Illustrations by Antonio Carrau.

Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a cycle of close reads written by the participants in the Critics Academy.

Rosemead(Eric Lin, 2025).

Few things make you more aware of your body’s limitations than a European film festival. Long, uphill walks become increasingly painful; afternoon screenings become battlegrounds between your eyelids and your pride. And yet, unlike many other festivals, Locarno genuinely tries to soften the blow. In 2023, it committed to a four-year Cultural Inclusion Charter with Pro Infirmis to eliminate barriers to accessibility in infrastructure and programming. Shuttle buses between venues are free and low enough for wheelchairs. Companions of disabled guests receive complimentary tickets and facilitated entry, allowing them to skip long lines. Screenings include closed captions in English, French, and Italian, and audio descriptions are even available via an app. Bathrooms are certified and service dogs are allowed everywhere. Cold drinking water is available near screening sites in consideration of the heat. For a festival that draws a significant elderly crowd, these efforts aren’t just cosmetic—they’re crucial.

Inside theaters, though, it was difficult to find new films that centered illness and disability without devolving into pictures of gratuitous suffering. Eric Lin’s Rosemead(all films 2025), for instance, centers on an immigrant mother, Irene (Lucy Liu), who struggles to take care of her son, Joe (Lawrence Shou), as his schizophrenia spirals into violent delusions while her own terminal cancer worsens. Problems mount when Irene rejects Western psychiatric support and withholds her struggles from their Asian American enclave for fear of being further ostracized. Based on the grisly true story reported in 2017 by Frank Shyong for the Los Angeles Times, the film is a no-frills, straightforward family drama.

Apart from the warm glow of a recurring memory in a motel, every frame in the film is desaturated—as if her husband’s death has drained their family of color. Irene becomes an avatar for her illness, with Lin isolating her in mostly still frames, at times on their periphery. When Joe becomes obsessed with mass shootings and suddenly disappears shortly before his eighteenth birthday, the film takes a steep turn into tragedy. As Lin exposes the dehumanizing conditions that could push a terminally ill mother toward filicide, he also indulges certain tropes detailed in historian Paul K. Longmore’s “Screening Sterotypes”: both Irene and Joe succumb to extremism (a “disfigurement of personality and deformity of soul”) and the “violent loss of self-control” often depicted as a result of “the exclusion of the disabled person from human community,” regressively creating a cautionary tale from the fictional characters and the real-life subjects on which their stories are based.

Top: Yo Yo(Mohammadreza Mayghani, 2025). Bottom: A Very Straight Neck(Neo Sora, 2025).

Even two of the most arresting short films in the festival—Mohammadreza Mayghani’s Yo Yo and Neo Sora’s Pardo di Domani–winning A Very Straight Neck—veer into instrumentalizing disability toward allegorical ends. In* Yo Yo*, friends Shadi and Siavash travel to the beautiful southernmost desertscape of Iran as Siavash begins to “hear some voices and see some images that don’t exist.” Early on, Siavash sets the terms for his assisted suicide. As they sit on the beach, Shadi asks him how long he wants to stay “here.” “Until I forget who I am,” he replies. They proceed to test his failing senses. Fires grow cold to his skin. The voices in his head grow louder. His favorite food begins to taste repugnant. He stops sleeping and even blinking. During moments of “normalcy,” Mayghani unites the two within the same intimate frame. But as Siavash’s psychosis worsens, he appears increasingly distant from Shadi in the frame—disability is visualized here, as in Rosemead, as a physical separation. When Siavash forgets everything but his name and an Iranian nursery rhyme, Shadi resorts to inflicting pain in a last-ditch effort to ground him in reality. Like Rosemead, the film ends with a “rescuing” of the disabled through an act of killing. Amidst the blood, there’s a sense of relief. But why is freedom from disability framed as the ultimate goal, even at the cost of one’s life?

A Very Straight Neckrejects this proposition of death as the solution, even as it opens with a swan song of sorts, Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Le cygne.” Adapted from Momoe Narazaki’s graphic novel I Will Go Ahead, the film follows a woman (Sakura Ando) who develops inexplicable neck pain after seeing her deceased friend in a nightmare. Daily tasks become strained, and Sora lingers on each attempt at dressing or drinking water to emphasize how disability has fundamentally transformed her relationship with the world. As she scrolls through social media, she learns of her friend’s involvement in developing AI weapons used for automated bombings. The more she retraces her friend’s suicide, the more her neck aches in response. Here, disability is not only an external affliction but the body’s somatic response to an unspoken tragedy and an unresolved grief.

When the agony leads to a fall near an overpass, she grows too tired to get up and plays dead as strangers pass. She only gathers the strength to rise when another woman picks her up and offers her a small sweet. Sora stops short of killing his protagonist, but his film doesn’t end on this image of childhood comfort. Rather, he zooms in on her wound, an artifact from the fall, and plunges us back into darkness at the beginning as Ando’s voice narrates yet another dream—of people on a distant stage continuing with life despite the gloom. As a metaphor, it is haunting—a Freudian depiction of a world that has lost its innocence and sense of control, so caught up in productivity that its people have turned a blind eye to the violence happening outside of the frame. And yet, disability is still flattened into a device—a harbinger of dystopia—rather than explored as an embodied experience.

I’m Not Sure(Luisa Zürcher, 2025).

While there is some discomfort in how these films depict disability, they still offer moving interrogations of the society we live in today. But is it possible to represent disabled characters without infantilizing them? Luisa Zürcher’s I’m Not Sure is a ten-minute, hand-drawn animated documentary about the young filmmaker’s hospital stay after discovering a tumor in her belly. Lines that animate the walls of the hospital, the medical equipment, and the body blur into each other. The character verbalizes her post-surgery malaise and suicidal thoughts. Conversations about what she does for a living inject humor into typically painful situations. Otherwise grotesque moments—operations, violent vomiting, the cleaning of an ostomy bag—are gently reframed onscreen through the soft edges of the figures, drawn in what looks like crayon. Reflections on her discomfort are written literally on the hospital walls; at first, Zürcher draws on these textured backdrops; later, she uses footage of her own skin. She admits to having to adjust her ostomy bag during sex, and the nurses smile in response. Zürcher’s greatest strength is her commitment to limpid simplicity and her refusal to distill her experience into palatable parables. By maintaining such a lighthearted tone and avoiding cynicism, Zürcher creates a picture of disability as a navigable fact of adult human life, rather than a damnation.

The festival still has a long way to go toward improving access, but I was pleasantly surprised by the considerations in place. Such measures are nearly nonexistent in Metro Manila, where our public transportation is hostile toward those with additional mobility needs, our cinemas are tucked deep within circuitous mall complexes, and most of our arts initiatives deprioritize accessibility because of shoestring budgets. I had never seen as many smiling faces with wheelchairs and walking canes in screening spaces as I did across this ten-day stretch in Locarno. Such encounters open us up to the ways we can care for each other more deeply and more thoroughly.

Keep reading our coverage of Locarno 2025.