film.”

Fernandes co-wrote the film with celebrated Portuguese filmmaker Telmo Churro, whose 2022 feature “Índia” played at festivals including Thessaloniki and São Paulo and was nominated for a Portuguese Golden Globe.

“Hanami” is produced by Alina Film and O Som e a Fúria, with Ventura Film and RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera co-producing.

This year's international competition in Locarno also included ‘Fogo do Vento’, Marta Mateus' first feature film, which follows on from her short film “Farpões Baldios” (2017).

‘Fogo do Vento’, co-produced by Marta Mateus and Pedro Costa, in co-production with France and Switzerland, features some of the protagonists from the previous film, delving into the stories of an Alentejo community, “in a political film that calls on the memory of previous generations”, going “from resistance to the Salazar dictatorship to the present time”, according to its presentation.

Portuguese director Carlos Pereira, who works in Germany, was selected for the international competition in the ‘Leopard of Tomorrow’ section with his German short film ‘Icebergs’.

Out of competition, in a festival that began on the 7th and ended today, Edgar Pêra premiered ‘Telepathic Letters’, a film with images generated by Artificial Intelligence that puts the literary universes of writers H.P. Lovecraft and Fernando Pessoa into dialogue.

Also out of competition, Locarno hosted the film ‘The Wind Whistling in the Cranes’, made by Swiss director Jeanne Waltz from a novel by Lídia Jorge.