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Blending coming-of-age drama with a dreamlike, science-fiction edge, the film filters Argentina’s economic instability and the pull of the digital world through the perspective of a child searching for an escape.

Set during the first days of summer, as inflation rises, power cuts intensify and a solar eclipse approaches, the film follows Bego, 12, left to occupy herself while her family contends with the country’s deteriorating economy.

Using her mother’s phone, Bego connects with a virtual friend, REN__, who introduces her to shifting, a real online practice through which teenagers use lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis to try to reach a desired reality. As people around her begin slipping into an emotionally numb trance described as being eclipsed, the boundaries between Bego’s imagination, the digital world and physical reality begin to dissolve.

Antonia Robolini stars as Bego alongside Laura Paredes, whose credits include “Trenque Lauquen,” “Argentina, 1985” and “The Delinquents.” Luiza Quinteiro and Guillermo Berthold round out the cast.

“The Days Off” was produced by Paula Zyngierman at Argentina’s Maravillacine (“Marilyn,” “Under the Flags, the Sun”), alongside Brazil’s Persona Non Grata Pictures and Vulcana Films (“Hard Paint,” “Night Stage”), with Mexico’s Woo Films (“Pedro Páramo,” “Noise”) and Valiente Films as co-producers.

France’s Misia Films, whose credits include Oscar-winning short “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” and Argentina’s Año Luz (“La Calma,” “Lagunas”) are associate producers.

“The film speaks to anyone who has ever searched for belonging in places others could not see,” said Yuxuan Zhang, co-founder and sales agent at Inwave Films. “We were captivated by its tenderness, emotional precision and singular cinematic language, and are proud to accompany the film on its international journey. We believe it will resonate deeply with audiences around the world.”

Mariani described the feature as a love letter to an earlier internet that allowed young people — particularly those in the Global South — to find friendships, culture and identities beyond their immediate surroundings.

“It’s a film that explores intimacy and hopefully invites people to search for a new spirituality — to seek hope and change in a world that often tells us otherwise,” she said.

“The Human Surge 3” DP Victoria Pereda shot the film, combining phone, webcam and security-camera imagery with long observational takes. Maximiliano Passarelli edited, with sound by Gaspar Schauer and music by Punto y Pacífico.

Developed through Cannes’ La Fabrique Cinéma, EAVE Puentes, the Locarno Filmmakers Academy and the San Sebastián Co-Production Forum, where it won the ArteKino Award, the project received support from INCAA, Programa Ibermedia, ArteKino International and Ancine.

Its world premiere is set for Aug. 7 in Filmmakers of the Present at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, which runs Aug. 5-15. %!s()

The company is facing pressure to cater to a more cost-sensitive customer base, where enterprises have been less inclined to deploy expensive models without a clear picture of the return on their investments. It's also working to fend off competition from Chinese startups and tech giants Google and Microsoft, which have been touting cost-effective models.

OpenAI launched three models as part of its GPT-5.6 series, including Sol, the most powerful offering, Terra, the mid-tier model, and Luna, its fastest offering. 

The company said Thursday that it's reducing the price of Terra by 20% to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. It's cutting the cost of Luna by 80% to 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Sol's pricing remains the same. 

"Our strategy remains focused on advancing both capability and efficiency so each generation of intelligence can accomplish more work at a lower cost," OpenAI said in a release.

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, prompting companies across the U.S. to rush to deploy the technology and incentivize adoption within their workforces. The era of so-called tokenmaxxing was born, where employers encouraged staffers to use as much AI as possible without worrying about costs.

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But as AI bills have ballooned, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars, many companies have been actively working to rein in their spending. It's a shift that AI developers have been watching closely, especially as Chinese open-weight models have rapidly caught up with leading, proprietary offerings.

Open-weight AI models are available for users to download, modify and run on their own infrastructure, and can serve as a cost-effective option for companies. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released an open-weight model called Kimi K3 earlier this month that outperforms cutting-edge American offerings across some industry benchmarks, prompting a swift reaction from Silicon Valley.

Following Moonshot's announcement, OpenAI's chief rival, Anthropic, released a new model called Claude Opus 5, which it touted as its best-performing and most cost-effective offering for many use cases. It's half the price of Claude Fable 5, the advanced model that Anthropic announced in June, even though it performs comparably across coding and knowledge work tasks.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella repeatedly highlighted his company's cost-effective models during its quarterly earnings call with investors on Wednesday, following the launch of what it described as a cheap-but-performant cybersecurity model earlier this week.

Google also debuted three new models this month that aimed to undercut competitors on cost. The company said Gemini 3.6 Flash, the strongest of its new offerings, is cheaper per task than Kimi K3 and other Chinese models.

WATCH: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles this week

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In three separate, independent, high-quality polls released this week, Trump’s overall approval rating is in the low 30s, representing the worst rapport he’s had with the American public since the end of his first term and the January 6 riot at the Capitol building. 

The three major polls —CNN, AP-NORC, and Quinnipiac — have Trump at 34 percent, 33 percent and 32 percent approval, respectively. 

These are brutal numbers. The CNN poll gives us more insight as to why exactly America is fed up with the big man in charge, with 73 percent of respondents saying Trump “hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.” 

That’s a clear indication that Trump’s priorities are way out of whack. CNN’s survey also showed that some of Trump’s biggest projects — his ballroom and reflecting pool debacles, that is — are also out of favor with everyday voters, 58 percent of whom said they were dissatisfied or angry about Trump’s D.C. renovation projects. 

These polls aren’t outliers. New polling from the Argument, which surveyed 3,000 registered voters between July 20-26, had Trump at a 39-percent approval rating, though that combines both “strongly approve” and “somewhat approve” responses. The same poll found that 47 percent of voters “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s performance, with another 10 percent in the “somewhat disapprove” camp. 

Major polls have been showing bad numbers for Trump practically since he retook office and kicked off his tariff regime, and especially since the full cost of the war in Iran started to really hit financial markets. Tatishe Nteta, provost of political science at UMass-Amherst, told Rolling Stone in April that polls consistently slipping under the 40 per cent approval mark represents a shift in public opinion that is dangerously outside of the norm for a sitting president. Usually, there’s about a 40-40 split in hardcore approval-disapproval, so when the numbers start to slip below those lines, it can indicate that a president is losing support from his own party. Trump is now barely cracking 30 percent in some polls.

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The dismal polling was a bad sign back in April. In July, it’s even worse. Primary season for most states is wrapping up, and candidates across the country are starting to buckle down for general elections in the upcoming midterms. That’s going to put Trump’s popularity on the agenda for any Democrats looking to taint their opponents with their widely disliked leader. 

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Poll numbers, as always, can be fickle. But in this case, they’re following a clear trend. Under Trump, life has gotten harder for average Americans. A separate Navigator Research poll released this week found that the shift in Trump’s popularity was directly tied to these impacts, with gas prices and the costly war in Iran driving many voters away from him. 

The most telling statistic Navigator found, though, is a measure of regret. They found that 23 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024 now regret that decision. While the next presidential election isn’t until 2028 — and assumedly won’t have Trump’s name on the ballot — those dissatisfied voters will have a chance to reject every candidate who’s pledged him fealty. When the king goes down, his lackeys tend to fall too.  %!s()