Uruguay Takes Centre Stage at Locarno's First Look as 'Spring Story' and 'The Surubí' Share the Prizes
Two Uruguayan films in the final stages of production split the top honours at Locarno's First Look awards on Sunday evening, 9 August 2026. Spring Story and The Surubí each collected multiple prizes at the ceremony closing the 15th edition of the work-in-progress showcase, which this year turned its spotlight on Uruguay as the focus country.
First Look is part of Locarno Pro, the industry arm of the Locarno Film Festival, where films still in post-production are screened for buyers, festival programmers and sales agents. The section ran 7–9 August, with six Uruguayan titles unveiled to industry audiences. Winners were announced during the Locarno Pro Award Ceremony on Sunday evening, as confirmed by the festival's official press materials.
Spring Story, directed by Gabriela Guillermo and Irina Raffo, took two prizes. The Bright Side of the Moon Award covers complete colour grading — the final pass that gives a finished film its visual tone. The Le Film Français Award adds advertising work valued at €5,600. Produced by L'Avventura Cine, with Germán Ormaechea's Animista Cine as co-producer, the film is the fourth in a series of four movies each set in a different season. It tells the love story of Bruno, a botanist's assistant, and Agustín, a philosophy student, in the Botanical Garden of Montevideo. The festival's own press materials describe it as an intimate story that seeks to resignify inheritance and question what remains after we are gone.
The Surubí collected three awards, the heaviest haul of the evening. The La Mayor Cine Award covers total sound post-production. The Music Library & SFX/Acorde Award provides music supervision services at the company's labs, valued at €45,000. The Jannuzzi Smith Award offers the design of an international poster worth €10,000 ($11,500). For a film still finding its way to a finished cut, those are practical gifts: colour, sound, music and a market-ready poster are exactly the elements a sales agent needs to begin selling the film to distributors.
Directed by Lorenzo Tocco in his feature debut, The Surubí is produced by the Uruguayan company Monteloni. Tocco's 2019 short The Anniversary won best Ibero-American short film at Guadalajara. His first feature is set in the rural town of El Surubí, devastated by the closure of the local Pezur plant in the 1980s. Producer Pancho Magnou Arnabal described the film as an ensemble story featuring a distinguished Uruguayan-Brazilian cast, speaking to Variety.
The six titles in this year's First Look selection ranged across themes of desire, domestic violence, apparitions, financial crisis, family and comic strips, as covered by The Hollywood Reporter and Variety in July 2026. Variety's journalist Marta Balaga described the slate as ranging from family stories to a drama about desire that "persists across oceans."
For a small national cinema, the First Look spotlight carries real weight. The awards are not cash prizes handed to a producer's bank account. They are post-production services — colour grading, sound mixing, music supervision, poster design — that a film at this stage would otherwise have to budget for, find vendors for, and schedule around. Getting them covered means the path from rough cut to festival premiere gets shorter, and cheaper.
