Olga

Elie Grappe, 26 years old, is the youngest filmmaker of our selection. Olga is his first feature film after the brilliant short Suspendu which had him noticed by the international festivals. Olga started shooting in Zurich and was interrupted after 19 days. The film shows Elie’s delicate and powerful perception of lights and shadows of spaces and of humans.

– Mathilde Henrot, Selection Committee

Elie's Journey in the Festival's History

Passing through the list of the selected movies in Locarno Festival since 1946, my eyes stopped on Yolande Zauberman’s “M”. That one letter was enough to wake up my stupor as a spectator in Fevi hall, in 2018. Enough also to bring me back to this dark beach of Tel Aviv: Menahem is facing us, shirtless. Singing with a powerful voice. Then he tells, he tells us about the rapes he endured as a child, being part of an ultra-orthodox community. Menahem is so close, he almost get out of focus, but the frame stands his gaze. He sings again; a magnificent liturgy which carries its suffering and its survival. Menahem drives us to Bnei Brak, the town of his abused childhood, where he’s coming back for the first time for ten years. He came to dissect the taboo. Other voices open up, following his own, in a prodigious succession of sequences. Whereas the night seems to never come to an end, the smile and the song of Menahem irradiate everything. Yolande Zauberman’s documentary is “a vampire movie”», a tale, a deeply heroic journey. Made of questions and paradoxes, it continues to nourish my imagination and my desire of cinema.

– Elie Grappe