Wayne Wapeemukwa, director of Locarno competition opener “Manhunt,” calls the film “a film about fascism”

“Manhunt” director Wayne Wapeemukwa, a Michif filmmaker, said his Locarno competition opener uses a true-crime spark to examine alienation, masculinity, and the ideological drift that can accompany violence. Speaking in an interview published Aug. 4, Wapeemukwa described the film as “a film about fascism,” emphasizing that the themes are less about a single location than about how extremist ideas can take hold through a broader cultural atmosphere.

Wapeemukwa said the film’s starting point comes from a real-life killing spree, which he described as having offered a foundation for the story’s emotional and political questions. In his account, the “haunting exploration” in the film does not remain tethered only to the specifics of that event, but instead uses it to probe why certain narratives about power, status, and belonging can become available to young people.

The interview also addressed what the young murderers in the story say, and how that dialogue reflects what Wapeemukwa characterized as a global far-right drift. He framed the characters’ language and worldview as part of the mechanism by which violence can be normalized, rather than treating the plot as a closed-case morality tale.

Wapeemukwa further discussed the film’s attention to masculinity and how that identity can be shaped by isolation and social pressure. He connected those personal pressures to larger ideological currents, describing the film’s focus on how anger and alienation can find a political vocabulary, especially among those who feel left behind.

A separate thread in the interview concerned Indigenous presence in the film’s world. Wapeemukwa raised questions about the on-screen inclusion and exclusion of Indigenous people, portraying the casting and representation choices as tied to the film’s broader concerns about culture, belonging, and whose stories are centered when violence enters a national conversation.

The interview situates “Manhunt” as a project premiering in the Locarno competition, with Wapeemukwa presenting it as a work that is simultaneously grounded in a real episode and structured to test the audience’s assumptions about causation and ideology. His comments indicate the film will be read not only as a drama, but also as a thematic investigation of how extremist ideas travel through language, identity, and social circumstance.

Organizers and press materials for festival competition selections typically do not include additional factual context about a film’s underlying true event beyond what filmmakers provide publicly. As the Locarno competition date approaches, further coverage is expected to clarify additional details about the film’s production, story structure, and how festival programmers describe its placement in the year’s lineup.