Michif Canadian filmmaker Wayne Wapeemukwa's second feature, "Manhunt", opens the international competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival this Thursday. Inspired by real-life murders in Canada in 2019, the film follows two young men fleeing their dead-end lives across the country's northern frontier, using their story as a lens to examine loneliness, modern masculinity, far-right radicalisation and colonial legacies rather than simply retelling the crimes.

Rather than a straightforward true-crime reconstruction, the film reframes the killings as a parable in which its two protagonists find their sense of self dissolving between online fantasy and offline reality, with sorrow curdling into hatred and violence. Wapeemukwa co-wrote the script with Anna-Lena Theobald and cast Harris Lowe, Landon Tunold, Bianca Foscht and Dilara Foscht; Cinetic Media has acquired North American sales rights while Aspect Ratio handles international sales. Locarno's artistic director, Giona A. Nazzaro, has praised the film for questioning "the colonial myth of what is beyond the frontier", and Wapeemukwa has described it as ultimately being about fascism.