A competition film of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival that left audiences rattled and talking well past the lights came on after the movie was Wayne Wapeemukwa s sophomore feature, Manhunt.

Inspired by real-life murders in Canada in 2019, the film follows two young men who try to escape dead-end lives by embarking on a road trip through the country's northern frontier, which ends up as a journey with much, much bigger - and darker - consequences for people around them and themselves.

Manhunt caused much debate among Locarno audiences by not compiling facts but offering a parable and diving into what Wapeemukwa described in a THR interview as the  nihilism at the heart of these boys' lives. Online, we call it being blackpilled.  The film picked up an honor in Locarno's Junior Jury Awards.

Also turning heads in Manhunt, which Wapeemukwa wrote with Anna-Lena Theobald, were Canadian newcomers Harris Lowe and Landon Tunold, discovered by the team of Vaka Street Casting, which was also behind the Canadian hit Blue Heron, as the young male protagonists, along with L.A.-based Austrian twins Bianca and Dilara Foscht.

And then there is the cinematography, courtesy of Toronto-based Jonathan Glendon in his feature film debut. Sensory and visceral, mesmerizing and unsettling at the same time, the movie's visuals mirror the state of mind of the two guys at its center, earning the DOP all sorts of questions during a discussion after the Locarno world premiere of the film.

Cinetic Media holds North American sales rights, while Aspect Ratio is handling international sales.

About a month after the film's premiere, THR caught up with Glendon in between all sorts of work projects to discuss how he approached the cinematographic look and feel of Manhunt, inspirations from Dutch cinematographer legend Robbie Muller and The Wrestler, the use of saturation and infrared light, and why he and Wapeemukwa imagined hell as a colorful candy world.

This is your first feature film. How did you end up coming on board as cinematographer for it?

There were a few things happening all at once. I knew th

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