Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial sequel “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due” is finally here, by way of Locarno 2025 — six years after the director caused a firestorm at Cannes with the previous film in the trilogy. The 78ᵗʰ edition of the Locarno Film Festival includes 220 films, with Kechiche’s long-awaited third installment one of the most notable selections in the Concorso Internazionale section. The festival takes place from August 6 to 16.
The polarizing “Blue Is the Warmest Color” director first debuted “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno” in 2017. The film centers on Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), a young screenwriter who travels from Paris to his Mediterranean hometown for the summer in 1994. While there, he meets a producer who offers to finance his first film… for a cost. The story is based on François Bégaudeau’s novel “La Blessure, la vraie.”
That feature spurred an infamous 2019 sequel, “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” which included endless twerking shots and an unsimulated oral sex scene lasting for more than 10 minutes, leading to walkouts at Cannes. (Read the scathing IndieWire review here.) Then allegations of misconduct on-set surfaced. A source close to the production claimed to Midi Libre at the time that Kechiche insisted on the non-simulated sex scene, but that the actors “didn’t want to do” it. The sequence was later still filmed “with alcohol being regularly consumed” to allegedly coerce the stars. “Intermezzo” went on to land at Rotten Tomatoes with a rare 0 percent score from eight critics.
Kechiche reacted to the poor reception for the film at Cannes 2019, saying that he wanted to “try something different” with “Intermezzo” and that “not everyone is open to that new experience.”
“Not everyone shares the way I look at others,” he said of the backlash to the film. “Not everyone likes this or that kind of film for example so, no, it doesn’t bother me in the least. If what I see is what I want to see and if that doesn’t appeal to everyone, well, that is very fortunate, it would be a disaster if everyone watched a film in exactly the same way.”
Kechiche previously won the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2013 for lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” The film was plagued with on set allegations of exploitation from actresses Lea Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Kechiche was later accused of assault by various women in 2018.
In 2019, Kechiche denied that “Mektoub” was “a film to answer the critics” of “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” He added, “The most important thing for me, and this is what I want to say right away, was to celebrate life, love, desire, breath, music, the body. I wanted to try a cinematographic experience that would be as free as possible.”
Kechiche’s “Mektoub My Love: Canto Due” is one of the many surprising additions to Locarno. Fabrice Aragno’s “Le Lac” and Radu Jude’s “Dracula” are also among the program. The Locarno Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro said in a press statement that the 2025 festival has a theme of aspiration.
“The cinema that presents itself at the crossroads with history for the 78th edition of the Festival is a cinema that, on the one hand, does not turn its gaze away from reality, and, on the other, explores the still possible forms of the image without forgetting to smile at the absurdities of our lives,” Nazzaro said. “A cinema that is playful, takes risks, dreams, and provokes; a cinema that stubbornly remains in the world. Looking onward, alongside all human beings.”
Check out the full program here.