My favourite films of the year 2026, a choice from distributed films in The Netherlands in 2025.
These films apealled to me the most, because of their tone, their way of telling, their benevolent use of space, time and rhythm. The following list is not a ranking of films. (It's not a competition, films are grouped together based on theme and tone or contrasts). There are films about family, trauma, love, loss, exile, isolation, obsession, diseases, mental health, care, resistance, totalitarianism, the end of the world.
I saw 91 films this year, thank god most of them is my local cinema, a handful on streaming platforms. (excluding films that were shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam)
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"Prima la vita, poi il cinema''. Luigi Comencini
“What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body; which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot “even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere. “
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) ( Civilization and discontent) by Sigmund Freud.
“In life there is really no great or small thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905.
‘When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.’
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The Film Stage : Going back to the contrast between the righteous anger of your first film and the tenderness of this one, and thinking about that through character: Prabha and Anu are imbued with a rebelliousness, a refusal to conform to things like burqas, or living with men, or the caste system. They stand proud as societal disruptors. But there’s such a gentleness to them and their connection. Why did you decide to paint them that way, with that tenderness?
Payal Kapadia : I think I’m a person who’s a little sensitive. So, for me, that maybe goes into the characters also. My previous film was a very angry film. It was a film with a very clear sort of political position that I was taking. In this film I wanted to be a bit more calm internally, just because I have been so angry for so long. It just felt like I needed to calm a little bit, to explore a new way of thinking about the same issues.
TFS : They feel like two sides of the same coin in a lot of ways.
PK : And no one watched that film, so now I’m trying a different way. [Laughs]
TFS : There’s a sense to the film that family is better found on one’s own. Through friendship and the cobbling together of communities. I wonder: do you feel that way about most people? Or is it conditional on one’s family? I come from Texas, and there’s a lot of tradition there around family and sticking with the family you were born into no matter what. I’ve lost friends and partners over wanting to live alongside a larger, discovered family and not being solely glued to biological families. So it’s something that feels universal in some ways, but I’m curious what you think.
PK : It’s nice to hear you talk about that. Yeah, I think in India it’s the same. The family is a very important and strong unit. And I don’t have any problem with family, because for a lot of people the family is the one that looks out for you also, and that’s true, of course. But, for me, I was interested in the roles of the family members being so well-defined, in India especially. Like, how a mother should be, how a father will be. It’s all very clear in our media and in our literature and in our daily lives. It’s fixed. A wife must be like this. These are all relationships that are there.
But friendship is a big one, because there’s no real definition of friendship. It’s how you and I want to define our friendship. We are close friends, far friends, intimate friends, all these kinds of things. And that, for me, has a lot of possibility because it gives a space for people to integrate their relationship. And it goes beyond identity, and it goes beyond any preconceived notions. And it allows for greeting a lot of differences, which we love making in contemporary society.
TFS : The concept of impermanence is mentioned right at the beginning and is a theme throughout the film. It seems like a hard concept to define, in a way that the film speaks to through its contemplative and nurturing approach to exploring the concept. How do you define impermanence?
PK : For me, it’s two things. Impermanence is a source of extreme anxiety for human beings. For all of us––for me also––the thought of impermanence causes melancholy. But impermanence also implies change, which is the norm. I mean, change has to happen. So it’s both things in impermanence that we have to deal with, which causes anxiety but also, perhaps, a movement forward.
TFS : That gets directly to my follow-up question. While watching the film, it feels like impermanence is this thing that plagues the leads but also something that could potentially set them free.
PK : Absolutely, yeah. You have to just become comfortable with impermanence. Otherwise you’ll always be sad.
TFS : Do you think impermanence is something all humans experience by nature or is it brought on or heightened by socio-economic situations?
PK : Well, the general feeling of impermanence is there because we’re going to die. [Laughs] So that is a larger impermanence. But socio-economic systems definitely make people more comfortable or uncomfortable with impermanence. People who are always on the move or always precariously in situations where they know that their house is going to collapse when the next monsoon comes, or they know they have to be protected from the next flood, or that somebody’s going to come and ask them for papers for where they live but they definitely don’t have the papers––they have to negotiate impermanence in a very different way from all of us who have a sense of stability, a bank account, and a place to sleep every night. And that is a negotiation with impermanence that I think most of the population does on a daily basis. I see that in New York also.
Film Comment : Misericordia is a particularly philosophical film—explicitly so, even. When the priest (played by Jacques Develay) talks about our capacity for compartmentalizing injustice, his speech can’t help but feel very contemporary. Was it inspired by the current moment, or is it a more general reflection on the human condition?
Alain Guiraudie : I’ll admit that when we were shooting and he says, “We’re all responsible, even if it’s far from home,” I thought a lot about Gaza. But it was written much earlier and these questions of guilt vis-à-vis the world’s misfortune, of conscience and culpability, have been around for a long time: how can I live my life and let this happen? We all manage to let it happen. The priest takes on a lot of my personal troubles, my questions, my inner conflict between tradition and modernity—or rather, my desire to be modern, to have a strong relationship with the present moment, and still live out my desires. In fact, he’s my favorite character, in both the novel and the film.
FC : Although there were religious echoes in your previous films—the lambs and the wolves in Staying Vertical, for instance—this is the first time that you deal with religion head-on. Even the title, Misericordia, is a Christian term.
AG : I was raised in a Christian environment, and lately it’s been coming back to me. I have a certain fascination with religion as a response to our anxieties about death. And I’ve also become aware—though I think I might already have sensed it when I was very young—of the erotic force of religion. The eroticism of the Catholic religion, after all, is remarkable: the rituals, the clothes, the ornaments, the stained-glass windows, the paintings, the sculptures. It went well with the subject of the film, this quest for a desire that isn’t incarnated—the idea of a desire that wouldn’t be fulfilled by sex. Ultimately, it’s always the same: we make films in order to bring together things that don’t necessarily go together. I think that the eroticism of religion stems from the fact that religion is a response to death, to the anguish of death. Of course, eroticism is linked to death: Eros and Thanatos. In fact, you go round and round in your mind to then come up with things we’ve known about for centuries. [Laughs] It’s crazy—you realize that you’re not inventing anything. On a formal level, you manage to mix things up a bit, so maybe that’s the only real novelty.
FC : One can’t speak of Catholicism, eroticism, and cinema without thinking of Pasolini, and the essential plot of Misericordia—a stranger arrives among a small group of characters and ignites all of their desires—recalls Teorema.
AG : I’ve been hearing this a lot. I understand why, of course, but it’s funny because it never even occurred to me to watch Teorema again. I have a strange relationship with Pasolini; I really admire the man—his poetry, his politics, his relationship with the proletariat, his relationship with cinema—and at the same time I can’t say that I like his films very much. It’s very surprising. You’re right: once you link the three elements, when you consider the mystical-materialist side, my film is right there, very close to his. But Teorema is very theoretical—it is called “theorem,” after all—and for me it remains abstract. Whereas I want my film to come alive, for people to believe in it, for something to really happen between the characters. It shouldn’t just be a pure statement.
FC : Your films, and also your novels, all share the same premise: a man alone against the world. Is this a reflection of your worldview, or is it rather that you conceive of art as a means of confronting your own anxieties?
AG : It’s both. I think that, as a little guy from the countryside, I’m still afraid of the world. There’s always been a fear of the world, but also a desire to discover it. The same is true with regard to other people: I’ve always been torn between fear and desire for other people. Something of that is definitely reflected in my films. My main theme is solitude; I don’t know if it’s a man alone against the world, or if it’s lonely people trying to do something together, for better or for worse, and struggling to find each other. Then again, maybe it’s simply that a man alone against the world is a great cinematic premise.
More Information : IMDB
Hammer To Nail: Hard Truths seems to explore similar territory to Happy-Go-Lucky but from the opposite emotional spectrum. Was this parallel intentional or something you discovered during your development process?
Mike Leigh: Neither. It’s something I never thought of before or during. It’s only something that critics have pointed out to me! I do not relate the films to each other at all. It is a total red herring. I don’t see Poppy as the flip side of Pansy or vice versa. They are two quite different types of characters.
HTN: A lot of people have been pointing it out so wanted your take on it! You’ve reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste after Secrets & Lies. How did the experience of building a character with her differ this time, nearly 30 years later?
Mike Leigh: Technically it did not! We did exactly the same thing we did 30 years ago. The only real difference is time. I am 30 years older and so is she! We have new life experiences. In terms of the mechanics of doing it, we did on this film what we did then and even before that on a stage play in London.
HTN: Your films often examine the dynamics within British working-class families. With Pansy’s character, you’re exploring mental health and isolation in this context. What drew you to tackle these particular themes?
ML: I did not decide that those would be the themes. That is not what happens or happened. We started to investigate these characters, create them and put them together and it slowly grows. Of course, what happens is, as I am in the process of figuring out what the film is, I realize I am tapping into all kinds of preoccupations and experiences. That investigation led to opening up this area of behavior and family dynamic.
HTN: Could you talk about the development process with David Webber and Tuwaine Barrett in creating their characters’ silent responses to Pansy’s behavior? How did you work with them to build that specific kind of restrained reaction?
ML: It’s all about the kind of character they are. We were drawing from sources such as people they knew! By doing a massive amount of discussion and building of their backgrounds, There begins to be an ease for improvisation, very detailed, in depth mannerisms done in real time. It organically grows. As this woman harangues and bullies them, they deal with it in their own way.
HTN: Speaking of that process, it’s famous for its extensive character development through improvisation. What surprising directions emerged during rehearsals that significantly shaped the film?
ML: There always are! That is the whole point of doing it. There is input from me, then I input what’s going on in myself, and there’s tons of interactions and it’s my job to distill, organize, dramatize and give it cinematic form! There are things that happen in the film that were such a shock when they came out. There are several moments in the back end of the film, looking at the family gathering for Mother’s Day, where Pansy suddenly behaves in a very extraordinary way. It was not something I could sit in a room and script. I am talking about the moment where she was crying and laughing. Nothing is more surprising than that. It came organically out of this investigation. That type of thing happens all the time though. The way to understand what I do, is to think about how people paint pictures, write novels, write plays, write poetry, make sculptures, make music, etc. It’s all in that creative process.
Slant : Why did you set the film in 1970?
Kelly Reichardt : There [were] a bunch of little snatch and grabs, and this is an ode to them. The one that happened at the Worcester Museum of Art happened in 1972, and that was a story of these teenage girls getting caught up in a heist. That was the first thing that pulled me into that story. For some reason, Worcester made sense to me, and I set it in 1970 for various reasons. I liked it to come at the end of the ’60s but not yet in the ’70s. The glory, the high hopes, and the craziness of the ’60s have puttered out, and people are in the fog of what comes next. I liked that as a place to be. It’s the year we went into Cambodia. It’s the year of Kent State.
S : How were you calibrating the ambient noise of the era’s political climate? It’s less in your face than Air America on the radio in Old Joy but still very present.
KR : The character isn’t really tuned in to the political climate. It’s just at the periphery of his view, so I attempted to place it that way in the film, just on the edges of the frame. He’s privileged enough not to have it be at the center of his existence, so it’s not a focal point.
S : On the note of privilege, so many of your films are about these isolated characters on the margins living a little bit hand to mouth, and what they’re looking for is to become a part of a community and find stability. The Mastermind, in a lot of ways, feels like an inversion of that. Mooney starts where they would want to be, and then he ends up in an itinerant situation.
KR : I don’t ever think of them in relation to each other, so that’s too neat for me…
S : But was that journey out of privilege something that interested you on its own?
KR : He’s middle class, but there are guardrails that come with that. He relies on [them] and takes [them] for granted. Those things, I’m really just thinking about the character and the details of him. [Talking like] this is what you do after you do it all, talk about it in these terms. I really just thought about this character, the things he could rely on, and who would pick up the slack when he doesn’t fulfill the things he might if he were more of an upstanding character.
S : I’ve talked to Josh a few times as well, and I know he has a scrapbooking process where he really loves to build out a physical collection of what the character would be going through. For you as a director, what’s your role whenever an actor arrives with a process like that? Do you assist them or let them do their own thing?
KR : That’s his business! I think actors do a lot of stuff that’s for themselves. You start getting them into their clothes, the house where they live, the car they drive, all these things like who they’re married to, who their parents are, and these things start to fall into place. That’s allowing him to respond to all the situations he’s in. We’d concentrate on his driving since he’s driving a lot.
I shared this documentary with the family, Hope [Davis] and Bill Camp, called The Plaint of Steve Kreines, which was shot later in the ’70s. It’s just [filmmaker Jeff Kreines] filming his brother moving out of his parents’ house, but it’s a great East Coast, middle-class family situation. They all drew a lot from that. It was a good thing to share, to say, “This is the organism of your guys’ world.” Dawn Sutter, the music supervisor and a friend of mine, made him some different playlists of what would be on the radio and what he might like. [I shared] lots of Dove and art information. Just because he’s not American and he’s young—[I was] just giving him things from the period that he might have encountered.
Film Comment : Mirrors No. 3 is titled for a piece of music, by Maurice Ravel. How did music factor into your conception of the film?
Christian Petzold : The last few movies I’ve made are about people who have lost their senses. They have forgotten how to smell, to taste, to see, to hear, and they have to learn it again. Cinema likes to see people who are in a process, not people who are in a situation, and the process of winning back your senses is a subject I’m interested in. Music in films—it’s always something from outside. It’s from a godlike storyteller who thinks he or she knows more about the characters. At this moment in my life, I don’t want to use music as an extradiegetic score. I want to see people playing music, listening to music, hearing the sounds of the world, hearing and seeing the wind in the trees. I want to see them open their minds.
FC : I remember how you described the film two years ago, before you shot it, and watching it, I realized you had given me a very precise description of how the narrative is set in motion—the first 15 minutes or so. I didn’t expect it to turn into a film about family, which is a subject you have dealt with before but not recently.CP : Yeah, that’s interesting. You know Barbara Auer, who plays the mother? She played the mother 25 years ago in my film The State I Am In (2000), and it’s not a coincidence that I thought about her as the mother here. Because I have a family of my own, I usually don’t want to make movies about families. It’s from my biography; it’s too near. I prefer people who are not like me. But when we made Afire (2023), we had scenes with groups of people sitting around a table, a little bit like in 12 Angry Men (1957). With many of my previous movies, it’s one or two people at the table, shot-countershot. In Afire, I was so interested in this situation of the group: who is in love with whom, who hates whom, everything at the same moment. When I was younger, I didn’t have the skills to make a scene like this, to work on both sides: on the surface and also under it. Working with this ensemble in Afire gave me the trust to make a movie about a family again.
It’s something for cinema—to see people under pressure. With the family in The State I Am In, the pressure comes from outside, from the state. Now [with Mirrors No. 3], the pressure on this family comes from inside. This is something totally different. I think I needed 25 years to think about how I could make a movie about this. I could have told you the whole story in New York two years ago, but I didn’t know at the time how to realize it.
FC : So you figured it out in the process of making it? I heard you reshot the ending.
CP : This was the first time in my life that I did that, and it was six months after we shot the final scene. In the original ending, the family is sitting on the porch, and suddenly they notice that Paula Beer’s character is back, standing at the fence, with her luggage. The last sentence of the script was, “She opens the gate and intrudes into the life of the family.” I liked this sentence so much!
With my editor, Bettina Böhler, I watched the scene, and we knew something was totally wrong—it was a big, big mistake. We can’t tell a story, 90 minutes of someone looking for herself, and then in the end, she’s just a daughter! I had a depression for two weeks. I stopped editing; I thought it was the worst movie I’d ever made in my life. A little bit of negative narcissism.
In cinema, you have a collective intelligence, and that’s why it’s the best art in the world. From the discussions I had with Paula Beer and Enno Trebs, they also told me, “That’s not the final scene.” Then Bettina said, “Okay, let’s take all this shit out, and use an image of Paula in her apartment.” At that moment, I knew what this movie was about. It’s about a family that learns to live with trauma, and with the absence of their suicidal daughter. But that was not in my mind during the writing, because literature is completely different from cinema. In literature, you have a romantic final sentence, and you are proud. As a writer, you can lie 24 hours a day. Cinema knows when you start lying.
Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia who aids patients seeking abortions despite legal prohibition, must defend her values and actions when she is accused of negligence and subject to investigation
Filmmaker: Nina works in this specific milieu, and I was curious what research or interviews with doctors you did in getting all the detail.
Dea Kulumbegashvili : I started to work on the film in 2021 and spent a year in many clinics, even in the morgue. It was very extensive research in terms of understanding what would be the cause of death [and] the investigative process, how would it be done. [As the film begins, Nina is under investigation for the death of an infant she helped deliver.] The place where they do an autopsy, we built it. All the texts were written by professionals: I was working with doctors and writing with them, and also with women who came forward to talk to me about their own stories and very tragic things that happened. The death of the woman [which] is also portrayed in the film is not exactly but partially how it happened, and I was in this hospital at that moment. It was emotionally a very difficult process, and it required a lot of learning and a lot of collaboration. All of these doctors were very generous.
F : You mentioned the hospital birth scene earlier, which is so strikingly shot from overhead, as being important to defining the film.
DK : I wanted to focus on birth, and that’s how you focus on birth. I didn’t want to see the faces, I didn’t want to see acting or trying to perform. I just wanted it to be about a birth. Also, there is something very like a fresco for me when you look frontally at a moment in life. It was not an aim or a mission for me to film this. It started to become evident we would do it when we spent a lot of time in the clinic, and women wanted it also. It was also a difficult process in that you need to find a way to do it and not be in anybody’s way in the delivery room.
F: Could you talk about the creature or vision in the film, which I guess is a mix of camera and CGI?
DK : It’s a costume to start with. It’s all shot. What’s done in CGI is just deleting certain parts.
DK : Literally this: it’s like something which is not yet and not anymore. I was thinking about this phrase by Hannah Arendt. It’s between past and future, aa transitional moment for this creature from human to non-human, from being to non-being, or another form of being in-between the worlds. I know that it has nothing to do with Hannah Arendt directly, but for me usually everything’s connected somehow. And I knew that I didn’t want her to have eyes, ears, or mouth, but I wanted her to be expressing her emotions .
So it was difficult, because actors are used to different forms of expression. We first tried to do it with an actress in a costume, and it was not possible. We did so much physical training, because creating the creature started with physicality—how it would walk, sit, everything. Then I found this incredible performer from England, Hannah [Sheperd], and we just did it with her. She’s a dancer. I was by the camera and would say “very slow” or “slide your foot,” and it was easier in a way to do it with her because she’s a dancer.
F : I think you said earlier that people have responded quite differently to this film in terms of differences between men and women.
DK : Yeah, even today with your [journalist] colleagues. Several men said that it was very difficult for them to look at the delivery scene. And I was like, “Really?” You want to look away—I understand, and you can look away. But I would not want to look away because, I mean, we were born in this way. There is nothing that new at the end. Nina’s sexuality is also perceived differently, and her sense of loneliness. For some men, it’s a question: Why is she so lonely? How should we understand this? And for me, I don’t know if there is one specific, very clear, pragmatic, practical answer to why somebody could be lonely. She has many reasons, but I can’t answer that very simply.
Sorry, Baby directed by Eva Victor
Little White Lies : Language is this crucial thing, especially – correct me if I’m wrong – only once is the word ’rape’ used and you instead refer to ‘the bad thing’. I’ve thought so much about this because, on one hand, as a person of words, the best or most impactful thing you can do is choose the most specific word. On the other hand, words like that can be totalising to an individual who is going through processing, and does not want to be buried under the name of a criminal offence.
Eva Victor : I’ve only had male journalists ask me about [this] and usually, I’ve had their read on it be: she’s not ready to say it. I’m like: Agnes and [her best friend] Lydie have built this language that allows them to talk about this gently with each other. It’s their own private word, and their own private way of talking about it so that they don’t scare each other. The doctor is the person who says the word ‘rape’ because he doesn’t understand the sensitivity required. I had this playwriting teacher in college who used to say, ‘your characters could say, “I love you,” but what is their really special way that they say “I love you”? That no one else says, that is just their words for it?’ It always felt to me like they have their world that they’ve built and their safety in it, and these are the words that they’ve chosen to use to talk about it. The word ‘rape’ and the words ‘sexual assault’ come with these real big, clinical, scary things attached to them. Which is very helpful sometimes, like when you’re trying to make a point. Also, I really wanted the audience to feel safe watching the film. I wanted to approach making a film about this with as much tenderness as possible. Part of that was the language and part of it was what we see and what we don’t see. I was always trying to think of how to soften this so that our bodies don’t shut down watching it.
LWL : The space that you give Agnes is also the space that you give for the audience. It’s not that kind of film where she has a week to process the bad thing and then has to rejoin the world. You give her years and the expectation isn’t even that when the film ends she has to be done with it… There’s no sense of a ticking clock.
EV : It was really important to me that we’re tracking these five years and this small degree of healing. Naomi [Ackie – who plays Lydie] said something I thought was so beautiful. She was talking about this kind of trauma in an interview we did, and she was like, ‘This stone is put in the middle of your river. And the painful thing is trying to get the stone out, but actually things will grow around the stone, and things will move around the stone.’ The stone will remain, but we’re allowed to move around it. It’s crazy because there’s no choice about the stone being there, that a person is thrust into this kind of situation without any choice. When she said that I thought that was a really beautiful image. And true.
EV : We only meet him before this thing happens and I never even thought about returning to him, because the story really isn’t about him. It’s almost a gift to Agnes that he disappears. But it’s the kind of gift that leaves her empty, too. So it just felt truthful. I worked with Louis [Cancelmi] – who plays Decker a lot, we talked about building him in a way that doesn’t undermine Agnes. So, making sure that they do have a chemistry – that it feels exciting, that he is interested in her work, and that he seems smart and a little discombobulated. Basically, I never wanted it to feel like, “No, don’t walk in that door!” Maybe that’s confusing because she actually does walk in a door, but I mean more in a horror movie like, “Go back out from the garage!” I wanted it to feel like we understand that they do have this creative energy that does have a sensual element to it. That mattered to me, because that’s how he convinces her to come inside.
And I wanted it to feel a little bit romantic so that we don’t feel like she should have known. It really mattered to me to have a scene where Lydie’s like, “You should fuck him!” and it’s playful because that fantasy is so allowed. Like, with your best friend, you’re allowed to talk about, like, “Oh maybe you should hook up with him,” because it can’t happen. The beauty of being young is like, you’re allowed to have fantasies and it’s up to people in power to be clear on what you’re allowed to do. That scene mattered a lot to me, because I wanted them to be allowed to dream and then have that be used against them. But yeah, Decker is really a device. As, honestly, are most of the men in the film. I love the men in the film, but they’re all pretty much there to reflect back to Agnes her experience of the world at that moment.
Screenanarchy : Would you describe your style as realist? In style, the film is lightly affected, with a wonderful tendency towards the poetic, the symmetrical, and the romantic. But your characters’ actions and mannerisms feel recognizable and real.
Kohei Igarashi : The episodes in the film stem from real life, but in constructing a film I have to somehow transform those episodes into fiction. When I set about combining reality and fiction, I think about creating something that could only happen in a movie. The crossroad from reality into fiction, that’s what makes it a film.
SA : You mention drawing on real life. Could you tell me about the real-life backdrop and inspiration for this film?
KI : There are a lot of moments in my life that inspired me. One is from when I was in Venice with my previous film. There was a boat party, and the producer, my wife, dropped her phone into the sea. Even now, when my wife asks ‘Where’s my phone?’, I always remember that episode, and say ‘Oh, your phone is still in the Adriatic Sea’. It’s this kind of thing, some incident that could be negative, but also brings back memories, that inspired this film.
The protagonist of this film loses quite a lot of stuff, a hat for example, but those losses, those moments bring back memories.
SA : Death and grief are treated with a matter-of-factness that I found refreshing. It's something that you allow to quietly gut punch the viewer, for example when there’s a sudden understated revelation over drinks. I'd love to hear your thinking behind treating death with a matter-of-factness that is equally reverent.
KI : When I deal with the topic of death and grief, I can only think about my own way of feeling, because I don't know how other people feel. So this way of representing it is based on the way that I think, which is something that I don't exactly know.
In my head, I logically understand that that person is dead, but then I also feel that, if I call out to them, maybe they will answer, or perhaps they now exist somewhere else.
SA : Past romances and the temporal aspect of them are often explored in Japanese films through flashback, but in your film the past sequences don’t feel like flashback. You connect us through place and keep us grounded, the past is made to feel like the present. Were you conscious about breaking the mould and template of romantic cinema in Japan?
KI : I don't really like flashback scenes typical in Japanese cinema, I think they’re quite boring. What’s interesting about film is thinking about what’s happening in the now, not being told what happened in the past. I wanted to make something different.
It’s the nature of film that, when we watch cinema, we are looking at the past but believing that what we see is the present. The media itself is something that we shot in the past, so it includes some element that doesn't exist anymore in the present.
When Nagi, the character who passed away, appears in the film, I wanted to make it feel like the person is alive in the present timeline. This aspect aligns with the nature of film. It’s something shot in the past that feels present when you look at it on screen.
Screen Anarchy, October 3, 2024
More information : IMDB
The Arts Desk : Do you remember your first big crush?
Johan Dag Haugerud : I do, quite well, actually. I have a very vivid memory of being completely immersed in that warm feeling, the butterflies in my stomach. But also the uncertainty and the fear of rejection. You constantly analyse everything, every gesture, every word, until it becomes a love story in your head.
TAD : How did you process this whirlwind of emotions back then?
JDH : I started writing a diary very early on. But to be honest, my first love was rather fleeting, like blowing up and popping a balloon. As soon as the romance became reality, it was all over pretty quickly.
TAD : From today's perspective, it seems almost old-fashioned that Johanne in Dreams writes down her love story instead of sharing it on Instagram.
JDH : Writing is a fascinating and therapeutic process on many levels, and it's timeless. On the one hand, writing gives you access to your own thoughts. At least, that was the case for me when I was younger. It helped me find my personal voice. But it can also be healing in a very special way. Writing frees the mind at any age or point in your life. I don't think posting stories on social media has the same power.
TAD : How has your own writing process changed over the years?
JDH : I don't analyse it. I just write whatever comes to mind. In fact, I'm not really interested in telling stories in the traditional sense. I'm not interested in plot lines or dramatic twists and turns. I much prefer to observe different situations and try to build on them and relate them to each other.
TAD : What makes you a good observer?
JDH : I'm open-minded and not easily surprised. I have few expectations and just let things happen, not only in terms of events and situations, but also when I meet people. I try not to judge or limit them to my expectations in any way, especially in conversations. It's often more important to listen to how the tone of their voice might change rather than paying too much attention to how they behave. That way, you can pick up on their insecurities or awkwardness much better than you can from facial expressions or gestures.
TAD : All three films in your Oslo Stories trilogy deal with intimate human relations. Is there such a thing as a perfect relationship?
JDH : No, all relationships are problematic. It can be just as difficult to live in a monogamous marriage as it is to have an open or polyamorous relationship. There are always conflicts because that's human nature. We all have different emotions and want different things. The biggest challenge is figuring out what you want in terms of sexuality and love, to realise what really makes you happy. Above all, it's about learning to be honest with yourself. Of course, the society you live in also plays a role. But first you must accept yourself. Everything else is secondary.
TAD : For Dreams, did you always have a female story in mind?
JDH : Yes, I wrote it for these women. I had already worked with Ella Øverbye [in 2019's Beware of Children aka Barn] when she was 11 years old, and I wanted to explore how she had developed over time, both as a person and as an actress. The same goes for Ane Dahl Torp and Anne Marit Jacobsen. I've known them for a long time, but I've never seen them together as daughter and mother. To me, they seem very similar in some ways, even though they have very different characters.
TAD : What was so fascinating about Ella Øverbye that made you want to follow her career?
JDH : We met at a regular casting for my film Beware of Children. She was the third girl I spoke to, and we clicked immediately. We had the same sense of humour, which is important to me when I work with actors, because it makes the communication much easier. I also felt that we trusted each other right away. I'm quite insecure as a director, and actors, especially when they're young, often feel the same way. So it's important that you find a way to make it work together.
TAD : Dreams addresses the fine line between fiction and truth. Does it matter what really happened between Johanne and her teacher?JDH ; Yes. But truth and reality can be two different things. When you feel something deep in your heart, those emotions are real, and what Johanne experiences in this love story is very true for her. Her teacher experiences and feels the same way. When we see Johanna in the scene with Johanne's mother, we understand that even if certain things didn't happen in real life, they happened to Johanne in a certain way. It's a grey area to define when a certain behaviour becomes a sexual advance. When does sex become sex? What are the two characters experiencing, even if they are not having sexual intercourse in the conventional sense?
The Arts Desk, August 6, 2025.
More Information : IMDB
Filmmaker : I want to get back to what you’ve called the poetic logic of the film. It’s a film of great oppositions, thematically, that get translated into images and dramatic conflicts. But one of the things that’s amazing to me is how history is active within the film. This is shared with The Childhood of a Leader, the feeling that history is like an underlayer, like canvas showing through a painting, but it’s also a shadow pressing down on the characters. One of the ways that you key the audience into this is with archival footage and music, rooted in history. How much of that is done in advance? How thorough and deep does the research go before you start?
Corbet: Some of the archival sequences, for example, were scripted, and some were found along the way while we were pulling stuff for those sequences. That extraordinary footage we found on the history of the Christian tradition and industrialization in Pennsylvania, when we
found that we were like, “Oh, well, we’ve got to open the movie this way. I mean, this is so fantastic.” I often speak about W.G. Sebald, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachman, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Celan—a handful of writers who have this feeling for history that is in the text that transcends the linear nature of the way that we’ve been taught history, where it’s just basically dates and events, cause and effect.
Fastvold: “This is a fact. This is what happened.”
Corbet: It’s not fungible!
Fastvold: Who knows? I mean there’s of course facts, but when you start writing history, it all becomes slightly fiction as well. There are always details and parts of it that are—
Corbet: —invented by the storyteller. I just feel a more honest relationship with history from Sebald than I do from even great historical writers like David McCullough, because they found a way to this concussed feeling of the trauma and burden of history. And the fact that this is something that we carry with us all the time—
Fastvold: —connecting events that are not obviously connected. I think it’s what Sebald does a lot. He speaks about something that happens in one part of the globe, and then another, completely unaware of each other, but somehow these events speak to him.
Corbet: A butterfly flaps its wings. But it’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to feel it. And I think it’s the reason that I’m constantly doing these historical projects. I’m using the same actor to play a character and then that character’s child or family member. It’s because it’s one thing to say that history repeats itself, it’s another thing to feel it as a viewer. There’s something about it that’s quite disturbing. It really challenges the system of belief that you have built over the course of the entire film.
Fastvold: It’s a little Brechtian in that way where you’re saying like “Wake up and let’s talk. Let’s look at the ideas and the things that we’re talking, not just be lulled and seduced.”
Corbet: It’s an architecture which reveals its nuts and bolts.
Fastvold: Similar to Brutalism.
Filmmaker : The tension between aesthetics and politics is underlined when the story shifts to Italy and a captivating new character shows up, Orazio the stonecutter, who has left the mountains just once, “to beat the corpse of Mussolini with my bare hands.” He says he’s an anarchist, having fought in the Resistance, trapping fascists in caves and dropping stones on them. Is Orazio’s backstory as important as I think it is? How did you decide to present this rhapsodic interlude just ahead of a scene where Van Buren reveals himself to be an absolute villain?
Corbet: The film is sort of a 1950s melodrama. Everything is taken to operatic extremes, and Guy’s character is very much like an antagonist you would have in a film from mid-century a la James Mason. And I felt that this transgression in Carrera had to happen there—it wouldn’t mean the same thing elsewhere. The marble quarries felt like the appropriate visual allegory because the film is very much about this agent who wants to possess that which cannot or should not be possessed. The quarry is a very beautiful place, but a very violent place. We take a bite out of Mother Nature and she gets pretty pissed off about it. There are constant rock slides, it’s quite dangerous, and ultimately it’s one thing for it to be the source of Michelangelo’s Pietà, but now it’s primarily a material that’s used to surface people’s bathrooms and kitchens.
We had this rule that every single character in the film has a backstory and a different relationship with the Second World War. Isaach De Bankolé’s character as well as Guy’s character as well as Joe Alwyn’s character—there are no absolutely peripheral characters. Everyone has a link to the central theme of the movie, which is about this post-traumatic generation processing what happened with the Second World War—with both World Wars really, back to back. I looked at a lot of different guys for Orazio. Salvatore Sansone is predominantly a painter and a writer, and he looks so incredibly iconic, and has this beautiful voice, so I asked if he would do it. He gives it this kind of mystical quality, like the old man in the mountain.
More Information IMDB
Cineuropa: In both Limonov: The Ballad and The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, you offer an alternative angle on history. Is this a conscious choice or something that emerges during research?
Kirill Serebrennikov: It’s intentional. Most of the narrative about the post-war world comes from the victims’ side, which is important and rich. We hear victims' voices, but how did these educated people, people who knew poetry and music, become monsters? I was inspired by Jonathan Littell’s extraordinary book The Kindly Ones, which is basically the monologue of an SS officer. Reading it was a shocking experience for me – for the first time I was inside the mind of a Nazi. It helped me understand the mindset. And my intention was to do the same, to put the camera inside the brain of Mengele, and show his motivation. Furthermore, I wanted to get a grasp of the collective system called Mengele – the people who helped him, protected him, funded him, hid him. Altogether, they made Mengele possible. After the war, they helped him avoid justice and vengeance. The film is about that, more than just one man.
What feels dangerous to me now is that we have lost the idea of what is good and what is bad. When the situation gets foggy, we lose our sense of stability, our humanity. We need to be able to clearly recognise evil. If we say, “it’s complicated,” and start justifying things, we are falling into the trap of propaganda. The moment you say “it’s not okay to kill people, but...” – that but is what leads to a lot of blood.
C
: The
film is based on Olivier Guez’s book of the same title, but I
suppose you did additional research?
KS : The book was our main guide, of course, but since I’m not someone who knows everything about Mengele, his story was a challenge for me. Therefore, I did many interviews with German people, who told me about their past, revealed the skeletons in their closets. I’m not German or German-speaking, so I needed to learn about post-war German life – about families, the legacy of defeat, silence. I asked actors, journalists, friends, producers – I did almost 30 interviews – just to hear their stories about their grandparents, how they behaved during and after the war. Many had to remain silent. It was not even acceptable to say “I’m German.” And interestingly, we could not get funding from German institutions, similarly to The Zone of Interest, which also got none. German funds say: “No more money for Holocaust and Nazi topics, we’ve had enough.” Perhaps they are right. But we still had to make the film.
C : With no funding from German institutions, are there concerns about releasing the film in Germany?
KS : Yes, it’s a very painful topic. But Germany loves discussion, so maybe the film has the potential to create a big debate there. That would be good. We have a German distributor. I met him yesterday and he said they will do their best to release it widely.
C : Now, outside of Russia, you work across languages and countries. Do you consider yourself a transnational director?
KS : Yes. Currently, I’m staging Boris Godunov in Amsterdam, my first Russian opera abroad. It is very serious. I used to do Wagner, Mozart, European classics – but this is different. After that, I’ll do a film or opera in France, shoot in Latvia, perform in Austria, and Germany. That’s why I love Europe – it’s transparent, close, culturally rich. You can do a lot through various professional identities and in different cultural contexts.
As for the languages, we had twelve on the set of The Disappearance of Josef Mengele. We brought people from various countries. It was crucial for me to have native speakers, because it always feels fake otherwise. I hear it in other films, and it’s bullshit. I insisted on this authenticity, even though it was more expensive. We had people speaking Brazilian Portuguese – not Portuguese from Portugal as the film partially takes place in Brazil; Spanish, and Umbanda practitioners who could authentically play Umbanda. It was a complicated pastiche of different faces, identities, and speeches. But it was a kind of pleasure for the German people living in South America – we collected them from different places. Not all of them wanted to participate, of course, because of their past.
FilmInt : Was there any particular accident which made you think about making this movie or just a collection of different events?
Alexandra Makarová : It was just a collection of different things because this feeling of being a foreigner in another country and the fear that the country’s political situation may change is ingrained in me, even now that I’m in Vienna. I think the first idea for me was to tell the story about this very resilient woman and mother and artist who fights for herself and for her freedom to be an artist and to live her life as she wants. I know such women in my family because most of the people who suffered during the war and after the war in my family were women and children and then children of the children, so it’s a never ending chain of memory.
F : One of the main themes of the film is the relationship between a mother and daughter. You went with your mother to Vienna; so how much of the story was based on your own experiences with your mother?
AM : A lot, more than I wanted! In the beginning it was more focused on the mother-daughter relationship and later it focused more on Perla and less on her daughter. I had a very hard time with my mother because she was very young, she was 19 when I was born. The first few years I lived with my grandparents in Czechoslovakia and then, just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, she took me to Vienna and we lived together. She was a wild and free artist, always partying. I had no father, so I had to be very adult, more than she was, that was always my struggle until I was in my 30s and then I had a child too. My point of view changed a lot through that, but that was important to me because the generic view of motherhood is always the same; we have this Mother Mary icon who suffers for everything and everybody, but that’s not true because as a mother you are always by yourself and you have to look after yourself. I think that’s very important and we see that for example in France women are more emancipated then in Austria or every Slavic country.
F : In one scene Perla tells Joseph: you don’t understand, you’re not from here. Do you think you have to have been from there and lived that life to fully understand the people there, because he cannot understand why she wants to go back with all the accompanied risk and trouble.
AM : In this particular story she is a very complicated character. Not everyone who fled would go back but she has this attitude of never looking back and always looking to the future. For him of course this is stupid, it’s just too risky and it’s not rational. When she says you’re not from here and you don’t understand, I think that is true because that is one sentence which I heard many times and I always thought that’s just in my family but then I found that many people from Slavic countries think the same way. For example if someone gets sick, you tell to get over it. It’s this way of thinking, even if it’s hard, you get over it.
F : You paint a very stark picture of Slovakia during that time. We see the big lines at supermarkets and bakeries and in one scene when Perla orders a lot of food, an old man berates her for eating so much when people are starving. Did such details about the mentality of the people and their conditions come from your talks with friends and families?
AM : Yes, from friends and family because they all had experienced it. People who lived in that time know that, I know it from the stories I’ve heard from folks. I did a lot of research which I loved doing. It was important for the art directors. For example we have a scene where Julia unpacks this gift-wrapped projector and the guy from props showed me some wrapping papers and I sent it back to him and said no because we only had one pattern at that time and it was always the same and even one type of toilet paper which was grey and thin. Even so, it was much better in Czechoslovakia than for example in Romania or Poland.
FilmInt, March 26, 2025.
Rabbit's Foot : Vermiglio is set in 1944, in the decade when Neorealism was emerging in Italy—was that an influence for you?
Maura Delpero: Of course. Coming from documentary, I have a strong reality parameter. So when I do fiction inspired by reality, I need to begin from the ground, from reality, from the roots. The preparation is really long, I try to find things that are already there, objects that are there, people that are there, dialect that comes from there, costumes. I pick from the world and then structure it in a fictional way. It’s a difficult decision because you lose a lot of opportunities in terms of commercializing. So when I decide to stay so radical, I also have to do the film with less money, which means less time. It’s a lot of suffering for me. But it’s good not to compromise. I think when you watch it you say, okay, this is something authentic.
RF: Can you talk about the use of sound? It’s a very quiet film in a literal, and metaphorical sense, and it’s interspersed of course by the beautiful Chopin music.
MD: I think we experience it as a silent film because we are used to a lot of sound. The film asks for silence and offers the viewer the possibility to enter another space and time tunnel. You have to do it in a theatre, not in your home watching your phone and going to the fridge. If you enter this bubble, you will hear a lot of sound. Silence has a sound—we use a lot of direct sounds from inside and outside the house. And the music of the dialect itself. There’s a specific way people talk. And the fact they talk very little. In this space [the mountains] people don’t talk a lot. Their tongue will be freezing. Other parts of Italy are more talkative. Here they are very reserved, emotionally reserved. For the music, I didn’t want a soundtrack, so all the music is internal, all diegetic. The Chopin, even if it is anticipated in the scene before, they always come from a source within a film. The songs are sung by people in the town—the same people you see in the bar, with those faces, they are the singers.
RF: You mentioned your father earlier. Were there any personal links to the character you shaped? What did you want to say about him?
MD : He’s based on my grandfather. My father inspired little Pietrino—the one who asks questions. At the time the school teacher was an important person. Like the priest or the mayor. They were the three people who had authority. My grandfather came from the rural tradition but at the same time had studied so he was this kind of intellectual peasant. He was intellectually curious. He didn’t hit on hands like other teachers. But at the same time he was a patriarch. His relationship with the mother is old fashioned, but at the same time you see them in bed at night—when you see the truth, the couple in bed. They are much more equal. He confesses his love, worries about Pietro’s letter. He’s the eleventh child.
RF: Vermiglio is a real place, and maps are an important motif in the film. How did you find this place?
MD: It’s nice that you talk about maps—the atlas that is in the house. We really talked about this object a lot, because we are talking about an isolated place in time and space. The idea was that the world outside was so far away—the fruit of imagination. I like that there’s this atlas in the father’s room and everyone is secretly dreaming through it—Flavia is dreaming about culture, and Ada is regretting Virginia going away and Lucia is waiting for her lover. I remember my generation still had this space for imagining and dreaming and not knowing. I used to dream a lot through atlases. I like the fact there is this little house up in the mountains dreaming about the world. Especially during the war they were really isolated. Everything becomes great, like cinema.
For me this village is also a place of my soul, because it’s where my father was born. It’s a place from my childhood, and maybe I kept this dreamy, fantasy atmosphere of childhood where you look at things with big eyes. When I started to write, I realized I had a lot of material–a lot of souvenirs—do you say souvenirs?
RF: The sense of time passing also adds to the sense of it as a novel.
MD: It was decided to structure it as four seasons, and to have these big elliptical passages that push the story forward and create a sense of a year. At this epoch the season was an important time parameter. The whole time frame is one year, from winter 1944 to autumn 1945. You begin with Winter, then you have this moment in which Spring arrives with pollen, the people arriving. There are bridges–of Summer, and of the Autumn, when just three children go to school instead of the whole family. It’s four seasons. But you hear that, no? Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
A Rabbit’s Foot, January 19, 2025.
More information : IMDB
Hammer To Nail : At the 36 minute mark, we have the final moment between Robert and Gladys. Kate ignores Robert as he tries to show her the flower. He gives the flowers to Gladys and, slightly defeated, says, “I’ll just go.” He walks off with his axe, looks back one more time, whistles at Kate, and that would be the last he ever sees of them, at least in what we think is reality. Just talk about crafting that final moment.
Clint Bentley : Oh my gosh, that’s one that turned out very beautifully and it was one that became more beautiful by following what was being given by the world at the moment. That was initially crafted as this scene that was a moment between Robert and Kate as a two-year-old where they had a real connection. It was this scene where he made a game out of leaving and she says goodbye over and over. It was very sweet and beautifully written.
But the two-year-old on the day did not care at all about doing that. She had no interest. At first, with Adolfo, I was trying to figure out, okay, if we get an insert of the kid saying this, and then we get an insert of Joel, etc. We were trying to figure out how to make it work. Then the two-year-old was just trying to walk off and play with the toys on set.
Joel, Felicity and I, we all have kids around the same age who were around two at the time. We were like, “this is how it is, isn’t it?” We just realized that’s life. You’re trying to go through this big emotional moment and the kid doesn’t even care. We just decided to embrace it.. It became this really beautiful moment and felt more real by listening to the kid.
Then it became a moment between Gladys and Robert where they know something that the kid doesn’t. The added benefit of it was Joel trying to do this little trick with the flower in his hand. We did it the first time and the kid didn’t care at all and just walked off. That was the take that we used in the edit. But then, we did it like two or three more times and the kid loved it. She was like, “oh wow.” We used that take for the montage, in the plane, at the end when he’s remembering back. We use the one where she’s into the trick as if his memory of the event has become sweeter over time. So just an example of something where I knew the feeling that I wanted, but then life gave me something much better than I had initially thought of.
HTN: Shortly after at the 38 minute mark we have this conversation with Robert, Arn, and a couple of the other workers. The young man has a boyish arrogance to him. Arn says he used to think just like the young man. One of my favorite lines in the whole film is when he says, “This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We are but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be God.” It was just a great conversation. What was your thinking?
CB: That was one of those of taking what I had gotten from the book thematically and trying to expand on it. I think that “intricately stitched together” was something I stole from Cormac McCarthy at one point or another. We were trying to get across in this moment that looking at the last 200 years, which is a blip on the radar of the time of the earth and even the time of humans, we’ve changed so much. We’ve taken these big rivers and just decided we’re gonna straighten out this river. We’re gonna dam up that river and we’re gonna move, we’re gonna chop down this forest and put a Costco up here.
There is an arrogance to it that I don’t think is very controversial to say. We have no idea the impact that these things are having and the impact that these things will have over the course of a few centuries. I love when characters get into arguments in films, and neither is right, but neither is wrong at the same time. Arn saying to The boy, “This hurts us.” And the young guy saying, “Ah, fuck it, I got money in my pocket now, I’m fine.” Making the point that there’s always gonna be enough trees, which if you go up in that area, you go up into these wooded areas, it feels like that when you look at it, even though you know it is not true because of how quickly we’re taking them down. It’s kind of a tragedy, in Arn’s position, that once you recognize the damage and the destruction, it’s a bit too late.
HTN: At the 53 minute mark, there’s this great moment between Ignatius Jack and Robert. You match cut shots of Jack killing the deer with Gladys doing the same. This leads into a montage that shows them musing over how the location would be good for a cabin, the cabin burning and her saying his name. At its conclusion, Robert is looking over the dead deer, holding on to his antlers, breaking into a full sob, saying that they’re not coming back. He apologizes, saying, “Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.” Talk about crafting that moment and how that montage came to life from the page to the screen in the editing room.
CB : I think emotionally, I wanted to show this character, the first time where he fully weeps. It’s because of this elk that’s laying there. Just seeing this, They kill the elk because they need to eat and yet something has died, that paradox. Him just recognizing this death of this animal unlocks something emotionally for him. But he’s a man at a time where he’s not fully able to process those emotions. It’s not really okay for a man to cry like that. So he apologizes for it just out of an almost knee-jerk reaction. I wanted to get that across. The montage that came kind of late in the edit, as Parker and I were trying to find the language of the film and the language of the edit. We were threading those montages through more and more and it was honestly something that I think we tried to give the viewer a glimpse without him having to express it. Again, he’s not somebody who can explain very much of how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking. So I’m trying to give the audience a window into his mind. What’s going through his mind that leads to this emotional breakdown? There was a subtle crafting of that moment to give these glimpses of memories without overdoing it to the point where it gets in the way of Joel’s performance.
Film Comment : When you set off on your shoot through Asia—your own grand tour—in early 2020, how much of the concept and the script were already in place?
Miguel Gomes : We knew the structure of the story, and we knew the characters would do the Asian Grand Tour, which was an established touristic path for Europeans in the beginning of the 20th century. The script came later: we wanted to write it after editing the images from the shoot a little bit, and seeing how those images could resonate with the inner world of the characters. We knew from the start that we would also shoot the characters in the studio, and that the images filmed during our journey would somehow be in the film.
FC : Were you looking for anything in particular on this trip? Any types of shots or situations?
MG : First of all, to have fun. That was number one on the list. There is this big Ferris wheel without a motor in Myanmar that was being manually turned by these guys, and we saw it on the first day of shooting. We said, wow, let’s film this—it could resonate with the disorientation and the efforts of Edward, the main character, before he flees. So the criteria were to have fun, to film things that were interesting to us, and to have a diversity in the material. We also had an interest in shooting the different kinds of puppet shows in every region. Some things are staged, of course. For instance, in the Philippines, we invited a bunch of people onto a jeepney and turned it into a moving karaoke party.
MG : The spectacle of the world. One of the two main characters, Edward, tries to hide in the world, to recede into it, and later he starts to open up to the world, or at least starts to think more about Molly, his fiancée—the woman he’s trying to avoid. As he does, the images become something else. They start to have a different mood: more melancholic, more peaceful. In the second half of the film, with Molly, she’s smart, she has lots of joy, she changes more. The images are funnier, more enjoyable, but they also get darker. Of course, in the process of editing, everything kept changing all the time.
FC : In the press conference, you talked about a W. Somerset Maugham text as well as your own marriage [to filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro, a co-writer of Grand Tour and co-director with Gomes of The Tsugua Diaries (2021)] as starting points for the film.
MG : In Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, which is a collection of his travel writing through Southeast Asia, he tells a joke about men and women, men being cowards and women being stubborn when it comes to marriage. Maybe I was sensitive to this question for personal reasons as I was recently married. My name is Miguel Eduardo. I’m not Edward, I hope, but I’m a little bit like him. And Molly is not so different from Maureen.
FC : Maureen doesn’t laugh like Molly, who has a very distinctive, eruptive laugh.
MG : This laugh was the first thing the actress, Crista [Alfaiate], and I created together. I showed her some films from the ’40s with Katharine Hepburn, not because Hepburn laughed in a particular way, but to get the mood and the joy of the characters. This silly laughter gives Molly some definition early on.
FC : Tabu was also set in a colonial context. In Grand Tour, colonialism is not front and center, but there is the line about empires ending…
MG : Said by a guy who’s smoking opium, so I would not trust him too much [laughs]. But it’s true—if you shoot in a studio-constructed post office and you cut to the real post office in Saigon, I don’t have to make much effort for a historical comment or reference. It’s inevitably present. But in Tabu, it was the Portuguese Empire, and this is the British Empire. I’m not playing at home. It’s not the center of the film, but it’s present.
FC : Watching it a second time, I was struck by how many potential obstacles you set up for the viewer. In the collision of present-day documentary footage and period studio scenes, but also in the play with language and anachronism and various forms of artifice, the film is constantly breaking the rules of realism.
MG : Which is nice for me, because I think cinema makes too much effort to convince audiences that they’re seeing something of this world. But we’re not; we’re seeing the parallel world of cinema, with different laws. I hope it’s a world that puts us in a better condition to connect with the real world, with ourselves and other people, but it’s a different world and I want it to look like a different world. As I’ve said before, all of my films are remakes of The Wizard of Oz. That’s the basis of cinema. Dorothy goes from Kansas to the world of cinema, and you have to create some kind of relation between them, and this is my job in my films. Nowadays there’s an understandable desire to try to fix up the world in cinema, which I value, but I think it can be kind of impossible. You cannot fix the world with cinema. But you can open the minds of people. And then they can maybe try to fix up the world.
More Information : IMDB
Goethe
Institut : How
did the idea of making a film about an almost 80-year-old woman come
about?
Gabriel
Mascaro : I
grew up with older people, including my parents, two grandmothers,
and my grandfather. We always took care of the elderly together. When
my grandfather passed away, my grandmother, at the age of 80,
surprisingly started painting. It was interesting to observe her in
this moment of renewal. Everyone thought she would fall into
depression, but she did something entirely different. She developed
new desires, a new existence, and sought a new life with different
meaning and horizons. This deeply moved me and sparked my research
and desire to make this film. I wondered how I could politically read
and think about the aging body in our society.
GI
: One
of the core points of the film is neoliberalism, with its focus on
productivity and the control of one's desires. You create a character
who opposes this dynamic. What exactly is at stake?
GM
: When
I started writing the script, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. There were
debates about productivity, whether to halt the economy to prevent
more elderly people from dying. The pressure to maintain productivity
was immense. The aging body became a problem for the economy, but
this issue concerns us all because we all have elderly relatives and
will eventually have such bodies ourselves. That’s when the idea
for a film with dystopian elements came to me: it’s about a
populist, growth-oriented Brazil where a government program is
launched in the name of productivity, isolating the elderly for the
sake of production and economic recovery. Then comes a woman in her
seventies who questions the status quo of how the state envisions her
end and supposed retirement.
The
film critically engages with this utopian government project and the
associated propaganda—the euphemism of a "future for all"
and the illusion that isolating the elderly from society is the best
for everyone, treating them as a living national heritage. It’s a
film about a central theme for all of us: aging.
GI
: The
film also restores a possible sexuality to the protagonist ...
GM
: It
is primarily a film about a desiring body. This idea has been present
in all my films since Boi
neon (Neon
Bull, 2015). The challenge was to think about this aging body. There
is a scene where actor Rodrigo Santoro takes Tereza's face in his
hands, and you think a kiss is about to happen. But it’s not the
young male body that seduces Tereza; it’s that of Roberta (Miriam
Socarrás), an even older boat captain. In her, Tereza finds support,
security, ideas for a new life, and has a psychedelic experience. The
film plays freely with these experiences, and it is the aging body
that undergoes them.
GI
: Despite
the external dystopian reality, we recognize a great vitality and the
inner utopia of the protagonist. Is the film this place of
utopia?
GM
: If
there is a place to dream of possible worlds, it is cinema. Creating
spaces of resistance, seeing this body that is under tension in the
face of the present, is something that drives me greatly.
Goethe Institut, February 2025
El Jockey directed by Luis Ortega
Film Int : In your director’s note, you mention “the clash between the inner world and the outer world.” As Lola embarks on a chaotic, spirited journey of self-discovery, they experience rebirth spiritually, emotionally, and literally. What does Lola’s personal journey mean to you?
Luis Ortega : Well, I’m about to be forty-five years old, and when you’re younger you think you’re going to learn something, at one point, and that never really happens. You think you’re going to figure yourself out at some point. And at this point, I just gave up on trying to understand myself and all that identity bullshit, that you’re going to know who you are at some point. I think that applies to anyone. Like, you see your father and you think “Who the hell is this guy?” and he doesn’t know, so you can’t ask him. I had a child on the way while I was writing the film, and I was very haunted about being a father. What kind of father was I going to be? So, I put that in the film, also, and then I had this idea (or this nightmare) that I would die before he was born and then maybe reincarnate in my son. This fantasy thing. But basically, you have a character whether you like it or not. It can be, more or less, like yourself. People build up a character that may be just a mask. Other people maybe build the mask that has to do with their soul, or who they are. And I guess that’s as close to being honest as you can get, but you still need that physical aspect. How do you go through the scenes in life, with what face, with what attitude? It’s really something you can’t choose. You think you can choose but you can’t.
LO : Honestly, I’m not into themes and I’m not even into the identity theme, it just came across. And when you have to talk about the film, you really wish you didn’t have to. I guess some people seen the identity thing, and it applies, it does touch that theme. But in my films, I don’t like working with genre. At least not one genre—maybe all of them put together, or whatever comes up in each scene. I’m not a person who can work with themes, it just comes out and it becomes obvious that, yeah, it does have to do with the question of “Who the hell are we and what are we doing?” But, no I don’t really have a message. I’m not into messages either. I just like the psychedelic experience, and I think it’s amazing. I guess if you put it out there, then maybe we can all relax with the psychedelic experience that doesn’t provide us with any true knowledge. You know, just keep calm and try and stay away from the psychiatric hospital. But I also like to get close to the psychiatric hospital because maybe that’s where some true things happen.
The goal is just to walk through the fire and not kill yourself or get into trouble. But I like to walk that line because that’s where I think real things are happening. That’s the whole point about making films, you don’t get involved too much with the social part of the world. You forget about paying taxes or going to all these social things, which you do have to do at some point to secure money for the film. You just have to build your own world. But I don’t have anything specific that I want the audience to get from the film. Just to get as close to life as possible.
More Information IMDB
Alpha directed by Julia Ducournau
Wonderland Magazine : How did you approach balancing personal real-world references pertaining to the AIDS pandemic with fictional elements?
Julia Ducournau: A lot of people say it’s a movie about AIDS, which I think is not exactly accurate. If it had been a movie about AIDS, I would have named it AIDS, and I would have portrayed AIDS as it was, and probably in a very precisely historical way.
I think that it’s really about the shift that I did. To me, the virus that I wanted to expose in the film is fear itself, and the way fear seeps into a society. How it creates taboos, how it generates rejection and hate. From the moment that no reparation is made, from the moment where no one actually wants to embrace. A contact pandemic, in that situation, that concerns everyone, and keeps pointing at people and shaming certain people in order to cope with the fear. It can only induce a ripple effect, and the trickle-down effect that generates more and more trauma within a family or within an entire generation, and through the next generations.
However, with the peak of the AIDS pandemic in the 90s, the peril that is clear in my film is precisely through the way society reacts to the virus. That definitely stems from my memories from childhood, also from the conversations which I had with people who were actually adults or young adults at the time.
WM : One of the most striking visual metaphors in the film is the metamorphosis of bodies, infected by the mysterious disease, into cracked stone. How did you conceive that iconography?
JD : It was very clear from the get-go. To me, the idea was to use marble, which is a sacred and noble material that is used to depict saints. The references that I gave my makeup artist and CGI for the marble bodies were recumbent effigies from cathedrals and churches I had been to and taken pictures of. Then we had to decide what colour of marble, what colour of veins in the marble, what level of crevices?
WM : What meaning did you want the marble bodies to convey?
JD : I wanted to somehow implement some sacredness to the people who have been treated like pariahs by society, and I wanted to use it for them in order to sanctify their lives and their deaths. To somehow create an eternal monument that is sacred, that gives them the verticality that they have been denied through their entire lives and death. So to me, the choice of marble was actually quite instant. That’s exactly how I wanted us to see them in the end, as martyrs or saints, definitely.
WM : I’m interested in how you came up with the concept of the red wind. This post-apocalyptic force of nature that is meant to represent the virus in your film, it’s quite an arresting image.
JD : As far as the red wind is concerned, well, I didn’t have that many references, really. Obviously, everyone thinks Dune, but I wanted something that was more realistic than this. Just for the simple reason that the idea of the red wind, to me, is very logical. In the biopsy scene, when [Amin’s] back starts crumbling, within it, the blood has petrified as well. The dust that we see protruding from the back is red. I did not want to make it white; otherwise, it would have been too distant. It would have made him a statue already, when I wanted to keep it at the human level. It still had to look like blood, but blood in a mineral way.
The red wind is made of the red dust of the bodies of all the ones that we have lost through this pandemic. The first time we go to [Alpha’s grandparents’] council estate, there is red dust on the floor. In my memories of the council estate where my grandparents used to live, there was red dust on the floor as well, it was not concrete.
For the look of the last red wind tempest, I wanted the wind to feel extremely real and to feel the dust, the particles of dust, to be very gritty and organic, not smooth, like we were on Mars. The red dust is real, there is nothing dreamlike about it. Everything in the creation of this tempest comes from real aspects of the movie.
Wonderland Magazine, November 13, 2025.
More Information IMDB
A young girl named Ellen prays for a companion to ease her loneliness. She inadvertently contacts a powerful being known as the Nosferatu, forging a psychic link between them. In 1838, Ellen has married Thomas Hutter and they live in Wisburg, Germany. Thomas is sent to Transylvania by his employer, Herr Knock, to sell the decrepit Grünewald Manor to the reclusive Count Orlok. Ellen relates her nightmares to him, seeing them as a bad omen, and pleads for Thomas to stay, but he insists on going.
Roger Ebert : You started working toward remaking “Nosferatu” about 10 years ago, though you have a much longer history with the Murnau. How did the project evolve over time, as you were working to bring it to the screen?
Robert Eggers : So, yes, I had originally put together this high school play of “Nosferatu,” when I was 17. That was then brought to a local theater and done more professionally, and that was extremely Expressionist—and more Expressionist than the Murnau film. I mean, the budget was meager, but it was more 'Caligaricized'.
The Murnau film, I would argue, even though the writing and acting styles are Expressionist, that it is not particularly Expressionist. Certainly, I’d say that Murnau, [producer and production designer] Albin Grau, and his collaborators were more interested in German Romanticism. If you think about it, “Dracula” had come out not that long before they made “Nosferatu,” and they probably felt that setting it in the period where “Dracula” was set would have been dated and lame. What was really cool was back in the 1830s, to them.
In doing my adaptation, I was trying to understand their impulses, and I also found it exciting to be more romantic and in the German Biedermeier period. But once I had the first draft of the script, it didn’t change a whole heck of a lot in terms of what I wanted the film to be. What’s changed is that I’m better at being a person, at being a film director, and that my collaboration with my heads of department has grown more fluid, more complex, and better. We were all better-equipped to make the movie that we’d been talking about for a long time.
RE : In that effort to understand the original impulses of Murnau, Grau, and his collaborators, you actually wrote a novella at one point, to work through elements of what might have been on their minds—and on the minds of the story’s characters—in their respective time periods. What did that process of tracing the lineage add to your understanding of their intentions, especially with regard to their conception of the vampire?
RE : We only have 15 minutes, so it’s too much to unpack, but one of the things that was interesting to consider was that there was sensationalist press that Albin Grau did for “Nosferatu,” talking about Serbian vampires in the war. I think he believed in the existence of psychic vampires who would come and visit victims through astral projection; I think, given his interest in the occult, there’s pretty much no question in my mind that he believed that that was real.
One of the tasks I had was synthesizing Grau’s 20th-century occultism with cult understandings of the 1830s and with the Transylvanian folklore that was my guiding principle for how Orlok was going to be, what things he was going to do, and the mythology around him. I was synthesizing a mythology that worked with all of that.
The other things that were crucial in this exploration of the novella was expanding the Ellen character, making this her story, and also the secondary or tertiary characters of the Harding family, finding a way to give them enough screen time with enough weight for you to care about their story, knowing it was going to be limited. Basically, the novella allowed me to really overwrite their characters, so that I could find a way to condense it down.
RE : I often feel you achieve this historical immersion outside of the material, in how you reflect the psychology of your characters: customs, superstitions, belief systems. To what degree are you suppressing the influence of your more modern mind in making these films?
RE : As much as possible. I mean, obviously, it’s impossible to completely leave yourself, but when you’re writing each character, you need to inhabit them the way an actor would, so I try my damnedest.
RE : There are such layers contained in this question Ellen asks: “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” Given that “Nosferatu” is set in 1838, before Germany was unified into a nation-state, I’m curious to what degree you considered that anxiety of emerging national identity and this fear of “the Other,” in this case Eastern Europeans, within your adaptation.
RE : [long pause] My works tend to be less intentionally politically charged, and that was also something that was not necessarily front of mind for me. I think there’s a lot of criticism about “Dracula” and Murnau’s film, about this Other from the East coming in. But that’s not what excites me about the story.
RE : What does excite you about the story?
RE : I think that what ultimately rose to the top, as the theme or trope that was most compelling to me, was that of the demon-lover. In “Dracula,” the book by Bram Stoker, the vampire is coming to England, seemingly, for world domination. Lucy and Mina are just convenient throats that happen to be around. But in this “Nosferatu,” he’s coming for Ellen. This love triangle that is similar to “Wuthering Heights,” the novel, was more compelling to me than any political themes.
RE : All of your films navigate this idea of original sin, this mixture of attraction and repulsion we feel toward sex and death. What draws you to that subject matter?
RE : It’s hard for me to be reflective about that, as in regards to my particular attraction to it. I think it’s interesting that vampires were very inspiring to me as a kid. The power of the vampire is this symbol of sex and death—and these are taboo subjects to discuss as a kid, even to understand as a kid. And yet, there’s something fascinating, compelling, and attractive about this person who holds a lot of power, who inhabits those two worlds. I was also very interested in witches as a kid, but they scared me. I didn’t want to be a witch. I was fascinated by how much they scared me, but the vampire… It seemed like I would want to be that, right?
Roger Ebert, January 10, 2025.
Cineuropa: Pietro Vella, with all his ambiguities, sometimes feels like a repugnant character. What made you want to bring him to the big screen?
C : Domenico
Starnone didn’t help write the film this time round, but he did
give you one pointer: “It’s important that there’s tension”.
DL : Tension is a very straight-foward mechanism. It ensures that viewers remain active and attentive, with their eyes and ears open. I’ve read Domenico’s book a few times and always in one sitting. There’s always this kind of tension in writing like his – you get to the end of it without even realising. I wanted the film to be like this, so I put the audience in a state of alarm, through the fear the character feels. This tension places us in his head and we feel every possible break there might be in the steadiness of his life.
C : Could we describe it as a psychological thriller? This is the first time you’re tackling this genre.
DL : I really like films with suspense, and I’ve made one in this instance using the things that I believe we should be afraid of. Children believe in monsters, I believe in the monstrousness of people, in the capacity people have to hurt others and, first and foremost in this case, in people’s capacity to do harm to themselves. This, for me, is the real enemy in the film. You don’t see it but it’s always hanging over the characters. In order to do this, I used the mechanisms of genre film in a very obvious way; what wasn’t easy was combining a genre film with a storyline which would traditionally have been used in films about relationships.
C : Mouldy lemons, crows, nosebleeds… These are just a few of the elements featuring in the film which create a sense of discomfort.
DL
: When
I was shooting the film, the plan was to find an unpleasant idea for
practically every scene, whether the look in someone’s eyes, a crow
hovering over the characters or a mouldy lemon found in a fridge –
ideas which I knew I have to come up with day after day. I wanted to
retain that feeling of being confronted with something twisted and
murky. Sometimes it’s just a sound, sometimes it’s an open
window, sometimes it’s something within a relationship that’s
disproportionate or violent.
DL : We’d already worked together on Cadice Carla. Thom had created new music for classical ballets. When I sent him the script for Confidenza , he was on tour and couldn’t help. But when he read it, four months later, he called me to say: “If you haven’t found a composer yet, I’ll do it”. I was just about to kick off shooting. So he sent me a piece he’d written while thinking about the film, a wonderful song which features in the closing credits. Then, when I’d finished filming, I showed him a few scenes, explaining the approach I used with my actors – basically always giving distorted instructions for each scene: I’d turn pleasant scenes into unpleasant ones, a more relaxed scene into a tense one. So he worked on the subtext, on what the scene concealed. Over time, we constructed a geography of sound which wrongfoots the audience.
Cineuropa, April 23, 2024
Filmmaker: Regarding your cast, I love the way that icons like Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas share incredible chemistry and dialogue with younger stars like Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde and Esther McGregor. I also love how the power dynamics constantly shift between these older and younger characters across the board.
Halina Reijn: Apart from the fact that the movie’s about female desire and power, it is also absolutely a movie about generations. I became obsessed with younger generations doing Bodies because I had to do a lot of research. Because I was raised off the grid by radical hippies and wasn’t dressing in a normal way, once I walked into the world, I was like, “Oh my God, who do I belong to?” That’s when I became very focused on sub[cultures], because I tried to figure out how I could “become normal.” In this specific movie, I wanted to really look at Gen X and the hope that I personally have for young people. Esme, Samuel and the daughters are a representation of that. They look at sexuality and power in a very different way. Companies are all struggling to adapt to this new way of thinking where young people are not interested in having a boss that is a dictator. They want to be treated in a different way. I think all of that is incredibly positive. Romy’s oldest daughter almost teaches her mom a little bit about [it by saying], “I’m in love with this girl, but I’m also having fun with that other girl.” And Romy’s like, “What?” I think the relationship that the new generations have with their body is more positive. There’s more sex positivity, more positivity around desire and daring to be unique. Of course, these are generalizations because the same generation is struggling with social media and a lot of pressure on them in different ways. But it was important for me to make a movie about power, sex and consent in modern times to show the very different ways of approaching these topics for different generations. I think there’s also a lot of humor in how they discuss [these things] with each other and how they see each other. Esme is blackmailing Romy, but at the same time telling her, “I don’t want to take you down. I want to keep you there because there are almost no women at the top, so you better stay at the top. But please be a good example, a woman that I can look up to.” I think that is very funny and interesting.
F: Another element of the film that I love is the fact that Romy is such a perfectionist, hyper-fixated on preserving the beauty in herself that she finds fleeting. We see a very honest scene of her getting Botox, but when Samuel asks her to take her clothes off, she is mortified and embarrassed of her body. Tell me more about this honest portrayal of femininity and the insecurity that comes with maintaining the beauty we’re taught to covet.
HR: For hundreds of years, women have been taught that their main value is being beautiful, sexualized and fertile. Not only does she want to stay physically beautiful and will do anything and everything to get there—taking ice baths, sitting in oxygen chambers, getting Botox—but on a mental level, she thinks, “If I get rid of my wounds, I will look perfect and be perfect.” I think a lot of women suffer from thinking that we have to please, we have to nurture. We have to be the perfect wife, but also be the perfect CEO. “I have to have a perfect boyfriend and stay and look fertile, even though I am not fertile anymore.” All of these things are, for me, very present in the scene where Samuel asks her to take her clothes off. He tells her, “You’re beautiful,” and all she can say is, “I’m not, I’m not.” Of course, we’re looking at a woman who represents this perfect image to us in real life, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you look like—that’s the horror of being a woman. You always think it’s not good enough. You always think that no black hairs should grow out of your arms. “I shouldn’t smell like this, I shouldn’t make these sounds.” That is something that really needs to change. That is why I created this character of the oldest [daughter] who seems to be a little beyond that. She wears whatever she wants and has her hair cut however she wants. She’s not trying to be this cliche of what she thinks a straight white guy would love. That gives me hope because I think if I look in the mirror, I look at myself through the male gaze. I literally don’t look at myself through my own eyes because I’ve internalized the patriarchy on such a thick and scary level. I wanted to show that to an audience by having the daughter be much more free and liberated than the mother.
F : That Isabel doesn’t have to perform for the male gaze liberates her from the oppression that her mother feels. At the same time, she cruelly mocks her for getting Botox and ascribing to these gender ideals. Perhaps the younger generation doesn’t understand how hard it is to unlearn something you’ve been indoctrinated to believe your entire life. It’s not about taking one gender studies class and figuring out that it doesn’t serve you.
HR : In a way, the whole movie is about exactly what you’re saying right now. The movie asks the question, “Does female masochism only exist because it is a male fantasy, or does it exist as a fantasy because it allows us to enjoy sex without taking responsibility for it?” I think what happens, unfortunately, is that women also judge each other. We should stand up and try to change [the patriarchy], but we shouldn’t mock each other for trying to be a perfect woman because that is all we had for so long. I’m happy for my niece; she’s 19 years old and I feel that she’s way beyond that. I applaud her. She calls me and says, “Why did you post that picture in your bikini on your Instagram? You shouldn’t do that because you make other women feel bad about themselves!” I love that she says that. [laughs] I am happy that she feels very differently about these things. But in my movie, I just wanted to show all of the different age groups’ reactions to patriarchy and just very urgently try to say, also to myself, that we’ve got to move on from this. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror from the female gaze and not the male gaze. Who cares if you join the 4B movement now?
Filmmaker Magazine, December 16, 2024
Hlynur Pálmason: For me, it’s not enough to only have narrative—it’s very important that you also have a form. I have a lot of narratives that I’m interested in, a lot of stories, a lot of characters, but then I also have a lot of forms and concepts that I’m interested in. When I can feel that it’s more than just a narrative, or more that just the form, I begin working on a film. I’m trying to fit these two things together. I have to work a long time on the project, and that’s why I developed it for so long, because for me, it’s very mysterious. I don’t know what this is, I just know the things that I’m passionate about. I know that if I explore them, I will probably come to a place where I know more about it. But I never feel like I get to an end. I have maybe a couple of years to explore, and I give my whole heart, body and soul to it, but then I’m drained when the film is done. I can’t really finish the film, because the film goes on. If you would send me a really good script, I wouldn’t want to do it. I think someone else should do it. The process and the exploration is the whole thing for me.
Filmmaker: Before you start principal photography, do you do an inventory of all the images you have shot in the years leading up to it, select them and decide which to put into the script? I found myself paying attention to these plethora of scattered images, like a shot up a skirt or of the sky through an oval shape. Do you sit down and ask, “Do I include this, exclude that”?
HP : I do, in a way. What happened was that my producers and I decided that we need to buy a camera if we’re going to do the projects that we’re going to do, because we’re shooting almost every week. But sometimes, I’m just shooting a cloud or a small scene with the kids We can’t be renting equipment the whole time and having it where I live. I live quite far away from Reykjavik. So, we bought an old film camera, then I started just having the camera always in the car. When I’m going through my daily routines, I go and film. If I see something that interests me, I film it. And I don’t know if it’s always material for this project or the other one, if it’s for Godland or if it’s for The Love That Remains, or for my next ones, On Land and Sea or Joan of Arc. Sometimes I don’t know; sometimes it’s very clear. When I look at the footage after it’s been developed, I react to it, and start putting it into an editing process where I can, for example, put the opening scene of the roof in the beginning. Then I write, “We see our main character, Anna. She is in the car.” I have a couple of images throughout the film that are key images for me that I work around. So, this is sort of early in the process of developing. A lot of the shots are over a long timeframe.
Filmmaker: There is a lot of underlying pain that the characters are experiencing, but I feel with the character of Magnús, you’re showing his pain externalized more than the other characters’. I’m thinking of the dream scene with giant rooster, or the scene where he kisses the knight, or the last scene in the ocean. How did you conceptualize Magnús and his pain, compared to the other characters?
HP : I had a feeling that that maybe Magnús didn’t realize what he had. Often that’s the case in life. You have something, then you lose it and find out what you had because it’s not there anymore. That was one of the core feelings [with which] I wanted to color Magnús and his journey, because often when you’re making a film, there are a lot of things you know you don’t want the film to be, but you maybe don’t know exactly what you want the film to be. That’s the process. I had this core [idea] throughout the journey of the film with Magnús, which is to see the beauty around you. There is a lot of beauty around you. You don’t have to travel. If you just pay attention and really nurture your garden, beautiful things happen.
Filmmaker: I didn’t realize until I read the press notes that the kid actors in the film are your children. I was struck by the performance of one of your twin sons in the unforgettable and darkly funny yet literally painful scene when he goes to the hospital with an arrow in his chest. Watching in the theater yesterday, when he screams at the end, the sound really pierces. I found myself a bit shook. The sound level is a strong artistic choice. Can you talk about it? Was it in the script or something you changed in the post-production process?
HP : I actually wrote it for Þorgils because I have heard him. He sometimes jokes with me and makes this high-pitched scream just to irritate me. When the sound comes to my ear, you can hear it going all the way in, almost like it’s piercing your brain. It’s this very strange journey through the air. I was like, “I want to use that.” So, I wrote this scene for him and said, “You have to scream like you do for me, and it has to be really loud.” We recorded and filmed it, but we also tested it a lot in the cinema when we were mixing it. There I said, “No, we have to put [the volume] a little bit down.” It’s just noise, it doesn’t evolve, so we really tried to have it at the right place. But, of course, it’s a little bit different every time you show it, because cinemas are different, and also cinemas are not always full, so it echoes a different way. We really used a lot of energy to try to have it at the right volume, but also the right quality of sound. For us, it was of course supposed to be funny, but also a little bit scary and aggressive or dangerous.
Film Comment : I don’t know if I’ve ever recovered from watching We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Lynne Ramsay : I know. Funnily enough, I hadn’t had any children then, but now I do. Every time a mother comes up and says, “We watched Kevin,” I’m like, “I’m sorry!” The way I looked at Die My Love is I wanted to put some humor in there, and I wanted to take some of the ideas, the themes of the novel—the animalistic kind of feeling, the sexual nature of Grace—but make it a love story. A bonkers, crazy love story, rather than a postpartum story. When people say “postpartum,” I’m like, “That’s not a postpartum movie.” It is and it isn’t.
FC : I’d love to hear about how you translated the inner monologue of the novel into a film that keeps us at arm’s length. You’ve worked before with many novels that are told in the first person, and done very interesting things with them. With Die My Love, another filmmaker might have taken the easy route and done voice over. But you start with this long, remote, static shot of the house; you never give us full access to the heroine’s mind.
LR : I suppose it’s ’cause I started as a painter, and then a photographer. I’d like to be a painter again, actually; that’s my ambition. I think more in pictures than words. And that’s really handy as a filmmaker. I think of a key image. Here, the first thing was, they’re moving into this new house, and maybe they’ve lived in New York before. This is my backstory: he’s been a musician. She’s written a couple of things that got published. The house is free, but it’s in the bloody middle of nowhere.
The conventional thing to do is to shoot the house from outside. And I thought, no, I’ll shoot the house looking at them. And I’ll have them coming into the house, and we’ll do a locked-off shot. So that’s a sort of key image. It’s almost like the house is alive itself. Then you hear the rats, and there’s something a little bit ominous. But there’s hope in it, as well. The husband is saying—we’re going to do this. There’s an office upstairs for you. I’ll get my drum kit. We can do what we like here. So there’s actually hope here, before it falls apart a bit.
FC : You were saying that you wanted to make it a love story. I was very taken by the fact that you don’t justify Grace’s psychosis and sadness, or create villains. Her husband’s trying his best. Many stories like this make the mother-in-law a shrew, but here, she’s empathetic, too. Like you say, there’s hope in the house.LR : Well, I thought it was much more interesting—rather than make those archetypes, like the mother-in-law and the husband that’s beating her up or something—to show that there’s real love there for her. But there’s just this misunderstanding. She’s a bit of a wild animal. She’s unconventional, almost an anarchist, you know? Kind of smashing the world up, because she’s frustrated. But I didn’t want to justify it with these easy answers. I think she’s bored; she’s got writer’s block; she and her husband are in different universes for a while. She’s just had a baby, and something starts to unravel a little bit.
LR : That’s something I’m fascinated by. Morvern Callar was the mysterious kind. You never really knew what she’s thinking. The book is all voice, it’s all explaining her thoughts. But I didn’t do a voiceover. She was an inscrutable character, even in the novel. So I felt she should remain inscrutable, like those cowboys in westerns, riding off into the sunset. I co-wrote that movie with one of my best friends [Liana Dognini], who unfortunately died quite young. But we always thought Morvern was like a cowboy. And here I see an anarchist. I see someone who is going to burn the world down. And I think she sees a reflection of herself in her boy, and that’s terrifying.
Film Comment, November 10, 2025
The Italian Rêve : The movie shows us different kind of relationships and different shades of love. How did you come up with these characters and how did you build the dynamics between them?
Luna Carmoon : Pretty much every character is an essence of someone I knew or grew up with, so it’s a little ode to them. There’s a tattoo that Michael has on his arm and that is an ode to a boy that I grew up with, who was a foster boy in a house a couple of doors away from me. The idea of Michael came out of the fact that I’d never met a man or a boy who, when I was left alone in a space with them, I didn’t feel like they were going to assault me and hurt me. All of the characters are a mixture of the people of my life, my grandma and my mother are there, both of them split in two in different versions, Maria’s best friend is based on my real-life best friend, and we really do live opposite each other; plus, the actress who played her had never acted before, and she was great, she really does embody my best friend. Everyone is birthed out of someone or something in my life.
The most important themes are the friendships and relationships in the film, and Michael is just a tool excavated in the past, whereas all the women are what grounds Maria, the core of Maria, they’re how she survives through all of this. And they naturally had such great chemistry, all of them, as soon as I brought them all in a room together – hysterical. We would laugh, and I couldn’t contain it, wetting myself from laughter because they were so funny. It was such a lovely group of people with such great personalities; you know, you don’t always meet actors who have their own identity, which is also why some actors are great, because they can shapeshift, but all of these guys had such full personalities that you can’t help but bleed it onto the screen.
TIR : Also, your way of directing is very interesting, there are flashbacks, creative transitions, and the use of limericks between Maria and her mother. It’s not a linear story. What were the challenges of making it, and how did you overcome them?
LC : The biggest challenge was the stamina of keeping your brain healthy, your mental health healthy while sharing a story like this one, and if we didn’t have such a lovely, full of life cast and crew, it could have been very dark. But we all loved each other so much and cared about each other’s well-being and safety and just loved each other really deeply, and that’s why it was all so easy. Especially when it came to splits, as there were lots of night shoots. As soon as we hit the splits, I think that if we didn’t all care about each other so much and had great chemistry all around, as I said, it could have been so dark. Even when we had so little sleep, everyone was giddying and acting silly, everyone was having a laugh, which put some levity to when we were shooting maybe more intense scenes, and we’d just giggle and really ground each other off to it. So, I think definitely the stamina of the nights. I’d never done anything like that before, so that was probably the biggest challenge, staying awake, staying lucid because it was down to me that these people felt safe enough to go to those places. That’s why I got so hyper aware of making sure they were safe and their wellbeing was important, so I had to be switched on all the time so that they could switch off and feel safe and go into the world. And they did so well.
TIR : The past with its memories, the present and the future: for Maria and Michael, they have different meanings, but what about you instead?
LC : I’m very dangerous when it comes to the past, I romanticize it, and I can get stuck in it. I am a very sentimental person, I go back and I watch all the VHS tapes of my grandmother and her times, I have them on my phone and I would watch them at night, it’s like a sadistic little ritual. I’m a deeply melancholic person in general, so I can’t help but crave them. But memories feel as alive to me as they did when they were the present, and I feel as close to them as I felt when I was experiencing them. I’m the least present person you’ll ever meet, I masque it really well but I disassociate very well, too; most of my existence is made of looking at my hands and feeling like I’m in an alternate reality, like I’m in GTA.
The future… I know that what it’s meant for me is what is meant for me, so I don’t really stress about the future because I think it’s already happened. What I kept saying from the beginning of the film was that we’d already made it, it’s already happened. And when you know that, you know the things that are for you and you follow the invisible tethering, and that’s the animal in us, that’s what Michael and Maria have, they know that in some way there’s a tethering, an invisible rope between one another. That’s how I feel about my projects, I know when I have to follow these feelings and write things out and exorcise things out – it’s already been made in my head.
The Italian Rêve, September 2, 2023
More Information IMDB
Roger Ebert : One thing that struck me about this film is that everyone around Linda tells her that she’s doing everything wrong, but no one offers her any actual help. Can you say more about that?
Mary Bronstein : This is a woman in crisis in every way, shape, and form, yet purportedly surrounded by helpers. Mr. Rogers had something he would say. “Look for the helpers.” That’s supposed to offer you comfort, that there are people there whose job is to help.
In this movie, there’s an abundance of helpers. There’s doctors, there’s therapists, there’s husbands, there’s friends, and she is asking all of them for help. Sometimes literally, and sometimes in ways that people should intuit. Sometimes she’s screaming in someone’s face, “Please help me,” and they’re still not.
There’s a whole thing embedded in that for me, which is this idea of women not being listened to—especially a woman who is in crisis, whether it be physically or mentally in the medical or psychiatric system. “You have to calm down. It’s not that bad. You have to get a good night’s sleep.”
RE : Everyone’s always giving her breathing exercises.
MB : “Take some deep breaths.” This is not helpful. Sometimes what’s helpful (which Linda also doesn’t receive) is you need to have somebody who is just empathetically listening to you without offering a solution.”Yeah, that does suck. Yeah, that fucking sucks. That is unfair. What’s happening to you is unfair.” And she doesn’t get that either. It’s extreme in the film, but when it happens in real life, it feels even more so. And that’s what I was trying to capture.
RE : It all ties in with these societal ideals of motherhood. When you’re a mother, you have to handle everything yourself. There’s a taboo against saying, “I can’t do this.”
MB : There are a lot of taboos when you’re a mother, and a lot of things you’re not allowed to say. And even in the privacy of [talking] one woman to another, who are both mothers, you would never say some of those things. You said, “I can’t do it,” but there’s the other side of that: “I don’t want to do it.” Or “I can’t deal with being around my child right now,” or “I want to get away from my child.” Those are things that mothers are not supposed even to think, let alone say, let alone do. And if you do it, you’re a monster or you’re a crazy person.
[My film] is getting at that. Who does it scare [when you say these things], and why? As with any other life experience, women and mothers should be able to be honest with each other and themselves. It’s not a betrayal of your love for your child. It’s not. But it’s seen that way. Sometimes a friend will annoy you, or sometimes you don’t like something that they did, and you need a break from them. Your relationship to a child is no different than that, but it’s supposed to be [different].
Linda is in a place where she can derive no joy from her child. It doesn’t matter if she put herself in that place by victimizing herself or seeing herself as a victim of her child, or whether that’s actually true. She can’t, because she can’t take her kid to the playground. She can’t take her kid on a vacation. They can’t go to Disney World. She can’t even play with her kid.
Maybe she could, but she’s not in a place where she can derive joy from the relationship. So it does become a burden. And you’re supposed to be able to talk about [difficult things] in private with your therapist, but even that’s considered inappropriate in the film. It’s something that I think is a problem. When you can’t express things, they don’t go away.
RE : Why do you think it’s so taboo? Personally, I think it has something to do with this misogynist idea of biological determinism. “This is your natural role. This is what you’re made for.”
MB : Exactly. There’s this whole bill of sale that women are sold falsely, which is that just because you have a baby, you know how to be a mother, and you know what to do. It’s supposed to be your instinct, and you know what to do, and you can just do it from dawn to dusk for the rest of time. Mothers are human beings. My mother was a human being. Your mother is a human being. They had feelings that we didn’t know about, but that was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay. It only becomes not okay if you’re abusing your child, but having thoughts and feelings and expressing them in private is still so scary.
And I think it’s exactly what you said; this is a woman who doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally screams in somebody’s face, “tell me what to do!” And his answer is, “You already know what to do.” No, I don’t!
Laura Carreira : I left Portugal in 2012, so it’s been nearly 12 years now. At the time, Portugal was in the midst of a severe economic crisis, and the chances of building a career in film there seemed very slim. I was already studying film in high school, as Portugal has public schools that offer arts education. One of my teachers suggested I look into a course in Edinburgh, which led me to visit Scotland. I applied to the program, got accepted, and decided to make the move.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to study in England because the tuition fees were prohibitively expensive. In Scotland, however, I was still considered a European student at the time, which meant I qualified as a home student and received the same tuition benefits as Scottish students. That made it possible for me to pursue my studies.
Initially, I hadn’t planned on staying long-term – I came to Scotland purely to study. But as things unfolded, I never really left.
SOC : In your two short films that I’ve seen, even from your debut, you focus on characters who are deeply immersed in their work – individuals in blue-collar jobs who seem unable to see a future beyond their daily grind. This theme of being trapped in the routines of working life feels very personal. Do you think this focus comes from your own experiences of working to afford a living in Scotland?LC : I think I would have experienced that shock regardless of where I was, but being in a foreign country made it even more intense. As a migrant, there’s an added layer of vulnerability – you don’t have the social ties and safety net that you would in your own country. That made the experience of working to get by feel even more raw and eye-opening for me.
Those work experiences shaped how I see the world, particularly how much we don’t talk about the realities of labour. It’s something we’ve normalised – this idea that you work your entire life to put a roof over your head and simply survive. It made me reflect on my own life, my parents’ lives, and the people around me. I realised just how much of our existence is tied to work, how dependent we are on jobs, and how little freedom that gives us.
These reflections heavily influenced Red Hill and The Shift. Red Hill explores that moment of release from a lifetime of work – retirement – and what comes after. It’s about questioning the meaning and value of those years spent labouring. The Shift, on the other hand, is more focused on financial vulnerability – how precarious our lives become when we rely entirely on our jobs for income. It’s about being at the mercy of the job market and the systemic pressure that creates.
To me, these are the quiet struggles, almost like daily microaggressions, that people endure constantly. I felt it was important to bring those stories to the screen because I didn’t see enough films portraying work in this way. Often, labour is only the backdrop for something else in cinema, and while I understand why – work can be repetitive and perhaps not the most dynamic subject to watch – I found the challenge of capturing it compelling. I wanted to focus on the lives shaped by work and give those experiences the attention they deserve.
SOC : What strikes me about your films is how deeply observational they are. There are so many moments – like the quiet loneliness of a character scrolling through her phone, or the seemingly mundane yet telling dialogues between coworkers during lunch breaks. These aren’t just conversations; they reveal how each character exists in their own isolated world. For instance, we see one character trying to connect with Aurora but failing, and later, tragically, he passes away. That moment feels not just like his fate, but a potential fate for anyone in that environment, including the protagonist.
I wonder, do these scenes come from personal experience? Did your own time working in such environments give you a deeper understanding of these characters and their worlds?
LC : Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. While I never did the exact job that Aurora performs in the film, I knew that to portray it authentically, I’d need to do a lot of research. I spoke to a lot of pickers to learn about the work, and those conversations directly influenced the film. It became a blend of my personal observations – distilled into scenes – and the stories shared with me by people who were incredibly generous with their experiences.
One moment that stands out, for example, is the scene where Aurora talks about doing laundry in her free time. That line came directly from an interview. When I asked someone how they spent their free time, they simply said, ‘I do the laundry.’ It wasn’t a joke – it was an honest reflection of how little time or energy they had after work. That answer stuck with me because it highlighted how work can define even your personal time. Many of the people I spoke with described how exhausting their jobs were – not just physically but psychologically. They talked about loneliness, isolation, and the mental toll of working long, solitary shifts, often following scanners or performing repetitive tasks for 10 or 11 hours straight.
Pauline Loquès: That’s an interesting question. During my preparation with Théodore Pellerin, who plays Nino, he told me the script reads like a movie about parenthood. At first, I didn’t see that: the movie talks about cancer and depression. But after reading the script again, I saw how all these existential questions about being alive and being born all surface. For a character like Nino, when facing cancer specifically at age 30, I imagine there must be constant movement in one’s head.
TP : What do you think these questions are?
PL : Why was I born? What am I doing here? Why me? And then, if I have the chance to stay alive, what will I do with that life?
For me, Nino is a film that explores the ideas of living and dying, and the purpose we give to our existence. When illness enters the story, I was interested in the ways Nino would answer these questions, given he has three days to sit with his thoughts in such a liminal state of mind before entering cancer treatment. How does one even start to navigate them? What meaning does he give to his life?
There’s a sense that these questions have been with him since birth and are just now resurfacing. His mother even tells Nino, “You seemed to be looking at everything, but not seeing anything.”
TP : In a past interview, you mentioned that while filming, you wanted to be very close to Nino while simultaneously maintaining a distance at certain points so that one knows he isn’t alone in Paris. How did you navigate when to focus on him and when to step away and watch Nino from an observational perspective?
PL : Much of the process was instinctive with Théodore, who is such an inspiring person to me. I found myself paying close attention to him and his performance: sometimes I’d feel we needed to be close because so much was happening in Théodore’s face. Other times, even something as simple as him walking down the street carried such weight and tenderness that I knew I had to capture it. It depended on the moment and on the actor in front of me.
With each actor, I’d approach it differently. For Théodore, I was constantly asking myself: where am I being moved, and how do I translate that into the shot? That meant making deliberate choices about distance: when to hold back and when to come in closer. Every day felt like a conversation about how to shoot him in a way that was true to what he was giving while still telling Nino’s story.
TP : There’s something about the way you portray Nino: you look at him with such kind curiosity and care, almost as if you wanted to ask him endless questions but instead choose to follow and simply observe. Was that how you approached writing and filming him, as a way of trying to get closer to his inner world?
PL : During my writing process, I felt like I was simply following Nino without really knowing who he was. But that felt true to the character–he himself doesn’t know much about who he is and rarely questions himself. Nino is a character who discovers things as the story unfolds.
I avoid overdefining my characters. If I write out every detail, I lose the desire to make the film because I already “know” them inside-out, and in every aspect. Instead, I wanted to discover Nino as we went along, up until the editing process. For this character, Nino felt like someone I just bumped into on the street, not a person I created. I felt empathy and curiosity, and simply followed him.
Mohammed Rasoulof: There are many experiences that people have in oppressive situations in democratic situations they are not felt and not transferable. So, this form of storytelling creates certain problems. For instance, if I want to make the situation understandable for the non-Iranian audience, the way of life in Iran becomes so dramatized for the Iranian audience that they might find it meaningless or useless.
A big part of my energy [making this film] was spent on forgetting what has become normalized for me in these abnormal situations and putting myself in a situation that is more in tune and in sync with everyday life outside Iran.
There was another problem with making the film in a clandestine way; you have to make everything very quickly or you get exposed, so these contradictions are always very tense for me and take a lot of my energy to get to a level of thought that I want.
SM : Each of these characters hide the truth in some form. Whether it’s the actual hiding of the gun or the daughter’s friend, there are many layers of secrets, deceptions and lies. Please elaborate on this.
MR : These oppressive situations are parallel to that in a family structure in which the father rules to do something to the members of it and it takes away the trust between the members. In this family, parallel to the patriarchy, girls are not allowed to express themselves the way they are. Not only they cannot express themselves in the family setting to their family members, but they cannot express themselves to members of the society in a social setting.
In my film, for example, the sequence with the family at the restaurant, the mother is telling them that they have to get used to having multiple perspectives of their lives, showing themselves in multiple ways, in their lives. The mother herself is somewhat rope walking between the children and the father, sometimes she leans towards the children, sometimes she leans towards the father, and she’s constantly trying to find an image that brings the two together and reflects on the other side.
The father believes by hiding his job from his children he’s protecting them. Therefore all the characters have reasons not to be themselves and not experience trust together.
SM : The gun is the dramatic catalyst and symbolizes not only violence and a false sense of safety but paranoia. How would you describe it?
MR: The gun is a symbol of power and the father holds it as his way of getting close to the power he wants to get to. When he holds the gun, he’s one step closer to the position he wants to get. When he sees the situation in danger and sees the path he has been walking is under a threat, he becomes disheveled and worried inside. Gradually he shows a side of himself that is fully prejudiced and biased and we, as the audience, understand how the events unfold in the way that they merge with one another.
In the end, the younger daughter tries to bring her father back to himself and remind him of who he once was to them by broadcasting and playing sounds from the past. But it is now too late. We see how prejudice can take away humanity from us and cause violence.
IndieWire: The film is set in a version of America that, while fictitious, still feels distinctly American. Yet, the more you watch the film, the more it feels like it goes far beyond just “an American story.” How did you see it?
Jan Komasa: First of all, I started with the structure. That was the first thing that came to me, the structure of different anniversaries and nothing in between. You just leap from one [year] to another and maybe you can even fill the gaps yourself with your imagination.
My father is an actor and I grew up watching him in theater, and it always fascinated me that you have three acts or four acts, and you go for a break, you come back, you see the same living room, same people, and they’re different. It’s a year later and people are OK with this. They don’t need context. In cinema, we tend to over-explain things and in theater, you don’t do that too much. People are smart enough if you treat them like they’re smart enough to come up with their own story. That was my first initial desire creatively.
The second one, it came to me during the pandemic or even before, I was swiping, seeing, watching different films and photos from our anniversary as my family, which is quite big and everybody’s busy and creative. My brother is an opera singer. My sister is a singer. My other sister is a costume designer. And they all have friends and we all come together. And then you watched 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, da-da-da, same day, like a leap from one year to another and suddenly you see changes that…
IW : In the moment, it’s hard to feel it.
JK : It’s hard to. If you go one after another and you see someone coming with their partner and then the next year the partner is gone, for whatever reason, and then the next year somebody is gone because they’re gone forever, it’s like there’s a horror structure to it, something is happening to us and we can’t even stop it, which is scary. But also, if I show it to you, you’ll be interested in what happened before, between those anniversaries. So these two ideas were the trigger to come up with “Anniversary.”And then politically, also, the whole world is nuts today, right?
IW : Yes. [Laughs]
JK : … As it always was. But today the polarization is much more dynamic and it can change from one day to another. We live in tectonic shifting times, so this too makes those jumps, from one year to another to another to another, much more dynamic. There’s more change between today and six years ago than, let’s say, between 2002 and 2007.
IW : Did this have to be set in America?
JK : I was thinking about Poland initially. It’s easier for me to think about my whereabouts and surroundings and the context, but then I feel it’s just exciting to take something that’s new and graft it to a different culture and then see what happens with it. Usually, nothing happens, because that’s the beauty of us everywhere, there’s the same story, just the decorum changes and the dynamic changes.
I want to prove this time and time again, that we are very similar everywhere. At the same time, differences are just exciting. I think differences shouldn’t terrify us. Differences should excite us, like in the old days when people were more interested in differences than just coalescing everything or unifying everything into one thing because they’re too afraid of the other, right?
IW : The conflicts here are within the entire country and this family, but the central and inciting conflict is between two women. It’s not romantic or about jealousy, it’s ideological, and that’s not something we see a lot. Was it always going to be two women at the heart of this story?
IndieWire, October 30, 2025
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Thirteen-year-old Marija is temporarily living with her grandmother in a dreary Lithuanian hamlet. She limps and finds it difficult to connect with her fellow villagers. But then she meets the headstrong Kristina and joins a dubious modeling school, just like the rest of the girls in the village. The desire to escape their current lives and the promise of a glamorous life in Tokyo or Paris drives the teenagers to seek increasingly extreme methods of weight loss.
International Cinephile Society : The film’s visual elements play a significant role in conveying the emotional landscape of the characters. What was your vision behind the cinematography and the choice of color palette to reflect their inner struggles?
Saulė Bliuvaitė : I didn’t want to follow the standard cinematography typically used in teenage films, where the camera constantly zooms in on the characters’ faces. I believe that the atmosphere and environment are just as important as the characters themselves, and I wanted to showcase the characters within the context of their bleak industrial surroundings.
My goal was to create a contrast between their youth and their aspirations for friendship, love, and other vibrant, lively experiences, juxtaposed against an environment that feels stuck in the past, where nothing exciting seems to happen. I aimed to portray these characters in relation to their environment to capture the sense of struggle they face in wanting to escape the place where they find themselves.
ICS : Can you discuss the political background in Lithuania that influenced your movie? The film is set against a bleak industrial backdrop with a lot of Soviet architecture. The characters, especially the boys and girls in the film, are not involved with phones and social media; instead, the boys are into drugs, and the girls are concerned about their looks. It seems you’ve specifically set the story in post-Soviet Lithuania, where the economy underwent a significant shift from industrial to service. Can you explain?
SB: I wouldn’t say there is a strong political background to this film. Instead, it relates more to my own experiences as a teenager. I grew up in an industrial area in Lithuania that was occupied by the Soviet Union from the 1940s until 1990. I was born and raised there, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed it left behind places filled with Soviet architecture – remnants of that empire.
In the ’90s people were trying to reorient themselves toward a capitalist Western world, but when I returned to that same area twenty years later the Soviet-era architecture was still very much present. The buildings constructed during the Soviet occupation are still standing, and I often wonder if they will endure for another hundred years. The collapse of the Soviet Union happened decades ago, yet people in Lithuania often say they no longer speak about it, as if it were a distant memory. They might feel like they are in a different landscape now, but visually that landscape remains unchanged.
In my hometown there are some areas that were built while Lithuania was independent, during a brief period before the two world wars. Those structures are stunning compared to the vast, industrial buildings that dominate the area. My hometown is filled with beautiful architecture, a stark contrast to the industrial zones. Sadly, these remnants of the Soviet era will likely stand for a long time, as no one is planning to demolish entire areas of those buildings.
ICS : In what ways do you believe the decline of industrialization impacted the characters’ aspirations and choices? How does this transition affect their perception of identity?
SB: The decline of industrialization creates pressure for individuals to turn themselves into commodities. There’s this expectation for them to capitalize on their own identities, which I believe is a significant contemporary problem. Everyone feels the need to find ways to monetize themselves, which is a theme I wanted to explore in this film.
For the girls in the modeling school the pressure is to commodify and monetize their bodies. It’s as if everything about being human has to have a price tag. There is a pervasive belief that everything must be monetized, and nothing can be considered free anymore. People even joke about monetizing the air we breathe because, in today’s world, it seems like everything is for sale – natural resources included.
ICS : You highlight the irony of consumerism in the context of the film. How do you think societal beauty standards impact young women today?
SB : While making this film I came across an article in The New Yorker titled “The Age of the Instagram Face.” It discusses how many of the faces we see on social media are not real. Women increasingly visit plastic surgeons to alter their appearances, striving to look like the images they see on Instagram, which often feature various cosmetic procedures and injections that Hollywood stars undergo.
This creates an unattainable standard for people living regular lives who cannot afford these beauty procedures. As a result, we find ourselves in a world that has become detached from reality, where the natural appearance of a human being is increasingly obscured. This disconnect causes more and more stress, especially for younger generations who, at an age as young as 13, begin to immerse themselves in social media. They are exposed to these unrealistic beauty standards and often suffer as they compare themselves to faces that are not genuinely representative of real people.
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Ljósbrot (English title When The Light Breaks) directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson
Just when Diddi, an Icelandic art student, leaves town to break up with his girlfriend Klara because he has feelings for fellow art student Una, he dies in an explosion in a car tunnel. So Klara never finds out that Diddi had someone else. And Una has to watch helplessly as Diddi's group of friends mainly comfort Klara.
Variety : As proven by “Sparrows,” you are not afraid to tells stories with younger protagonists. Is it easy for you to go back to that mindset?
Rúnar Rúnarsson : Everything I write is based on my first- or second-hand experiences, which I then mix with fiction. I also had an amazing cast, which is probably one of the first things you have to have. There is a lot of talent in Iceland, but we wanted the crème de la crème. It was crucial to find the right people to portray these characters and turn them into human beings.
It’s different when you work with young adults, but we tried to make this story believable and timeless. There are still things that unite us, even though there was a middle-aged man behind the camera, which they realized only halfway through the shoot [laughs].
V : Why did you want to talk about grief, and over the course of just one day? Specifically, you mention two names at the end.
RR : Usually, I prefer not to reveal my sources, but these were my friends. They both passed away. I wanted to dedicate this film to them.
I thought it was interesting to keep it within such a short time frame — we go from sunset to sunset — and focus on these first moments. If you experience something life-changing, regardless of your age, you feel … everything at once. It’s a rollercoaster ride. The same things that make you cry, make you laugh. At the same time, or five seconds later.
For me, that’s life. We don’t laugh all the time, even on the happiest day, and we don’t cry all the time either. There is beauty in the mundane and there is humor in grief.
V : Could you tell me more about this strange, unnerving melody heard throughout the film?
RR : It was composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson [Oscar-nominated for “Sicario” and “The Theory of Everything.”] He died in 2018. I think it’s my favorite thing he did and it has never been used in any film.
It’s one of his first works and it’s so human, even though it’s “sung” by a computer. It combines the beauty of classical music with something completely different. I decided not to subtitle the lyrics, but it’s in Latin and it says: “I love, I hate, I don’t know why. I don’t want this, but it’s happening again. I can feel it and it tears me apart.”
I think you can still feel it, even though you can’t understand the words, because that’s how we are, as human beings: we have all these mixed emotions.
V : As you mentioned, you waited a long time to tell this story. How does it feel right now?
RR : It’s a relief. I just had to get it out of my system, one way or another. But when something, like a box, has been standing on a shelf for a long time and then you move it, it leaves an empty space. I managed to get rid of the box and I am glad it’s gone, but nothing else will be able to replace it.
Variety, May 14, 2024
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Ernesta and her sister Justė (the sisters mentioned in the original title) gather at a lakeside cabin for a weekend getaway with their husbands (Lukas and Tomas, respectively) and children. The vacation takes a dark turn when Justė's daughter falls into the lake, unable to swim to safety. Details about the accident and its aftermath are revealed in a series of flashbacks as the family tries to move on from the tragedy.
Hammer to Nail: This film is so complex: confusing, satisfying, and tragic all at the same time. Could you talk a bit about how the idea for this film came about?
Laurynas Bareisa: This film is very much connected to my previous film, Pilgrims, because just before going to its premiere, I had a kind of similar, almost tragic experience with my kid. At the time, I didn’t think it was meaningful, but it kept coming back to me and I kept thinking about it. It was very puzzling for me to deal with because it wasn’t tragic, but it could have been. I kept thinking about it, and it kind of connected to what was happening with the film [Pilgrims], so I just started writing this film, not even knowing if it was going to be a film, but just a story.
HTN : How did you go about writing this script? The film flips back and forth between a number of different timelines, revealing hints of information about the past and future. Did you start writing this linearly then split it up or was it always nonlinear?
L.B.: In the beginning, it was very much a straight narrative storyline about this family and how they all deal with this event that happens. So I started writing this linear narrative and then it kind of transformed into this nonlinear narrative because I was interested in how memory works – for this event, but also how it works in general over time; how it differs, how it changes. I was very much interested in how we remember these kinds of traumatic events and the nuances of life that happen around it – the prosaic moments that become important, the ordinary things that you keep remembering over and over.
The most difficult part for me was finding the moment of that first jump in the narrative. I decided that it was going to be in the moment where this trauma happens. For me, time splits in two different ways. It splits structurally as you have different timelines of a memory, but it also splits emotionally as you have a factual reality of what actually happened and an emotional reality of what was felt. So this was something I wanted to get through to the viewer, that there are different timelines and realities.
HTN: I, too, am extremely interested in the characteristics of memory – how it can essentially be manufactured, how it’s like a puzzle that takes shape over time, but can also be confused with the expanse of time. Clearly the nonlinear timeline mimics this fragmented nature, but what other filmmaking elements did you employ to imbue the sensation of memory and recollection?
LB
: For me, it was important to consider the perspective we approach
each scene with and from where we see what is happening. In this
film, I wanted the frame to translate to the viewer that you are not
exactly in the moment. I wanted the film, visually, to have some kind
of an uncanny element. The camera is not in the position where a
person would ordinarily be – it’s a bit behind their backs, or
further away. Like it’s something that’s already remembered.
This
feeling was important to me, but was something that was hard to
describe and put into words, especially on set. So I decided to shoot
the film myself, to the DP and camera operator. I could work more
intuitively.
HTN : In addition to this uncanniness, there’s also a voyeuristic quality to the film, specifically in the long, static, medium shots so frequently used throughout the film. When filming, how did you decide how much time was enough to linger on a scene?
L.B.: I tried to plan some of the shots, considering the length compared to the impact of the shot, and the position of the scene in the story; the length and the emotional impact should correlate. I started doing this in my first film and, for that, I actually even had a stopwatch on set. But then for this film, I wanted to make some of these decisions more instinctively, so I decided to just feel it on the spot. If I feel in the moment it starts to drag, I change it. So we just kind of tried to find the rhythm on the spot and feel how it worked. But because this was so subjective, I wanted to have someone, an editor, to check it afterwards, to make sure I wasn’t going off the rails.
Hammer To Nail, July 31, 2025.
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After the once celebrated Norwegian director Gustav Borg disappeared from the lives of his now adult daughters Nora and Agnes years ago, he suddenly reappears after their mother's death. His plan: to make an autobiographical film starring Nora, set in the house he was born in. But Nora, a famous theater actress, refuses, because she wants nothing more to do with her father. Gustav then chooses American Hollywood star Rachel Kemp.
Roger Ebert : I’ve always felt that you identify so strongly with your characters—that the empathy of your filmmaking flows from your impulse to understand and connect with them. You come from a film family, and I’m curious about drawing on that personal experience in shaping the characters of Gustav Borg, his daughters, and Rachel Kemp.
Joachim Trier : It’s true. I think the idea of identification comes first from a writer’s point of view, then from a director’s, and finally from a collaboration with the actors. I need to understand them and identify their yearnings and their struggles. But that’s not the same as saying that the characters are biographically like me, or that you don’t need to vary up the characters. Still, this is a polyphonic kind of story, and so it’s nice to have that identification.
For example, Gustav is a film director. As you say, absolutely correctly, I come from a film family background. Without him being anyone I know, I understand the struggles and the joys, the passion for making films, so I identify with that—and also the anxiety, perhaps, that it will come to an end, that “one day they won’t let me,” which is what he’s going through. But this film was also about having characters like the younger sister, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who was in Gustav’s film as a child and certainly didn’t want to be in front of the camera again—something completely different.
With her, for example, I found this identifiable point: she wants everyone to connect and feel good. I have that in me. I always want people to get along. You do find something with all of them, after a while, when working on them. But the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t want to hinder the possibility of the actors coming in and taking charge of the characters. It’s good to leave an open space for them to fill in, as well.
RE : The term you use, “polyphonic,” refers specifically to sound. I’m curious about your creative relationship to music, score, and especially sound design, as this was your father’s craft. Your film opens and closes with two wonderful tracks, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cannock Chase,” but how do you think about the role of sound design in your filmmaking?
JT : Thank you very much for asking that. I really care about it. When I talk to friends about using music in film, I also tell them that one of the joys of life is the system of loudspeakers and the richness of frequency you get in a good cinema. It’s the best sound you’ll hear anywhere in the world. It’s a super hi-fi, complex, surround-sound experience. I feel that sometimes filmmakers forget how subtle you can be while still including a lot of sound and using the full range of frequencies. Hammering, loud sound doesn’t necessarily use the possibilities of a theater.
That’s something I think I’ve learned from my father: that you can create what feels like silence but is actually a full sound design of atmospheric subtlety. I love loud pieces of music; I love noise, but I also love the dynamics of daring to be quiet and gentle with sound. It’s almost like you draw the audience into the image by being very cautious about sound in certain areas.
For example, towards the end, there’s an almost climactic scene between the two sisters, full of emotion and action. And there’s no music. I tried to really build towards that feeling of presence: being there, hearing the breathing, all the movements of clothes. That can ultimately be so strong. Sometimes, when it comes to people talking about sound, they always talk about the loud films—And I think that the opposite could be equally complex and interesting.
RE : Everyone has a childhood home, a place where they grew up; this film explores the poetics of such a location. You’ve referred to the house as a “witness of the unspoken.” But there’s an emotional residue in the house’s atmosphere; it reflects all this lived experience. What can you say about first conceiving of the house and its presence, and of mapping your story onto this setting once you had a physical location?
JT : First of all, our spatial treatment of the narrative—to refine it so that it fit the space—was an exciting, visual task. When we write, Eskil Vogt and I write for the image in a way, and for the actors, but I think the sound aspect is really interesting as well.
Hania Rani was our wonderful composer; this was the first collaboration I’ve had with her. She wanted to go to the house and record its reverb and other sonic qualities, which, to me, was fascinating. I’ve never had anyone think like that, but she said it inspired and affected her approach to reverbs for certain pieces of music as well. The idea of sound always being present is very interesting to me.
Roger Ebert, November 14, 2025
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Maria directed by Pablo Larrain
Awards Watch : You’ve mentioned watching operas with your mother when you were young. What was the initial draw of them to you and was it a thread that you kept with you as you grew up?
Pablo Larraín : No, it was very simple. My parents would get the “l’abbonamento ascoli,” the subscription to the theater, so you get a ticket for all shows, ballet, concerts, and opera. So my mom, we are six siblings, and my mom would just say, “Who wants to come?” And I often was the one to raise my hand, and I just went, because my father was too busy, so there was one ticket available and I came with my mom to numerous operas and ballets and concerts. So that was my gate to this incredible form of art. And then I tried to become a musician because of it, and I just failed trying to play guitar, and the piano was terrible. But then I found a camera, an old camera that wasn’t really actually working well. The light meter didn’t work. So that’s how I started, and then I’m here.
But opera, Erik, it’s not just a beautiful art form. It’s not just something that should be more popular in my opinion. Opera was for me, the gate to the performing arts. And I realized that there was something in my sensibility that was very, very moved when I saw one production after the other over the years. Whether the production was better or worse, high quality, mid-quality, whatever the result of that, I fell in love with opera because it was just so moving and I understood that my emotions were affected, very, very affected by what was going on onstage. And I started wondering if I was able to affect others with my own idea. So that was something, is the origin story of my own approach to the form of art. And then I discovered cinema that, believe me, I directed one opera once, and it’s a very similar work. It’s incredible.
AW: I love that. In thinking about Maria Callas, I think of how Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana had such collective visibility worldwide, just being photographed so much and their speaking voices being so recognizable. But there’s almost a mystery about Maria Callas in the United States despite her worldwide success. Did that help give you more ways to interpret her life?PL: Can I ask you something, Erik?
AW : Yes.
PL: I know you’re here to do the questions, but tell me, honestly, do you think you know a lot about Angelina Jolie?
AW: No, I definitely don’t. That’s something I can’t wait to talk to you about because I feel like, obviously we know as regular people, we know bits and pieces of what we’re told by [points to self] journalists, by media, by anything. So, we don’t really ever know anyone.
PL: That’s the same with Maria Callas, and I’ll tell you about Jackie, and Diana is very similar. But going back to Callas, I’ll tell you, I read nine biographies, read so many documentaries, read every single interview, made a movie, and I don’t really know who she was. And I think Angelina, whether you know more or less about her throughout her work, throughout what media says, even when she says things about herself, in reality, I don’t think you really know much about her. And that is where both Maria and Angelina come together and can do a movie that is not Angelina. It’s not Maria necessarily, it’s our Maria. And that is made through a very mysterious character and a very mysterious actress that created a very enigmatic and mysterious main character. And I am fascinated by that.
I think that I’m a filmmaker that really, really, really cares about the audience. I respect the intelligence and the sensibility of the audience, and I want them to complete what we’re not showing in the film. And that is a lot, and that’s how cinema works. It should be like you’re active, you’re trying to read, you are trying to complete things that are not given, and that is my job and I really love it.
AW: I was thinking of the very same thing and how it can be, whether it’s with Angelina, Kristen Stewart, the way that you play with public persona a little bit, so that as a viewer you are filling in those little bits of blanks and you are allowing you to color outside the lines a little bit to give us something different.
AwardsWatch, November 25, 2024
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A House Of Dynamite directed by Kathryn Bigelow
When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race ( 18 minutes before the missile reaches Chicago) begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
Cinema Daily : What surprised you most once you got into the development and research process of the movie?
Kathryn Bigelow: One of the great surprises was being able to work with Noah Oppenheim. His acumen on the subject is like none other. The most surprising thing was how the president has so much authority on something so potentially catastrophic. It’s just this one man who, within a matter of minutes, has to decide about the utilization of these weapons. What I don’t understand is that a defensive measure could be global annihilation. What are you defending? There’s nothing left. It’s an interesting paradox.
CD : Was the decision to tell the story through different successive perspectives already made in the script? Or was it a decision made later during the editing process?
KB : It was early on. We decided to break it into three chapters in order to stay in real time, because an 18-minute journey would have been too brief for a feature. We broke it into three phases in order to do a deep dive in each one of the halls of power.
Noah Oppenheim: The reason we constructed it that way, as Kathryn said, was so the audience could feel what that pressure of 18 minutes would be like. And experience the disorientation that the decision-makers would feel when something like this would first happen. You would hardly be able to make sense of it in those 18 minutes. In the first viewing, the audience is absorbing it in that way. Then we pause, and they have an opportunity to re-experience it with new context. Unfortunately, in real life, the folks who have to make these decisions don’t get the luxury of a second or third run-through.
CD : You’ve directed large casts many times before, but House of Dynamite is your largest in terms of ensemble focus. How did you work out balancing the stories?
KB : I was incredibly lucky to have an extraordinary cast. With the editor Kirk Baxter’s help we were able to balance it. He executed in such a surgical precision and kept everybody extremely forefront in the story. The performances necessitated that.
CD : Did you have the cast go through any type of training or coaching to become as authentic as possible in grasping the specific military and government jargon in their day-to-day duties?
NO : I have the privilege to be sitting next to one of the greatest filmmakers who has ever lived. One of the things that makes her so great is her commitment to authenticity and realism, her sense of responsibility in depicting these worlds. If you’re gonna take an audience behind closed doors, if you’re gonna take them to the Situation Room, you want to accurately portray what goes on there. From the very beginning when we started working together, Kathryn Bigelow made it clear to me: If you’re gonna write dialogue in the mouths of these people, it better ring true. Every line, she interrogated: Is this how it would really happen? Is this how they would really say it? We did a lot of work in advance talking to people who held these jobs, who had been in these rooms before, so that we could try to accurately reflect how it would unfold. Then these extraordinary performers absorbed that sense of responsibility from Kathryn and we all relied on those Technical Advisors.
KB : : The Technical Advisors were so extraordinary on this, invaluable. They would be with me on the set, we didn’t shoot anything that they didn’t say that is relatively accurate. The authenticity is paramount in something like this. If you’re inviting an audience into space that’s not readily available, especially a story like this, you need it to be as authentic as possible.
CD : How did you work with Barry Ackroyd to create the atmosphere of the film?
KB : I worked with Barry first on Hurt Locker, we developed a visual language. But it was really him teaching me this incredible latitude that he provides. He basically lights an entire environment. In the case of Hurt Locker, we were outdoors for most of it. Then he covers it with cameras, and there’s no marks. Basically, the actors are left alone to do their job. He captures it. It’s the most extraordinary way. It’s very much like a documentary but applied to fictional narrative. It gives, like Rebecca was saying, a tremendous amount of freedom. And that was imperative for The Hurt Locker, imperative for something like this. They need to feel like they own the space.
CD : Was there a piece of advice from op military and intelligence officials that made you rethink a major scene?
NO : I don’t know about rethink. There was one conversation that we had at the beginning of our process that stuck with both of us, rattled us and informed a lot of the rest of the film.We were talking to a gentleman who had served in senior roles at the Pentagon and the CIA. The movie is predicated on this notion that the President of the United States has the sole authority to decide whether to use nuclear weapons. It’s only up to him in our system. So we asked this former official: “How much does the president practice? How much does he read on the subject? How much does he prepare for that moment?” And the person’s response was: “Not at all.” Basically when the president takes office – any president, it’s not specific to any individual – they’re given a very short briefing on the briefcase that gets carried around, less than an hour sometimes. And that’s it. They don’t think about it ever again. The fact that the folks at the top of the decision-making ladder might be the least prepared for the moment was stunning to both of us when he shared that.
KB : It’s just shocking. We were completely surprised by that. He said, “No, there’s so much else that they’re doing.” At StratComm, when we visited, there was this admiral that we met: she said they practice the protocol for nuclear weapons 400 times a year. They’re very practiced. On the other hand, the president is not. Which is another paradox.
CD: How did you approach building a sense of unbearable tension around time? And how does leaving the origin of the missile undefined amplify the audience’s anxiety throughout the film?
KB : How does it amplify that? I’m not sure. It was important that within the incredibly finite timeframe, this case being 18 minutes, you have limited information to make a decision. There’s so many elements you don’t know. You’re left flying blind. That made everything far more complicated.
Cinema Daily US, October 26, 2025
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Moveable Fest : This idea of a lavish underground bunker was something you actually learned of in meeting with an oligarch who let you see theirs, but when this setting can become a reflection of the value that the family has and the world that once existed, what was it like figuring out what it’d look like?
Joshua Oppenheimer : The set grew from the questions that I had when I visited that bunker. The bunker was a cave and at that point, they hadn’t finished it yet. It was a former Soviet command bunker built in a mountain, so I could really project whatever image I could dream up of the finished bunker onto these rock walls because there was nothing there yet. They were planning many of the same features you have in “The End,” the art vault, the pool and so on, but I found where really the vision of the house came from were these questions that haunted me as we walked around the bunker, which was how would you cope with your guilt for the catastrophe from which you’re fleeing? How would you cope with your remorse for leaving your loved ones behind? How would you raise a new generation as a blank canvas onto which you could paint your own version of your lives? And what happened to the world as a means of reassuring yourself, as a means of easing your regrets, as a means of justifying your actions?
That led to some insights about the sets and the home, namely that even though there would be no windows, it should not feel claustrophobic because otherwise you’d be constantly aware that you’re penned in. That led us to have these light wells inspired by skylights in Versailles and in the White House where you’d have simulated daylight streaming in and diffused among the rooms. That led us to the idea that there should be exteriors, so we came to this ant colony model of the bunker where we would fashion some caverns into these classically appointed manor house-style rooms that would just open up into the emptiness, the rawness of the salt mine. Also, we would use the mother’s art collection as windows, so you would be looking through these romantic landscape paintings to a lost nature that never existed because what we’re seeing on the walls are the stories they’re telling themselves about the past, like the narratives they’re spinning in song.
MF : In “The Act of Killing,” music allowed the subconscious to emerge from the perpetrators you interviewed and of course, they were ultimately pulling from a memory of what they had done. Was it different working with actors when the music might serve the same purpose for the characters, but obviously they’re just playing a part?
JO : Because these characters are haunted by their pasts and it’s a non-familiar world in which they live together, rehearsal was crucial, so we had a month where the [actors] could understand after a conflict, how would they find harmony again? Because they would need harmony to live for 25 years in such a place together. [We’d talk about] what are the secrets that they’re all keeping from the son? Because apart from the son, all of the older characters have a pact of silence and they all know each other’s secrets that they all keep hidden from the son and each of them use in different ways as a kind of canvas onto which they can paint their idealized version of themselves.
So rehearsal was crucial, but then when I make a documentary, I’m always looking for authenticity, which sounds like a cliche, but what I mean by that is I’m looking for moments that I instantly recognize as true because they’re not what I expected. In a certain sense, I quickly realized that with actors who would have to bring characters to life whom I had richly envisioned as I wrote them, they would have to make these characters true to them and emerge organically in the moment from their inner lives. That meant that rather than hoping for them to flesh out something I’d already imagined, I could lean back on my skills as a documentarian and create a space in these long takes through which we shot the film for them to surprise me and bring me those moments of authenticity.
MF : In a way, that’s how I ended up taking away hope from the film when it’s about delusion, but at the same time a group of people are coming together to recognize that and pierce the bubble. In these times, what was that experience actually like for you?
JO : I wrote at least the first draft of the film and the first draft of the songs under the first Trump administration, so the film is right at home in this dangerous moment we’re living in. And it feels all the more urgent because I think we as a culture and a society, at least a large minority of us at the very least — and maybe many people who didn’t vote — are realizing that our expectation that somehow things will work out for the best, no matter what we do, was a delusion. I still believe that this is a cautionary tale about the wolf of despair masquerading in the sheep’s clothing of hope and the importance of embracing in contrast to that false hope, the genuine hope of saying, “Look, we have to acknowledge right away the urgency of our problems and marshal all our creativity and come together as a human family to solve those problems.” I still believe that there’s time for that.
And this is still offered by me and the cast and the crew and the producers and the hundreds of people who made this happen as a gesture of genuine hope. I even believe that the humanity we will discover by coming together collectively to solve these problems, the activism we will now need to be ready to embrace up to and including nonviolent civil disobedience, will remind us of our full human potential. I say “remind” because I think we as human beings have done this before. We did it in the civil rights movement. We did it in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. We’ve done it many times before. But it will remind us and we will rediscover our deepest humanity which lies in the broadest human family and in this dark moment, that is more than a silver lining.
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IFFR 2025 :
The Shrouds, directed by David Conenberg; Morlaix, directed by Jaime Rosales ; Il tempo che ci vuole, directed by Francesca Comencini ; Czlowiek Do Wszystkiego (english title The Assistant), directed by Anna and Wilhelm Sasnal; Orenda, directed by Pirjo Honkasalo
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