A road trip through Canada's northern frontier opens the international competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The film is "Manhunt," the sophomore feature from Michif filmmaker Wayne Wapeemukwa, and it carries a streaming release on Netflix set for August 2026 (Variety).

"Manhunt" follows two young men fleeing dead-end lives on a drive through Canada's vast north. Rather than reconstructing a crime, Wapeemukwa uses the journey to explore disconnection, modern masculinity, far-right digital fantasies, and colonial echoes — themes the Locarno festival's own programme summary reinforces, describing the film's concern with loneliness, masculinity, and the colonial (Hollywood Reporter; Locarno Film Festival).

The story draws from real events. In July 2019, between July 14 and July 19, a killing spree along the Alaska Highway and Stewart–Cassiar Highway in Northern British Columbia left three people dead: American Chynna Deese, her boyfriend Lucas Fowler, and botany lecturer Leonard Dyck. The suspects, Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky, later recorded video confessions and, according to police, planned further killings (CBC; The Guardian; NBC News).

Wapeemukwa's connection to the material is personal. When the murders took place, he was road-tripping through his Indigenous homeland in Saskatchewan and Manitoba — a coincidence that sharpened the film's exploration of the frontier myth (Hollywood Reporter).

Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro framed the selection in those terms, praising "Manhunt" as a film that "questions the colonial myth of what is beyond the frontier and how this myth still affects people" (Hollywood Reporter).

Wapeemukwa's path to Locarno runs through Toronto. His debut feature, "Luk'Luk'I," followed five residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside during the 2010 Winter Olympics and won best Canadian feature at TIFF in 2017. He also received the Directors Guild of Canada's DGC Discovery Award, a prize recognising emerging directing talent (Hollywood Reporter).

The film was written by Wapeemukwa with Anna-Lena Theobald, and produced by Wapeemukwa alongside Nathan Drillot and Matt Drake. Its cast includes Harris Lowe, Landon Tunold, Bianca Foscht, and Dilara Foscht. Jonathan Glendon handled cinematography; Coline Debray edited. Vaka Street Casting managed casting. On the sales side, Cinetic Media holds North American rights while Aspect Ratio handles international — the standard two-track arrangement by which independent films find distributors territory by territory (Hollywood Reporter).

The Locarno Film Festival runs each August in Switzerland, and its international competition is one of the most closely watched platforms for art-house cinema on the European circuit. For Wapeemukwa, opening that competition places him on a global stage just weeks before "Manhunt" reaches Netflix audiences.