John Bleasdale Guest Contributor “The Vanishing Soldier” is a coming of age story, as breathless as its protagonist: the kind of film that will make cinephiles of seventeen-year-olds.
Which is one of the reasons that Dani Rosenberg, the film’s 43-year-old director, is delighted to be in Locarno, where the film, sold by Intramovies, is screening in main competition, and has just got a trailer, and poster, shared in exclusivity with Variety. “We had options for other festivals,” Rosenberg told Variety at the Swiss fest. “But Locarno is the best place because it’s a festival that admires films and not topics.
We want the film to be first seen as cinema; not as an Israeli story about conflict.” So what cinema inspired you? “My first image when I was writing the script was Buster Keaton.
I imagined the chases like slapstick chases, like “Cops,” from his era. And obviously, the ‘70s paranoia films, like Samuel Fuller and DePalma as well as “Breathless.” This is a kind of adolescent film.
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