Lithuanian teen drama “Toxic” is a huge success at the Locarno Film Festival

Lithuanian cinema, which is usually not particularly well represented at international film festivals, was the big topic at this year's Locarno Film Festival awards ceremony: two films from the Baltic state won several main prizes.

Toxic, a promising debut from screenwriter and director Saulė Bliuvaitė, not only won the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the festival's main international competition – from a jury chaired by Austrian writer Jessica Hausner – but also, in an unusual double, the top prize in the separately juried First Feature Film Competition. Bliuvaitė's compatriot Laurynas Bareiša, meanwhile, won the Best Director award in the international competition for his second feature, Drowning Dry, while the ensemble cast of the same film also shared one of the jury's gender-neutral acting awards.

“Toxic,” a brutal study of alliances and rivalries between teenagers attending a modeling school in a small Lithuanian town, stood out in the competition…