Indonesian director Edwin's homage to and deconstruction of Asian 1980s action movies wins the Golden Leopard at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival. Dario Argento takes the lifetime achievement award.

Given that, after its shuttered 2020 edition, the 74th Locarno Film Festival's ident features a prowling, growling, resurgent leopard and the distinctly tumescent tagline "Cinema is Back" it's somewhat ironic that the festival's top prize should go to a film about erectile dysfunction.

The latest film from the South-Asian auteur, which premieres at the Locarno Film Festival, is both a tribute to and a subversion of the ultra-violent revenge movies that he grew up on in Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s.

Screen can unveil the first trailer for Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, which will world premiere in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival (August 4-14).

What is brilliant about this surprising infusion of achingly genuine emotion is that Edwin and Kurniawan aren"t aiming to have it supplant the inherited action impulses of the story they tell.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash [+], set in 1989, is a fight-filled oddity that somehow made it all the way to the Locarno Film Festival"s main competition, and which sticks to its retro guns, at the same time updating some tropes to fit in with more "woke" times.

An ode to Southeast Asian action films of the 1980s designed as a critique of toxic masculinity, leavened with winking humor.

Iqbaal Ramadhan stars as our titular character Ali, a seventeen year old Indonesian youth who has just lost his father. Cast away from home through a series of self-made circumstances, he sets out for New York in search of his estranged mother, Mia