While long established as a launch site for adventurous cinema, Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present sidebar has recently become appointment viewing. Similar in structure to Cannes’ Critics’ Week, where only first or second features are considered, the last three editions alone have welcomed wonderful titles such as Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, Courtney Stephens’ Invention, and Ruan Lan-Xi’s The Plant from the Canaries into the world. This year, the sidebar’s top prize went to Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, a movie that, along with Beatrice Gibson’s enchanting autofiction film At Night, has done more than its fair share to continue that trend.
Everlasting Summer is a temporally sweeping yet emotionally intimate docu-portrait that was shot and edited by Sanguinetti—a renowned Magnum photographer—over 25 years. The film’s subjects, as those familiar with Sanguinetti’s work will recognize, are the two young girls who the artist met in the Argentinian Pampas in the 1990s and whose lives she documented in her acclaimed 2003 book The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. The director’s debut feature takes us back to the time when those photos were before showing us what came after.
As the title suggests and film confirms, it is still very much a drag getting old, but rarely has that process been captured with as much care and focus as this––a work of joy, play, images, and heartache that packs 25 fleeting years into a 90-minute movie that aches with universal experiences. The first half mostly covers the years of the book, as Guile (ever the more outgoing) and Belinda (increasingly the more shut-off) grow from roughly 9 to 14 years old. The second half rushes through the following decade quick as a flash, and leaving us just as Guillermina and Belinda’s own children have basically reached the age they were in Sanguinetti’s book. The great wheel turns, and all that.
There’s a little of Paul Almond’s Seven Up! here, of course, and perhaps a little of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but Everlasting Summer allows us to see this process through Sanguinetti’s filmic eye, which allows for image-making that is consistently interesting and occasionally borders on the mythical. Much of the early footage shows the girls playing to the camera: dressing up, singing songs, shooting pool, answering questions about what they’d like to be when they’re older; or in other words, normal kid stuff, but as charmingly candid and precocious as you could ask for. As inseparable double acts go, they are infectious to watch.
At one point, we see Belinda dancing in a communion dress as storm clouds gather in the distance. In another, which Sanguinetti captures in a remarkably well-framed shot from above, the girls pick at an amniotic sac containing what looks like the fetus of a horse. There is also a wonderfully symmetrical image of clouds reflecting on a farm’s reservoir that recalls Matisse. In that sequence, and another involving horse-riding gauchos, Sanguinetti steadfastly adheres to that rule about horizons that John Ford once taught Steven Spielberg—long before The Fabelmans was around to offer a reminder.
That the film recalls images of American Westerns is, you sense, no accident: Everlasting Summer, like the book that preceded it, is all about showing what it’s like to be a girl growing up in the traditionally male and often mythologized world of Argentinian cattle country. We see Guile watch movies with her father, who casually wears a bandolier. In one of the early interviews, she also admits to being certain that a man will abandon her, based on the movies she’s watched. When Sanguinetti asks if she likes being a woman, she answers yes: “Because men are gruff and strong and women are weak and kind.”
As an act of editing, Everlasting Summer is a marvel that thankfully goes against the promise of its own title. At around the one-hour mark, Guillermina briefly answers a question about being pregnant and within four cuts (a period of less than a couple minutes), her baby is fully grown. That sense of time speeding up will likely be familiar to anyone who has kids of their own, but it will chime with most other people watching this, too.
Ultimately, this is a film about how the passing years can sap us of some of the enthusiasm we might have once had, but it’s less a solemn piece of work than an honest one. It’s also significantly top-heavy with lightness and humor, which makes the first sigh of regret we hear from Guillermina hit like a ton of bricks. In an early interview, Guillermina explains that the thing that would make her happiest in the world would be for “everyone to be happy,” and “that there are no curses, as witches say.“ Is it really so much to ask?
The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.
The post Locarno Review: The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer Captures a Vital Portrait of Life on the Pampas first appeared on The Film Stage.
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