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Lithuanian drama Toxic, the debut feature of Saule Bliuvaite, has picked up the Golden Peacock award for best film at the 55th International Film Festival of India.

At the closing ceremony of the festival in Goa, the film also scooped the best actress award, shared between co-leads Vesta Matulyte and Ieva Rupeikaite.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Toxic follows two teenage girls from a bleak industrial town who join an extreme local modelling school. Featuring a cast of non-actors, it premiered at Locarno in August where it won the Golden Leopard for best film as well as the best first feature award.

Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė’s “Toxic” took home the best film award at the 55th International Film Festival of India (Iffi) in Goa. The jury, headed by Indian director Ashutosh Gowariker, recognized the film for its portrayal of adolescence and economic hardship.

Previously, at Locarno, “Toxic” won not only the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the fest’s premier International Competition — from a jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner — but also, in an unusual double, the top prize in the separately juried First Feature Competition.

Variety‘s positive review of “Toxic” described the film as “sobering but not without glimmers of tenderness and humor as female friendship takes root in a hopeless place,” adding that its “alternation between chilly composure and kinetic movement roughly corresponds with [the protagonist’s] wavering sense of self.”

Romanian director Bogdan Muresanu nabbed the best director prize for “The New Year That Never Came,” a multi-narrative feature set during a revolution.

It’s a shame Toxic wasn’t around for the recent excretions of body-horror discourse. Saulė Bliuvaitė’s debut feature, winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, does at least as much to turn the stomach with its tablet of tapeworm eggs than either of The Substance or A Different Man‘s Faustian cures. The rub in Bliuvaitė’s film is that such a pill exists, if only for those willing to wade onto the dark web––even Googling its side effects, as the protagonist discovers, should be done with some degree of caution. The anatomical anxieties and queasy professional demands that create a market for such horrors are the subject of Bliuvaitė’s film, which follows two teenage girls living in the shadow of a Lithuanian power station whose best hope for escape––a dubiously dangled carrot of catwalk fame in Tokyo or Paris...

“Teen-age fashion doll! A real grown-up fashion model! Everything is real!”*

This Barbie is a model.

She has long blonde hair and distinguishable pace. A comb. Fashionable jeans that might or might not be stolen from a friend. Removable high heels… that she cannot walk in. She is spectacular but normal. Suburban but cosmopolitan. Japan, Korea and Paris are lying in her feet.

She is Marija. She is Kristina. She is Gerda, she is Diana. She is outstanding and on sale, in case you have anything to offer in return – escape, for example.

Marija (Vesta Matulyte) achieves the impossible: you could argue that a model with a limp is like a violinist using only one arm to play a Bach concerto. But in Saule Bliuvaite’s captivating but devastating debut, the Lithuanian filmmaker mixes child’s play with adult activities by commenting on beauty standards and their clash with eastern European insecurities.

In the dreary industrial town of Marija and Kristina, escape seems like a distant dream. Marija has just moved in with her grandmother after her mother leaves for pastures new.

A limp leaves the 13-year-old an easy target for bullies at her new school. Kristina lives a similarly tough life with her dad, who prefers boozing to parenting. Their paths first cross through a scuffle over stolen jeans, but a shared love of fashion and desire to break free of their bleak surroundings brings the unlikely friends together.

When a shady modeling agency rolls into town offering the promise of fame and fortune abroad, it seems like the chance they’ve been waiting for. But their excitement soon gives way to despair as they subject themselves to punishing regimes to meet impossible standards of beauty. Starving themselves thin and making themselves throw up, the pressures pile higher with each audition.

Between the pale walls of a school changing room, we meet Marija (Vesta Matulytė), who is searching for her stolen jeans. After being bullied away by her peers for her limp, she continues the search on her own. Suddenly, she's transfixed by the hypnotic hollowness of an empty locker, the shot prolonging quietly. Submerging the first minutes of her first feature within a surreal realm, director Saulė Bliuvaitė signals a clear appetite for the eerie and the bizarre. Yet, they are used as expressions of a blunt reality that affects the lives of two girls who navigate their transforming identities. Placing the body at the core of her vision, the Lithuanian filmmaker crafts a coming-of-age story that glows with compassion for the bruises of shortened adolescence.

Marija lives with her grandmother (Eglė Gabrėnaitė) in a small industrial town, after being entrusted to her by her absent mother. Switching schools just as.

Toxic. Saulė Bliuvaitė says they chose a young cast 'because this film tackles the topic of adolescent bodies and girls who are not yet experiencing the changes of their body, they're still children and sexuality is projected on them' Photo: Akis Bado Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard winner Toxic is a gritty coming-of-age tale set in against a backdrop of a depressed industrial town in Lithuania. It follows new kid in town Marija (Vesta Matulyte) as she forges an unexpected friendship with local teenager Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite) and the pair of them join the mass of teenagers from far around trying to catch the eye of a shady modelling agency that is recruiting in the town.

Writer/director Saulė Bliuvaitė draws on her own experiences growing up to chart a tale that is as much about the teenagers’ own relationship with their bodies as it is outside influences. Mostly shot in a docureal style,...

The mean girls of your average Hollywood teen movie wouldn’t last a morning in the ruthless adolescent playground of “Toxic,” where economic exploitation and unforgiving body image standards rule the bullies and their prey alike. Set in an industrial Lithuanian town where even the asphalt has seen better days, Saulė Bliuvaitė’s impressively tough-minded debut feature is uncompromising in its depiction of the punishment and self-abuse endured by girls enrolled at a fly-by-night modeling academy — where the vague promise of an escape to pretty much anywhere is enough to motivate frightening extremes of disordered eating and body modification. Sobering but not without glimmers of tenderness and humor as female friendship takes root in a hopeless place, this Locarno competition entry can expect a healthy festival run, with interest from edgier arthouse distributors.

“Toxic” promises something severe from its opening shot, as 13-year-old Marija (Vesta Matulytė) stands alone, tensely quivering in a bathing suit,...

Locarno has revealed this year’s official selection.

Known auteurs Hong Sang-soo (“By the Stream”) and Wang Bing (“Youth (Hard Times)”) will now battle it out in the official selection, which will welcome 17 world premieres. Italy will be represented by Sara Fgaier’s “Sulla Terra Leggeri” and “Luce,” directed by Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino. Ala Eddine Slim’s “Agora” will also be shown, as well as Ben Rivers’ “Bogancloch,” “Cent Mille Milliards” by Virgil Vernier and Saulė Bliuvaitė’s “Toxic.”

“We are very excited and happy with our selection, which we believe represents the best of contemporary filmmaking. We have taken special care in highlighting those works that, while broadening the possibilities of cinema, are also consciously trying to spark a more meaningful conversation with the audience,” stated artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, adding that the fest “continues to offer itself up as a platform for intersectional dialogue.”

The...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will debut 17 world premieres, including new works by Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, as part of its 2024 competition program. This year’s event runs from August 7 – 17.

The festival announced its competition lineups this morning. The Hong Sang-soo feature is titled Suyoocheon (By The Stream) and stars Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee. The Wang Bing feature is a France, Luxembourg, and Netherlands co-production titled Hard Times. Scroll down to see the full Locarno competition lineup, which also includes new titles from Ben Rivers, Mar Coll, and Christoph Hochhäusler.

The festival today also announced that French acting veterans Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet will receive the event’s honorary Excellence Award Davide Campari at the opening ceremony on August 7. Previous recipients of the award include Riz Ahmed and Aaron Taylor Johnson.

Locarno’s separate Piazza Grande lineup features 18 titles, including Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig,...