By Variety | Created at 2026-08-10 12:29:36 | Updated at 2026-08-10 13:49:26
5 hours ago
In the Argentine Pampas, cousins Guillermina and Belinda cannot wait to grow up. When they are not swimming in the river and dancing through the long, breezy afternoons, they re-enact funeral ceremonies and feign surgery on dead animals. This quotidian desire to accelerate the inevitable passing of time animates photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s debut feature, “The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer.”
Presented in world premiere in Filmmakers of the Present at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, the film was produced by distinguished director-producer Julia Solomonoff (“Nobody’s Watching”), with financing from Mubi and Impact Partners.
Sanguinetti’s gaze follows Guille and Belinda while they grow up, fall in love, raise children and slowly drift toward separate lives over two and a half decades. The seemingly home-footage structure forms a familiar and intimate setting, in which the grainy footage narrates the life passing between the moments Sanguinetti captured as part of her extensive, decades-long photography of close cousins Guille and Belinda.
“We’re just like extended family now,” says the director about her relationship with the duo, spanning over 25 years. “It was really organic. I did not want to make a project about two women growing up. I just knew them and wanted to be with them.”
Static framing and pixelated vignettes of tranquil farmland in Sanguinetti’s work trace back to formal similarities to “Dry Leaf,” directed by Alexandre Koberidze, another Locarno title, screened in 2025. The Argentinian prairie is adorned with imaginary houses, castles and theatres as the young girls construct spontaneous, invisible cities, stories and games in which Koberidze’s likewise unseen characters could live. Lively farm animals populate the backgrounds against which Guille and Belinda confidently perform their silly and earnest singing and dancing.
Although the result bears some resemblance, the two directors employ the graininess for different aesthetic reasons. In Sanguinetti’s practice, the video camera appeared as a natural prop that watched and filmed Belinda and Guille’s performances while the director captured with her photographic camera “what happens slowly in the moment.” Comparing photography to video, she says about her relationship with the first, “I’m always more in control and looking for something. With video, I could let life flow in front of me and then later think about what to retrieve or not.”
These snapshots of life, then overlooked as common moments, might be actually foundational to one’s trajectory, as “we don’t realize that we’re defining ourselves in that moment. You can only see that when you’re at a certain distance, when you’re knowing and loving them, but you’re not being their mother.” This in turn enabled Sanguinetti to observe “patterns in the girls’ lives — what kept repeating or changing, what things they had escaped from, and what they achieved through sheer will.”
Sanguinetti’s tender film detours through the motions of time and eventually brings fleshiness to her presence. “In the beginning, I didn’t want to be a part of it. I thought my voice would ruin it. As the time went by, I realized that I was there and I just had to accept it.”
If women constitute the film’s heart, animals form its pulse. Neither pets nor crude products of an economy, Sanguinetti deftly places cattle, dogs and cats alongside people and land. Essential to the farmland Pampas, the girls’ grandmother repeatedly confesses to the director about the joy of taking care of chickens and their innate beauty or the bovines’ way of behaving as a tightly knit community.
This sentiment is personal for Sanguinetti: “I’ve always considered animals equal to humans,” adding on their importance to the rural ecosystem: “I always felt that the animals in that space were ignored. But these people are here because of the animals in that area, because there is no agriculture.”
