Locarno Entry ‘Phantoms of July,’ From Rising German Director Julian Radlmaier, Picked-Up by Bendita Film Sales (EXCLUSIVE)

Locarno main competition title “Phantoms of July,” the latest from fast-rising German director Julian Radlmaier, has been picked up for international by Bendita Film Sales.

The full Locarno lineup was announced Tuesday by the Swiss Festival, the biggest mid-Summer film event in Europe with traditionally a strong line in edgier auteurs increasingly accompanied by upscale genre pics, or films which employ genre tropes.

Starring recent Locarno Winner Clara Schwinning, who shared the best performance prize in Locarno’s 2023’s Filmmakers of the Present strand for her turn in Katharina Huber’s “A Good Place,” dramedy “Phantoms” marks another step-up towards prominence for Radlmaier whose first feature, 2017 Rotterdam entry “Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog (2017) won the German Film Critics Award for best debut of the year.

Radlmaier’s second feature, “Bloodsuckers” (2021), world premiered in the Berlinale Encounters competition, scoring the German Screenplay Award.

Now “Phantoms of July” (“Sehnsucht in Saherhausen”) plays International Competition, the most major competitive section at Locarno, an “A list” festival.

Broadly, it conforms to the “discourse cinema” for which Radlmaeir has become known, identified as a promising way forward for German cinema, marking a playful take on the concepts of equality of French political writer Jacques Rancière, whom Radlmaeir has translated into German.

Split into three sections, a first period piece serving as a kind of prologue is set around 1794, at a castle in Sangerhausen in the lap of Germany’s Harz mountains. Lotte (Paula Schindler), a put-upon chambermaid, discovers a small blue stone which awakens in her daydreams of another life.

Cut after 11 minutes to Ursula (Schwinning), cleaning up an office in a furniture factory in Saherhausen, who discovers a similar blue stone and develops a crush on a big-city musician. A final section focuses on Neda (Maral Keshavarz), an Iranian filmmaker now aspiring travel YouTuber and asylum seeker who is convinced that she recognized an old friend from Tehran in an equally enigmatic street sweeper. She falls in with Ursula and a Korean travel guide (Kyung-Taek Lie, a Radlmaier regular) who takes them on a ghost hunt in the mountains.

“Phantoms of July” is “a film about the alchemy of encounter,” said Radlmaier.

“Or, one could say more precisely that the film contrasts two encounters: the first (the romantic love affair between the proletarian waitress Ursula and the bourgeois violinist Zulima), fails dramatically, while the second (the strange friendship between Ursula, the Iranian wanna-be influencer Neda, and the Korean tour-guide Sung-Nam) succeeds comically,” he added. “This reflects my conviction that the deeper divide between people runs not horizontally between nations and cultures, but vertically between social classes.”

Also written by Radlmaier, “Phantoms of July” is set against the rise of a hard right in Germany and building hostility towards refugees. “We don’t give everything for free in Germany,” a bookshop assistant tells the penniless Neda when she flips through a guide book. Sluiced by an ironic bucolic idyll piano music, “Phantoms of July” suggests Germany’s still patronised and put upon workers are natural friends not enemies of its equally marginalized refugees.

“Phantoms of July” is produced by Kirill Krasovski at Blue Monticola Film, whose credits include all of Radlmaier’s Marxist-reinterpretation films including short “A Spectre is Haunting Europe” (2013)and graduation mid-feature “A Proletarian Winter’s Tale” (2014).

Westdeutchen Rundfunk co-produces. The film is funded by Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia’s.MDM, the Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg (MBB) and the German Federal Film Board (FFA).

“What drew us to ‘Phantoms of July’ was its rare ability to speak about loneliness, longing and class with both humor and tenderness,” said Luis Renart, at Bendita Film Sales.

“Julian has created a film that feels as light as a summer breeze, yet lingers like a ghost,” he added. “It’s a bold and playful work, but also deeply political in the most human way. We’re confident it will connect with audiences well beyond the festival circuit, in that quiet and lasting way only certain films manage.”