A Photographer's 25-Year Project Becomes a Film: Alessandra Sanguinetti's Debut Premieres at Locarno
Alessandra Sanguinetti has been photographing two cousins in the Argentine Pampas for more than 25 years. Now that body of work has become her first feature film, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, which had its world premiere at the 79th Locarno Film Festival on 10 August 2026, according to Variety.
The film screened in the festival's Filmmakers of the Present section, a competitive strand devoted to new and emerging voices. It follows cousins Guille and Belinda across two and a half decades as they grow up, fall in love, and raise children — a story that began as a childhood game in the rural grasslands of Argentina and unfolded in front of Sanguinetti's camera over the entirety of their adult lives, per Variety.
Sanguinetti is a San Francisco-based photographer who has been a member of Magnum Photos, the celebrated international photographic cooperative, since 2007, as listed on the Locarno Film Festival site. The film takes its title from the second volume of her photographic series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, which traced the cousins from ages 14 to 24 and was published as a book by MACK in 2020, according to Magnum Photos. The book's full title — The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer — carried the same name into the transition from page to screen.
The feature was produced by Julia Solomonoff, a director-producer whose own credits include the film Nobody's Watching, Variety reports. Financing came from Mubi, the global streaming and distribution company, and Impact Partners, a documentary-focused production fund. Autlook Filmsales, a Berlin-based sales agent, boarded the project as its world sales representative in July 2026, ahead of the premiere, according to Variety.
For a sense of scale: Locarno's Filmmakers of the Present section is one of the festival's three competitive strands, programmed for directors working in their first or second feature. A world premiere here puts a film in front of acquisitions executives, festival programmers, and sales agents who travel to Locarno each August.
Sanguinetti's move from still photography to moving-image documentary places her in a small but notable group of photographers who have stepped behind the camera for a long-form film. The project's quarter-century span gives it a built-in archive: two lives, one camera, from childhood into parenthood.
