On Film: The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer
Alessandra Sanguinetti’s debut film presents a new vision of her long-term project, winning two awards at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival
“It wasn’t born out of an idea, it was really born out of life,” Alessandra Sanguinetti told the Locarno Film Festival on her newly released feature film, “La ilusión de un verano sin fin” (The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer). Taking its title from the second book of her long-term project The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, the film, produced by Argentine director-producer Julia Solomonoff, took home both the Pardo d’Oro Concorso Cineasti del Presente and the Swatch First Feature Award at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.
The first image below features in Fact/Fiction, the October Square Print Sale, and will be available to purchase online for one week only from October 26-November 1 at the Magnum Store.
Sanguinetti first met Guille and Belinda, two cousins, when they were about four years old, playing on their grandmother’s farm in the Pampas region of Sanguinetti’s native Argentina, not far from her father’s farm.
“I had been working on a project called On the Sixth Day,” she told Magnum, “which explored the relationship between animals and humans on a farm in Buenos Aires, so I had been photographing Guille and Belinda’s grandmother’s animals for a few years before I began The Adventures.” Their intimate relationship would evolve over more than two decades, brought together in two books: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams and The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (2020).
"I started photographing them and I just couldn’t stop."
- Alessandra Sanguinetti
While Sanguinetti focused on the life cycles of chickens and pigs, the girls would often make their way into frame. In the summer of 1999, when the cousins were nine and 10 years old, she finally turned her lens towards them. “I started photographing them and I just couldn’t stop,” she told the festival.
"The scenery might change, the conditions might change, but we all have to go through life."
- Alessandra Sanguinetti
Within a mythologized, gaucho world, Sanguinetti celebrated the girls’ bold yet fragile imaginary universe they carved out for themselves, observing their creative freedom as they transitioned into young women. Floating fully clothed in a canal, embodying archetypal characters, and performing sketches in the fields, they inhabited dreamlike worlds with their beloved farm animals.
Sanguinetti had a video camera on a tripod, filming them — and often directing them — while she photographed, collecting 70 hours of video. The two mediums were intertwined.
"It’s beautiful to know that you can still make work that’s slow, discrete, very specific and it will be valued."
- Alessandra Sanguinetti
“The idea to make a film came a few years afterwards, after I had accumulated some footage and I looked back and I thought this could become something,” she said.
On film, the narrative finds a new pulse; we can hear the girls’ voices, listen to their ideas, and hear the photographer’s own exchanges with them as they conducted imagined interviews. The screen brings a spirited dimension to the story, while reminding the viewer of the creator behind the lens, not just as an observer but as a participant in their lives.
“In the beginning, I didn’t want to be a part of it. I thought my voice would ruin it. As the time went by, I realized that I was there and I just had to accept it,” she told Variety.
Sanguinetti’s photographs involved the act of looking for something, yet with video, she could allow time to pass and life to unfold in front of the camera, without aiming for a precise moment to retrieve.
Framed within its distinct sense of place and characters, the film speaks to the delicate unfolding of life itself — the patterns that keep returning, the struggles we endure. Across two decades, the girls become women, fall in love, have children, and gradually settle into their own adult lives.
“It’s really about growing up, about affection, about relationships, about the passage of time, relationships with animals as well. I think those are things that people experience everywhere in the world, no matter where you come from. The scenery might change, the conditions might change, but we all have to go through life,” says Sanguinetti.
The film’s reception at the Locarno Film Festival affirmed that this unhurried and unconventional form of documentary can deeply touch its audience. “It’s beautiful to know that you can still make work that’s slow, discrete, very specific and it will be valued.”
Collect the first image in this article in Fact/Fiction, the October Square Print Sale, available for one week only from October 26-November 1 at the Magnum Store.
