Six Canadian film projects have been chosen and unveiled on Tuesday for the Locarno Film Festival’s Locarno Pro First Look program, highlighting works-in-progress.

Out of more than 40 submissions, a first pre-selection was made by a committee composed of Ana David (Berlinale Panorama, Márgenes, Queer Lisboa), Tom McSorley (Canadian Film Institute), and Alex Masson (San Sebastian International Film Festival). The projects will be presented to accredited industry professionals by the producer or producers during the Locarno Film Festival.
 
An international jury, comprised of Franck Finance-Madureira, film critic and president and founder of the Queer Palm and the Queer Palm Lab, Kim Yutani, director of programming at the Sundance Film Festival, and Jacqueline Lyanga, co-director of film programming at the Berlin International Film Festival, will award several prizes, including one covering post-production services up to a certain price, one covering music supervision services at Music Library & SFX’s labs, and one for image finishing services, among others. 
 
The winners will be announced during the Locarno Pro awards ceremony on Sunday, Aug. 10.  Locarno Pro runs Aug. 7-12.  
 
Here is a closer look at this year’s selected projects.
 
Lhasa  
Directed by: Sophie Leblond 
Produced by: Metafilms (Canada) 
Form: Documentary 
From Lhasa de Sela’s nomadic childhood in Mexico to her artistic life in Montreal, this film will follow her life and career, as a woman and as an artist, until her untimely death from cancer at age 37. With Lhasa’s narration as our guide, the film is an intimate collage of her writings, drawings and paintings alongside with the family’s archives, visiting the places and people she loved. 
 
Lunar Sway 
Directed by: Nick Butler 
Produced by: Cloudy Pictures (Canada) 
Form: Fiction 
Cliff is an eccentric, young man living in the small desert town of Mooncrest, looking for love in all the wrong place. His life is shaken up with the unexpected arrival of his estranged birth mother, Marg, a steely, misfit who reminds him of himself. But she brings with her, a range of dangerous consequences, sending Cliff on a wild misadventure he never saw coming. 
 
Nina Roza 
Directed by: Geneviève Dulude-De Celles 
Produced by: Colonelle films (Canada), coproduced by Umi Films (Italy), Echo Bravo (Belgium), Ginger Light (Bulgaria), Premier Studio (Bulgaria) 
Form: Fiction 
A viral video of an 8-year-old Bulgarian artist catches the eye of a major art collector, and Mihail is sent there, 30 years after leaving his home country, to assess the value of the girl’s work and confront ghosts from his past. 
 
Thanks to the Hard Work of the Elephants 
Directed by: Bryce Hodgson 
Produced by: Coukuma (Canada), co-produced by Harrington Studios (Canada) 
Form: Fiction 
Based on a true story… Elephants is a queer love fantasy that follows two teenage boys who escape an abusive youth lockdown center while high on LSD. They steal the center’s van and drive 400 km to a big-box store parking lot, determined to start an alternative youth commune in a nearby suburban forest. 
 
Veins  
Directed by: Raymond St-Jean 
Produced by: 1976 productions (Canada) 
Form: Fiction 
In Saint-Étienne, a semi-abandoned Canadian village, a young woman unravels the mystery surrounding her father’s sudden death. As strange incidents multiply in her surroundings, what she discovers is even more sinister and horrifying than what she could have ever imagined. 
 
We Will Not Be Silenced 
Directed by: Catherine Hébert and Elric Robichon 
Produced by: Films Camera Oscura (Canada) 
Form: Documentary 
Though it feels like a story from the past, the persecution of writers continues. They are silenced, punished, exiled – for daring to write. We Will Not Be Silenced follows the intertwined journeys of three writers and a publisher, revealing how repression turns words into resistance, and exile into a powerful act of defiance.