The Best Films of 2022

My Choice of  Films, distributed in The Netherlands in 2022. Seen in cinemas and on streaming platforms. 

 

The Northman,   directed by Robert Eggers,  United States of America, China, United Kingdom,  2022.

 

The Northman is a retelling of the Scandinavian legend of Amleth (which also inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet). After witnessing the murder of his father and kidnapping of his mother at the hands of his uncle, young Amleth escapes his home and vows to avenge his father. Many years later, the adult Amleth, now a Viking warrior, embarks on his life’s mission to exact revenge on his uncle and save his mother.

 

“Man’s hubris in nature is a running theme in your work. What was it like living that out on set when filming in Iceland?

 I have a 19th century romantic landscape painter's relationship [with nature] where I'm in awe, and I'm very cognizant that it could kill me. There's something thrilling about that, of course. We were looking for the most punishing, brutal landscapes we could find, with the worst weather available and the most mud and rain and misery. I'm not a masochist towards myself, nor a sadist towards my collaborators, but it is what's needed to tell a story.

 I mean, drizzle doesn't photograph. So virtually any scene that's overcast, it's raining, whether it looks like it's raining or not. It was raining the entire time. I had to do, for Vanity Fair, the hardest day on set, and I was like, "There were one or two days that weren't hard."

 Alex can tell you about how miserable it was shooting the naked volcano fight at night. But that's the thing. If you're not shooting a raid of a village, you're shooting a storm at sea, at night on a Viking ship. Everything was pretty intense.

 I hesitate to apply modern concepts to historical time periods, but The Witch is read as a movie about female ascendancy and The Lighthouse, about toxic masculinity. I know you’ve talked about how you don’t sit down with those concepts in mind when you’re writing, but both of them do reappear in The Northman. In this case, did you write them in?

 No. I really do try to present this stuff without judgment. I was doing press in Paris. The first journalist who I sat down with, challenged that idea by saying, "Well, you only allude to sexual violence. You don't show any sexual violence, which tells me, as an audience member, something about you."

 But then when we're talking about other violence, that was another thing that was tricky to consider. Because again, it's based on Icelandic sagas, which read like '80s action movies sometimes—complete with one-liners like, "That's what I call a headache." It's a culture that glorifies and celebrates violence. And I'm making a big action set piece tentpole movie. So there's times when the violence needs to literally be thrilling. But I don't want to be condoning violence or glorifying violence. So how do I walk that line as a storyteller?

 Do you have any interest in ever making a movie set in modern times?

 No thank you.

 What's the next historical setting you're looking into?

 Well, The New Yorker said I was writing something Elizabethan. So there you go. But I've written all kinds of things that haven't gotten made. And I'll write a lot more that will and won't get made. I mean, every time period interests me except for the one we're living in.

 Why’s that?

 I get enough of the kitchen sink in my kitchen sink. But let me just say this. I've established a routine for telling stories that is about doing all this historical research. I literally like the act of researching. It's not just for me, it's for an end, but I love it. And it occupies a massive amount of time and brain space for me when I'm making a film.

 If I was making a contemporary film, what am I supposed to do with myself? Obsess over wallpaper swatches, until my eyes fall out? It's just not interesting. For whatever reason, it just does not inspire me. And you can't shoot something that doesn't inspire you.

It was hard for me and [cinematographer] Jarin [Blaschke] to get into the Knattleikr [an early Viking ball game] sequence, because we were the losers in school, and we didn't play sports, and we never were interested in it. We got there, and I like the sequence, but I could never get passionate about photographing a cell phone. “

 GQ, April 20, 2022.

 

 

Corsage,   directed  by Marie Kreutzer,  Austria, Luxembourg, Germany,  France, 2022

 

Empress Elizabeth of Austria is idolized for her beauty and renowned for inspiring fashion trends. But in 1877, ‘Sissi’ celebrates her 40th birthday and must fight to maintain her public image by lacing her corset tighter and tighter. While Elizabeth’s role has been reduced against her wishes to purely performative, her hunger for knowledge and zest for life makes her more and more restless in Vienna. She travels to England and Bavaria, visiting former lovers and old friends, seeking the excitement and purpose of her youth. With a future of strictly ceremonial duties laid out in front of her, Elizabeth rebels against the hyperbolised image of herself and comes up with a plan to protect her legacy.

 

“There's a line maybe halfway through the film I love when she's being photographed and she talks about not liking being photographed because they claim to be objective, but nothing is objective. That made me think about how in the last several years, there have been some iconic women who've had these biopics, for lack of a better word, that aren't necessarily straight biopics; they're really playing with the myth of them. Like "Spencer" or "Jackie." This one, in particular, really plays with her mythology. Do you have any thoughts on this concept of women who we have an idea of who they are, but now we're able to sort of play with that a bit with research or just with our creativity?

 I think these are all characters that have something in common. The image of the beautiful, sad woman who suffered from whatever, but mostly the man on her side, and then is not really able to move because there's this position she's in, which demands this and that. So she's not free to make her own choices. I think because they are beautiful, and because they're all sad, and because you cannot look behind the doors and you don't know what's really going on, you just protect so much onto them. I think that's why these characters are always good for stories because we always want to hear about them again and again and again.

 And yeah, of course, when you then go into that and make a film about a character like that, you can fill in the blank however you like. You can just make it your story. When I read the biographies, they were all different in a way. The way she was described has so much to do with the time that book was written in and the person who wrote it. Was it a man? Was it a woman? Was it in the 1950s? Was it now? It depends so much on that. It was also never objective. You think it's a biography, and a historian wrote it, so it must be objective, but it never is. That freed me. I felt like I could do my own thing entirely because I will never do it right.

 It's not possible to make the perfect film about someone who actually lived. There will always be people who will say no, that's not correct. So that's important. I let that go right away. I always say I think I tried to stay true to what I read about her character or what I sensed when I read about her. Not true to the facts.

 Sometimes I get the question, was your film trying to be the opposite of the old films? Were you trying to make it extra different? Or what were you trying to provoke? This was never my intention. What I read about this woman, I tried to show within my own storyline, but I tried to stay true to the character that I think she had, who she was. “

 I found her meeting with Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield) really fascinating because he's a person who is the opposite of Sissi. His life story is not well known. The end of his life was so mysterious that people are still debating how he died. How did you decide to bring him into the story?

 I stumbled across him somewhere; I don't even remember why I read about him. But when I was at film school, nobody ever told me about him. I always thought it started with the Brothers Lumière. I was like, who is this guy? I read what was to be found on the internet, which was not so much. Initially, this had nothing to do with "Corsage." Maybe it was at the same time. I don't even remember that right. I also don't remember how he found his way into the script because when I'm writing, I'm my own black box. I'm on my own. I listen to music. I have my mood boards. There's writing and rewriting. It's very intuitive, and I cannot really describe it. Afterward, I very often don't know how things developed or came into the script. So I really don't know that anymore.

 But now I would say I loved the idea of the meeting. I love the idea of bending history, which I didn't do on many levels. And I liked that it was possible for her to see another image of herself than the one she was used to. The one she was used to would always be the beautiful Empress standing still for painting. Then there's this totally different medium, and she's able to move and able to maybe be herself in front of that camera. So it was about that because I focus very much on her struggling with her own image, with her own oversized image all the time. Then, being able to see another image of herself, maybe it would have been possible, in a way, to also be someone else.”

Roger Ebert.com, December 26, 2022.

 

 

Decision to Leave,    original title: Heojil kyolshim,   directed by  Park Chan-Wook,  South Korea, 2022.

 

From a mountain peak in South Korea, a man plummets to his death. Did he jump, or was he pushed? When detective Hae-joon arrives on the scene, he begins to suspect the dead man’s wife Seo-rae. But as he digs deeper into the investigation, he finds himself trapped in a web of deception and desire.

 

“AVC  : In taking us through Detective Hae-jun’s investigative process, most filmmakers would have shown flashbacks when he imagines a crime scene in his mind. But you show us in parallel exactly what he sees in the moment.

 PCW: If this was just about the investigation process, this film would’ve turned out differently. But it is both an investigation process and a romance film. Those two processes are a unified process, which is why I made those choices. Love is the most immediate and important emotion that we can feel. You could tell the story through logical realizations of a flashback, but I thought it was more important to lean in on that momentary, step-by-step emotion.

 The only exception would be the last scene when Hae-jun thinks, “I never said the words I love you.” And he finds the answer to that mystery through a flashback when he’s listening to the recorded voice. Solving a mystery is usually about other people, but in this case, he’s listening to his own voice and solving out his own mystery. And he comes to a late realization that he had so much pride in his occupation as a policeman. But after he finds out that Seo-rae is a murderer, he lets her get away and even tells her to get rid of the important piece of evidence. So by abandoning that pride in his occupation is a thousand times more powerful than I love you.”

 AVC: Your films always have a sly sense of humor. Even when we’re watching something graphic or tragic, the humor is there. What’s your philosophy about using humor in general in your stories?

 PCW: I don’t know if I should call this a philosophy per se. When I’m watching other films or just meeting people throughout my daily life, I always find something comical and humorous in that situation. I savor it, I find happiness in discovering the humor in them. This is the same for when I’m reading literature as well. Even in works that most people find very serious and dark, I somehow find the humor. It’s very easy to find humor [in] Kurt Vonnegut. But I also find humor in Dostoyevsky.

 And it’s the same for when I’m meeting people. This is different from laughing at them. I just somehow find a humorous element in our conversations, regardless of whether it was intended. I think the same mechanism works when I’m making my films. This is a method to express the totality of life. With just feeling weak, sad, angry, horrified, or happy, something feels missing with those emotions. And if I’m merely expressing those emotions, I feel like I’m enforcing a particular emotion on the audience. That’s why you need a sense of distance, an objectivity, but you need the right amount or else you’ll get pushed out of that story. So there’s some form of attachment, but there’s also a little bit of distance.

 What is the fine line between the distance and attachment? That’s something I care most about when I’m making my films. And it’s also one of the most difficult challenges. But if you have the right amount, you can have sympathy towards the characters while having objectivity. And then you can easily find comical moments within these characters. For instance, when the male character says to the female character, “I like you for your straight posture,” there’s something humorous about the serious attitude in which he says this. So you laugh when you have expected him to say something very elaborate and sweet, because instead he stoically says, “Oh, just the posture is what I like about you.” It’s funny, but also understandable. It makes sense that he finds an attractiveness through the posture. So you also find a bit of empathy in that. “

AV Club, October 17, 2022

 

.

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, original title Gûzen to sôzô,  directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2021.

 

A triptych about coincidence and connection. In the first part we follow a model who makes a discovery about her ex, in part two a student tries to seduce her professor, and in the finale a woman who meets her sweetheart after a school reunion.

 

“All your films seem to carry a specific reference: Ozu in Happy Hour, Hitchcock in Asako I & II, Hong and Rohmer (and maybe Kiyoshi Kurosawa) in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy... Are these intentional? Or is it just a matter of works that are always with you, unconsciously, when you film?

  I don’t think I specifically refer to Ozu in Happy Hour, or to Hitchcock in Asako I & II. But while, in a way, Ozu’s influence runs throughout my work, I hardly ever think of Hitchcock when I make a film. For Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, however, I referred to Eric Rohmer. This was surely because I needed a basis to work on a different approach to shoot short stories. The main source of inspiration came from the interview I did with Mary Stephen, who’s the editor of the work related to the second part of Rohmer’s career. Rohmer’s influence on my film is therefore inevitable and substantial. On the contrary, Hong Sang-soo is a director I respect, but if there are any similarities between us, they mostly come from our common love for Rohmer.

 For me, watching and making films is a continuous cycle, so in addition to the names mentioned, I always have many directors on my mind. However, I think that at the moment I would not be able to create a film from another film. Even the great filmmakers who came before us made their works from reality, not from a film, and that is what I would like to do.

 The Japanese title of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is Concidence and Imagination... Chance is a very important element in your cinema. Is this a literary aspect, or is it something you see deeply connected to life?

  I don’t know to what extent the literary component is linked to my work, since I don't consider myself an avid reader. But I feel that using the “power of words” in films, especially in today’s Japan, is important.

 The fundamental power of words is to “separate”. There are words used to temporarily define (or end up defining) vague feelings of the individual, or our relationship with others. Generally speaking, for the Japanese individual it is preferable not to put one's feelings into words as, in doing so, one might end up defining the “self” in a way, thus separating from others. In Japanese society the fact of making otherness explicit beyond necessity (i.e. underlining that you and I are different) leads to a certain “difficulty in living”. However, I think that in each individual’s own life such moments should exist. A society that is founded on the repression of individuality will continue to require the same behaviour from everyone. In this, however, there is an even more substantial “difficulty of living”. Thus, expressing oneself in words becomes a way for the individual to remain within society while at the same time manifesting one's “otherness”. I believe that this could be the starting point to get society moving again. I’m afraid this might be the reason why Japanese cinema makes very few films when people talk a lot.

 Coincidence is always a matter of time. I believe that time - the passing of time - is a very important element in your cinema...

  I don’t know if what I’m going to say will answer the question, however what we call “chance” denotes an unusual situation. Unusual means that it will happen at most once in a long period of time. The two-hour duration of a movie is certainly too short of a time to allow this to happen. However, if you insert a caption that reads, for example, “5 years later”, it becomes easier to introduce randomness, because it will appear in the story as something acceptable to the viewers.

 And, yet, it cannot be said that this is enough to represent chance, as our lives actually abound with random events and the reason they do not have enough influence on us - the reason we ignore chance - is that these coincidences are often completely irrelevant. If we can keep the influence of these random events at a sufficiently low level we can accomplish something following our intentions and plans. The things we do this way, however, become “routine”, which can lead to turning our existences into a closed space. We end up shaping our social lives by letting chance pass us by.

 Randomness is fundamental to escape the daily routine - the time that always recurs the same - and to make the only life that we have truly unique. This is not easy, however, because social life is made up by the synthesis of routines.

 Eric Rohmer once spoke of “becoming accustomed to chance”. This is an expression I love. Coincidences can happen many times, they are not rare, because each of us lives within a recurring routine. We can appear to others in the form of chance and become ‘chance’ ourselves. Sometimes, our routines come into contact and at that very moment, if we try to open our routine to the other's, we will observe a small renewal in our lives.

 Chance is unusual not because it happens occasionally, but because it is rare to have the courage to accept it by undoing our routines. Answering your question I realized that Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy could be read just like a movie that shows the (thin) courage of the characters who accept, love and want to renew their lives.

 As a closing remark, I would like to add that it was the reality I saw through the camera during filming that made me process this way of understanding chance.”

 Film Parlato, August 23, 2021.

 

 

 

Licorice Pizza, directed by  Paul Thomas Anderson, United States of America, Canada, 2021

 Licorice Pizza follows the precarious romance between Alana Kane. a 25-year-old woman who works for a high school yearbook photography company,  and Gary Valentine, an endearing 15-year-old who attained minor fame as a child actor in 1970s Hollywood.  Set in the San Fernando Valley, 1973 the  film tracks the treacherous navigation of first love.

 

“Alfred Hitchcock meticulously storyboarded his films, so he said his job was largely done before actors ever arrived on set. Are you like that?

 I have a plan, but it’s not overly planned. The benefit of shooting in my neighborhood on a movie like this is I have a rough sketch of what it might be like. But then, of course, you arrive, and there’s 200 kids standing in line waiting to get their picture taken, and it becomes a real live breathing thing. It’s like a dinosaur tail getting away from you. You just try to wrestle it into your frame or go whichever direction it’s going. It never had appeal to me — the idea of knowing every bit before you start. There always must be some room for discovery.

 Do you write your movies with actors in mind?

 Mostly. I like to work with people I’ve worked with before. At this point it’s becoming harder to do this work with someone that you don’t know intimately, deeply, on a personal level. It’s too hard to do this work without having more than just a passing relationship.

 In the case of Alana Haim, who plays Alana, you’ve made music videos for Haim, the rock band she’s in with her sisters, but she’s never acted. What made you think of her?

 This was a story that was very specific to the San Fernando Valley. That was important in terms of casting. It’s like if you’re going to tell a story in New York, you hire Marisa Tomei. Alana looks like a girl from the Valley; she talks like a girl from the Valley; she is a girl from the Valley. She has a ferociousness. She’s very eager and she’s a quick learner. I don’t know how many more boxes you can tick. In the movie, she starts off as the stable one, who has more years under her belt, but it slowly emerges that she’s wobbly and unstable and impulsive and angry and trapped and incredibly immature.

 You cast Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Gary. Has he made movies before?

 Cooper had years and years and years of experience under his belt of making home movies with me and my family. Generally, they are action-oriented films where he’d get beaten up as the bad guy by my son who heroically throws him off a cliff or shoots him in the face. Besides that, he’d not acted in a professional way. I didn’t write it for him. I wrote it for a blurry 15- or 16-year-old boy. I never imagined when I was writing it that it would be Cooper. I thought that I would take the more traditional route and pursue a young actor. There were a few I met that were talented, but most of them already seemed at a young age to be overly trained, overly mannered and overly ambitious, which was not interesting to me. “

 Variety, November 10, 2021.

 

 

 

Les Olympiades,  directed by Jacques Audiard, France 2021.

 Set in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, Les Olympiades (named after the complex of towers in the middle of the 13th) is a thoroughly 21st-century love story: Émilie meets Camille who is attracted to Nora who herself crosses Amber’s path. The three girls and one boy become friends, sometimes lovers, often both. Based on the critically-acclaimed graphic novel Killing and Dying by American Adrian Tomine, it is beautifully shot in black and white, and is daring, sexy and elegant in its exploration of what it means to be in love in the modern world. Each of the characters is experiencing some level of disillusionment but by the end of the film, they seem to have learned something about who they really are and what they really desire and love.

“I find it interesting that after you leave France to make a film about the American West—even though it was shot in Europe—you follow it up with what feels to me like your most urban film. Did The Sisters Brothers give you any unexpected insights into how a landscape can imprint itself on people and influence their behavior?

 If there are no horses in Paris, 13th District, it’s because I made The Sisters Brothers before it. As Truffaut said, usually when you make a film, it’s contrary to the previous one. And I think that in that film I was focusing on opening all the drawers for action: men, horses, violence. But once I started to close them, others opened: women, a nicer landscape, love. So, yes, it’s the process of going from one to the opposite. Also, I’ve wanted to make a film about the way we speak about love, the way we speak love. I’ve wanted to make a film about that for a while.

 “Why so specifically the 13th arrondissement when adapting Adrian Tomine’s text? From my research, it seems like location came before the characters.

 It wasn’t really that I had chosen the place first, but I did live in the 13th arrondissement for more than 10 years. I found that it was possibly the most modern neighborhood because in recent eras it had undergone urban renewal. A lot of new buildings were built, a lot of high-rises were all around, and there was a kind of new architecture that gave it a different look from perhaps the rest of Paris. And I had the feeling that while I was shooting there, I was shooting something that was very Parisian. But, at the same time when you’re there, you also have a feeling that you’re not in Paris. The black and white also helped me a lot with that.

 There’s a certain romanticized view of Paris in black and white from the Nouvelle Vague, and even some more contemporary images that are consciously showing something grimier in films like La Haine. Are you conscious of how your black and white Paris fits into the larger body of cinematic images of the city?

 I love my city, but I understand that Paris has certain photogenic limits to it. It has a closed-in feeling. It almost has a museum-like quality to it. There are not a lot of different perspectives that you can get as you move around the city. I think that when I was doing this, I wasn’t filming it thinking about putting it in a context of other films that have been filmed in black and white. I mean, for me, what I wanted to do is shoot a modern story. My characters are evolving, and they’re evolving in a modern city, which happens to be Paris. I wanted to avoid that nostalgia that sometimes goes along with that idea when you film in black and white. I think one of the things that also helps with this is Rone’s music. Because it’s electronic, very modern, and fits in with that concept of Paris as being a very modern city. I think when you film in black and white, there’s always a danger that there’s a kind of preciousness and nostalgia to it. I wanted to avoid this. I neither wanted to be precious nor nostalgic.

 Slant, April 14, 2022.

 

 

Petrov’s Flu,  original title Petrovy v grippe, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland, 2021.

 Petrov, a weary cartoonist, his wife Petrova, librarian, and their infant son struggle with high fever. Petrov wanders through the drab, impoverished city, delirious and lost in delusions. The seemingly calm Petrova emerges as a deadly fantasy superheroine who kills all who displease her. Petrov's Flu is an anarchic mix of reality and fantasy, a feverish satire of the arduous life in the post-Soviet Union, where a cynical oligarchy tramples on the rights of ordinary citizen.

  

“DEADLINE : I saw Petrov’s Flu late in the evening and then dreamt about it all night, and I’m still thinking about it today. There’s a lot to unpick there – walk us through your thought process behind making this movie.

 SEREBRENNIKOV: The novel was highly acclaimed, it won all possible Russian literature awards. Ilya [Stewart, producer] bought the rights, but how do you work with this very strange book? It’s surreal and multi-layered, complicated, but extraordinary literature in terms of language. It’s such a pity that you can’t read it in its original language, it’s a masterpiece. So how to transform it into a movie?

 I was under house arrest and Ilya told me, ‘you have a lot of time, could you think about how to do something with it?’ I jumped into it and it grabbed me completely. It is poetry, the author is a poet who started to write prose, the construction of the text is poetic – and cinema is poetry.

 The producers loved the script and started to look for a director to make it. But then my circumstances changed, I was released, and I had time to work. And then my trial started, I said, ‘let’s do it anyway’. I had a month or two months without sleeping – part of the day was the trial and then we shot at night. The days were short. The crew and actors understood what was happening and helped a lot.

 DEADLINE: How restrictive was that period? Were you able to shoot without concerns?

 SEREBRENNIKOV: Russia is crazy, being here is high adrenaline. As Russians say, everything that won’t kill us makes us stronger. It gives us strength to overcome this situation and to work.

 DEADLINE: The film has an unconventional narrative structure, does that come from the book or is that your interpretation?

 SEREBRENNIKOV: It’s both really. It was an opportunity to put a special lens on our reality. The film covers several different times. Our childhood is mainly black and white (a portion of the film is shot in black and white), that’s visible in our family pictures. In my memory I have very bright moments and they are very colorful, that’s why I decided to add the third colorful layer from the point of view of Petrov as a child. Different times and different feelings.”

 Deadline, July 9, 2021.

 

 

 

The Card Counter, directed by  Paul Schrader, United States of America, United Kingdom, China, Sweden, 2021.

 William Tell,  a gambler and former serviceman,  just wants to play cards. His spartan existence on the casino trail is shattered when he is approached by Cirk, a vulnerable and angry young man seeking help to execute his plan for revenge on a retired military major. Tell sees a chance at redemption through his relationship with Cirk. Gaining backing from mysterious gambling financier La Linda, Tell takes Cirk with him on the road, going from casino to casino until the unlikely trio set their sights on winning the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. But keeping Cirk on the straight-and-narrow proves impossible, dragging Tell back into the darkness of his past.

 “As you’ve said, Card Counter hits on many of the same themes as your previous work. More broadly, you’re referencing films like Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket, but also Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and First Reformed. At this point in your career, are you still referencing those original films that inspired you, or are you referencing yourself?

 You're looking for an interesting problem and an interesting metaphor. Which comes first is sort of uncertain. I was looking at poker on television. I said, "Well that's an interesting metaphor, what kind of person does that?" They have commercials where they show people having fun in casinos, but I've never seen anybody have any fun in casinos. It’s like going into the zombie zone, a kind of purgatory.

 I realized that this is a man who is hiding from life, because of something he's done. And what can be so great? He can't just be a murderer, he has to have done something that shamed the nation, something that cannot be forgiven. And then I thought about Abu Ghraib. I started putting those two pieces together, and the problem started to define itself—that we live in a culture where no one is really responsible for anything. "I didn't lie, I misspoke." "I didn't break the law, I made a mistake." "I didn't touch that woman, I just had bad judgment." I come from a culture where it's just the opposite, where you're responsible for everything. I sort of imagined myself as someone who did something that can't be forgiven. He went to jail, but he still hasn't been punished enough. And what did he do? How does he keep punishing himself?

 I'm curious about your decision to show the torture scenes, instead of just alluding to his past.

 I mean, I don't really show it, if you compare it to Zero Dark Thirty or some other films. It's a nightmare, so this is the torture of memory. And I needed something in the story to raise the stakes of everything, because the viewer started to figure out the level at which this is working. I had no desire to compete with films that have done Abu Ghraib. But I needed to show the viewer this memory. As he says, "This weight can never be removed." Also, it's important to understand he's not apologizing. And that's really kind of chilling when you think about these acts, because people who do them are always looking for an excuse, and he just says it was in him and, to some degree, it's in all of us.

Were there specific real-life analogues involved in Abu Ghraib, like Lynndie England, who you studied for the character of Bill?

 Charles Graner, who has now fallen off the map. We would have heard if he had died, but obviously he has changed his name and he’s somewhere else. He was in for, I think, six and a half years at Leavenworth. So I didn’t base it on him, per se, but the fact that there was such a person, gives you the kind of freedom to imagine it, as opposed to someone saying, "It could've never happened."

 GQ, September 7, 2021.

 

 

 

Hit the Road, original title Jaddeh Khaki, directed by Panah Panahi, Iran, 2021.

 Seatbelt… Mirrors… Handbrake… Clutch… Father, leg in plaster on the back seat, growls driving instructions. His hyperenergetic young son dances and jumps around the car. They bicker about the ill dog in the trunk, but from the passenger seat mother mainly tries to keep things light. The eldest son drives this unruly group – to which he doesn’t seem to entirely belong – in silence, through broad Iranian landscapes. Using visual humour and a prominent soundtrack, that combines Bach with nostalgic Iranian pop songs, the film paints a sensitive portrait of a family desperately trying to postpone the pain of an impending farewell.

"Filmmaker: You’ve said in interviews that you have seen acquaintances smuggled across the border into Turkey. Can you tell me what that experience was like?

 Panahi: Two or three of my friends have left the country through Turkey. Later, they described in detail their departure from the moment they left Tehran to the freeways they took to the cities they visited and the manner in which the smugglers behaved, how they would have to use the skin of sheep. So in the film I tried to use the geographic logic as it was described to me. I would visit certain regions, I would talk to people, and I would get more detail from them as well.

Filmmaker: Despite this being a story about a young man trying to escape Iran, the film is rather charming and joyful. It’s not an issue drama. Why was it important to you to tell this story with such a light touch?

 Panahi: This might have to do with my outlook toward cinema and the type of person I am. In cinema and drama, there’s always a back and forth. When you have a paradox, you can point to something and then point to its opposite. Then your knowledge and understanding becomes more complete. This might have to do with my own character. If something serious happens to me, I try to make a joke about it. This could be a defense mechanism on my part. This might also have to do with my outlook on paradoxes; if there is something that causes unhappiness I should put something next to it that brings joy.

 Filmmaker: The film includes a number of scenes where the family dances and sings along to pre-revolutionary Iranian pop songs by Delkash and Shahram Shabpareh. What drew you to pre-revolutionary music for this story?

 Panahi: When it comes time to say goodbye, one is overcome with a sense of nostalgia. All Iranians have this common memory of going on trips as children and listening to these songs. Also, one has to look at the fate of these singers and what happened to them after the revolution. It’s the same fate that awaits the young man in the film.

 Filmmaker: This use of music and the dancing are details the censors would not love either. Do you think Hit the Road has any chance of playing in theaters in Iran?

 Panahi: Honestly, I can only hope that their view toward this kind of music will change and that the film will have a chance for exhibition. One can only be hopeful. “

 Filmmaker Magazine, April 22, 2022.

 

 

Compartment 6, Original title Hytti Nro 6, directed by Juho Kuosmanen, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Germany, 2021.

 

Finnish student Laura flees love and life in Moscow. She takes the train towards Murmansk and during the long journey is forced to share her carriage with the Russian miner Ljoha with whom she seems to have nothing in common at first sight.

 

“Cineuropa: What attracted you to Rosa Liksom’s novel and made you want to turn it into a film?

 Juho Kuosmanen: I think the starting points were the scenery, the train, Russia and the human connection between these two very different characters. The book has a Finnish protagonist, so as a Finn, I feel I have the licence to do it. I was fascinated to be able to make a film on Russian soil; it’s a country I’ve visited many times, also by train, to Saint Petersburg, to Moscow, and even to Ulaanbaatar, so I got to see a lot of it. I like the way the country looks, I like the people, I like trains, and I really like train films.

Speaking of Ulaanbaatar, this is actually where Laura, the protagonist, goes in the book. This is one of the things you change in the film, as she goes to Murmansk instead. Why this alteration?

 Well, I like to say that Compartment No. 6 the film is inspired by Compartment No. 6 the book, rather than being an adaptation of it. For Murmansk, I felt the coldness and the proximity to the sea make it a place where it’s easy to breathe. I felt that if we ended the film a long way away in Mongolia, even if there are huge and impressive landscapes, it’s mainly sand, and I felt that there should be lots of air and light at the end, something refreshing. We scouted Ulaanbaatar in the preparations, but we also took a look at the Murmansk route to see if it could pose as something that looked like the Trans-Siberian Railway. But then I just felt: if we’re shooting this route, why should we pretend it’s another one? To me, the story doesn’t deal with any specific place; it deals with a long journey. And I always like to remember a good rule that some wise film person said: try to lie as little as possible.

 How easy was it to get permission to shoot on the train, at the stations and so on?

 It was incredibly hard. Not for me, personally, during shooting, but for the location manager, the line producer and their colleagues. They had to work with the Russian train authorities, asking for permission to rent the train, to use their tracks, to get them to schedule it for us. In the beginning, the Russian producers advised against doing it this way: they thought the idea was downright stupid, which I totally understand from their point of view. But from my perspective, I’m not fond of control. I like to have a plan, but then I also like to see what I can get out of that plan in the moment.

 The story in the book takes place in the Soviet era, but you have moved it forward into the Russian one. Why this change?

 Again: try to lie as little as possible. We would have had to build Soviet scenery, but this way, we could just show things as they basically look today. Also, the book, I feel, deals with the Soviet Union as a state of mind, rather than a country, so I also wanted to avoid this geographical-political frame, which I think would have been distracting. What I want you to look at are these two human beings, without any topical comments on time or place. “

 Cineuropa, July 12, 2021.

 

 

 

The Wonder, directed by Sebastián Lelio, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States of America, 2022.

 Set shortly after the Great Famine, it follows Lib Wright, an English nurse sent to a rural Irish village to observe a young 'fasting girl', who is seemingly able to miraculously survive without eating.  Is she a miracle or is something more sinister going on? Lib is taking care of Anna.

 “I love this mysterious, intriguing film; it has so much to say and so much on its mind, spiritually, emotionally, and politically. Tell me all about it and what struck a chord in you about the book that made you think it could be a movie.

 When I read “The Wonder, I was trapped in it. My first connection was with the two women at the story’s center— the nurse and the young girl. I felt that link; that relationship was unique and very moving. So, at first, it was my emotional connection with the story, especially the journey that the nurse, Florence’s character, has to go through. Her character is the rationalist that faces this community where there is a lot of religious fervor or fanaticism even and progressively falls in love maternally with the girl.

 And she uses reason to uncover whatever is going on in this situation— whether there is a hoax or not. But by the time she understands the mechanics with which the girl is being kept alive, the story reveals why the girl is making the sacrifice, and the reasons are so devastating that the nurse is trapped emotionally. Because by then, she’s already deeply connected to a girl, and she’s facing a moral dilemma. Does she have the right to intervene at this point?

 And so the fact that her solution somehow transcends reason— it’s really what captured me because she is a scientist, someone who acts out of logic. Therefore, she has elasticity and adaptability— as opposed to many of the community that has immovable truths and operate from that position, which is the definition of fanaticism.

 Indeed!

 Florence’s character is a woman capable of— or that discovers that— she is capable of responding to life with an act full of contradiction but also full of life. And that journey was a beautiful one to portray in a film. And then, conceptually, I thought it was great to explore the power of fiction, both in our lives, stories we need, and because we tell ourselves stories. We tell ourselves about ourselves, or there are stories that we inherit or co-create. And religion and ideology— how they become political power and how those dynamics operate within society. Hopefully, ultimately it’s about the power of fiction in cinema too. So, yeah, it was a very rich territory. So, I had to say yes to this movie.

Ha, yes, you’re articulating precisely what I love about this movie. And I love the marriage of all these conceptual, emotional, and spiritual ideas and how they all fit together. The Bible is essentially a big fictional fable anyhow, and storytelling in itself is an act of faith because we have to suspend our disbelief, which is a crucial element to experiencing cinema too. So it feels like you’re commenting on storytelling while telling your story.

 Well, thank you. And yes, it has always been said that the mechanisms of believing that cinema can trigger and activate when it’s powerful are very similar or the same ones that we use to believe in whatever we believe. So there is a deep relationship between cinema and faith.

And in a story about the power of fiction in our lives and societies, I wanted to find a way for the film itself, as an object, to be part of the problem. And for the viewer as someone interacting with that fictional mechanism to be actively participating. To be aware that they were going to be exposed to the power of fiction and they were going to observe characters deeply believing in their stories, most of them by default, stories by default or inherited stories.

 And then also observing some characters that have the audacity to confront the mandate of the community and come up with the wrong chosen story, which is something that has always interested me thematically. In a certain way, “A Fantastic Woman” is also about that. Right. So, the breathing rhythm that the film has—you are watching a movie, and then you will forget that, that you’re watching a film, and then you’re kindly reminded that you were believing just like the characters were believing. I thought all was important to depict, and especially because I think what’s very 2022 about the film is precisely that. We’re in a post-factual era, where the main casualty is what’s real or the truth. What we believe in, it’s essential, and it’s clearly political. In the era of Twitter, who are you believing in? What are you believing in? Do you believe in something you inherited, or have you really thought about it? And so I think it’s a way of saying to the viewer, I know you are responsible for what you are believing. It’s saying, please be aware, don’t just fall asleep in the film’s seduction. Have an active and yet hopefully pleasurable participation in the whole game."

 The Playlist, December 23, 2022.

 

 

 

L‘Evénement, directed by Audrey Diwan, France, 2021.

 An adaptation of Annie Ernaux's novel of the same name, looking back on her experience with abortion when it was still illegal in France in the 1960s.

 

 “The film is structured as a reverse countdown, racing against an ambiguous clock. What was the thought behind making time this almost physical force in the film?

 There was a sentence in the book — I’m going to badly translate it. To summarize, it was like, “Time wasn’t day-by-day, going to school and taking lessons. It has become something growing inside of me.” Time, this weird thing growing inside of you. I was like, "Ok, so, it's a body horror movie, this sentence, somehow."

In the first version of the screenplay, I thought, "If she's in a hurry, I'm going to make very short sequences." And then I realized that I must do the exact opposite. Time is simply time for everybody else, except for her. She's in her emergency, and we know it; we're connected to her as an audience because we know the timeline of pregnancy. But the rest of the youths have no idea, and they all take their time. It's the difference between those two time schedules that makes us feel how she feels.

It's relativity for women — those weeks exclude us from the rest of the world, time becomes secret inside your own body ... I wanted to think about this specific moment that takes you out of the world, out of time as the rest of the world experiences it.

 Most of the other characters of Anne’s age are sex-obsessed and talk a lot about sex, but also insisted that they’d never actually had sex. It sort of felt like she was the only person depicted in the film who was honest about her desires. Why was that?

 The way we talk about sex and pleasure is always full of hypocrisy. We worked a lot on that idea with my co-writer, Marcia Romano, because I wanted it to appear slowly. At first, it's only girls talking. Then it's one [pornographic] image [Anne’s classmates share]. Then it's a girl who imitates masturbation. And then my character is ready to embrace the idea of her own pleasure … I think this is something beautiful, but not everyone agrees with me.

There is some shame here. It's very interesting, the way we've been raised with the idea of shame. In the end, it's very political, because we're talking about the freedom of half of humanity. On one side, you have sex and shame, which are social and culture ideas. On the other, you have politics, because if you have sex [when abortion is banned] and you get pregnant, and you don't want it, it's your punishment — it’s the punishment for the girl who had sex.

I also feel like a film about restricting abortion would feel timely at any point in the past few years.

 It’s interesting, because when I first wrote Happening, many people asked, "Why do you want to make this movie now? We already have the law [legalizing abortion] in France.” I was like, "Oh, really? I hope you're going to ask the next filmmaker that wants to make a WWII movie the same question, ‘because it’s over, it’s over.’" I realized how much we were raised being silent about it. This sentence, coming over and over again, “Why do you want to make the movie?” — “Please stay silent, please stay silent.”

 GQ, May 27, 2022.

 

 

Grosse Freiheit, directed by Sebastian Meise,  Austria, Germany, 2021.

 Poignant drama about a victim of Paragraph 175, the German law that prohibited sexual acts between two men. The law was actively used until 1969 and not repealed until 1994. Main character Hans is a homosexual who is freed from a Nazi camp in 1945 and then immediately reimprisoned to serve a previous sentence. Over the years, he is tried again and again. Gradually he develops a complex friendship with addicted fellow inmate Viktor.

 "BR: You’re right, Paragraph 175 is a big blindspot in history and it was very insightful to watch and learn about it, I guess, in the same way that you did when researching. So, did you find your personal connection in Great Freedom‘s story through your research?

 SM: Well, the research was the basis, I knew I wanted to make a film about this. But the personal connection came with the characters, of course. Also, with the story between between the main characters between Hans and Victor, this was the point where I thought this is going to be good.

 BR: In regards to filming Great Freedom, I heard that you filmed a lot of it in an actual prison, not a built set. Can you talk about the challenges of working in such an environment?

 SM: Well, it is challenging, concerning the space as it was really limited shooting in those small cells. The location wasn’t big. It was cold in winter, very cold, and it was dirty. Then we had to bring the lights to the second floor, it was really complicated. But on the other hand, we had the discussion if we should build the cells in the studio, but I was against it because I think shooting in a real location does something to the atmosphere of the filming process. It was, in the end, a film set as it was not in real, functioning prison. But, it’s a place with a lot of history, which does something not only to the actors, but also to the whole team.

“BR: The way that the film is structured is over three time periods, what was your approach to creating that jump between World War II and the late 60s?

 SM: Well, I knew I wanted to start it after the war, this was always clear. As this was the starting point that that gay people were liberated from concentration camps, but were put directly into prisons after. Then I wanted to cover the old, post war era until the amendment of the paragraph in ’69. So, ’45 was clear and ’69 was clear, then in ’57 there was an amendment in the GDR of Paragraph 175, that’s why we used that year.

 BR: Also, in terms of visually creating those years, were you thinking of making any notable differences?

 SM: In a prison, things don’t tend to change too much. This is what I also liked about the location because it’s somehow universal as there are bars, cells and solitary confinement everywhere. It has a kind of universality to it, it’s timeless, in a way. But we did try to make some differences, very subtly in the lightning. In ’45, we just used bulbs with yellow-ish, tungsten light. Then, in the 50s, we had fluorescent lights with a yellow, green tint. It gets colder in the 60s, creating a feeling of modernity. But, we agreed to keep it simple and as subtle as possible. It’s more or less in the little details. If you look closely, you can see the differences.”

 

Awardswatch, March 3,  2022.

 

 

 

 

Men, directed by Alex Garland, United Kingdom, 2022.

 Following the apparent suicide of her husband James, Harper Marlowe decides to spend a holiday alone in the village of Cotson, Hertfordshire, hoping to heal. But someone or something from the surrounding woods appears to be stalking her. What begins as simmering dread becomes a fully-formed nightmare, inhabited by her darkest memories and fears.

 “Men deals with types of masculinity, and there are #MeToo elements.

 #MeToo was like a magnifying glass that focused a lot of people’s attention, but to my memory – I’m 52 – there was still attention on that stuff prior to [the movement] and there was a lot of awareness of [its issues]. It’s the kind of thing my parents might have spoken about in the 1970s. They’d have used slightly different terms, but they’d have been talking about exactly the same thing. You could find any number of writers or commentators or activists who would be addressing this.

 You seem as though you’re satirising a lot of things and commenting on grief, there’s perhaps a look at motherhood in there, among other topics.

 Usually what I try to do is I’ll make a film that has an argument in it, but the argument is not there if people don’t see it or are not interested in it, or don’t want it.

 For example, a film like Ex Machina could be just a sci-fi story about a robot escaping, or it could be seen as a discussion on objectification or gender or whatever you want to say it is. In Men, I wanted it to be able to function as just a ghost story, so a woman has lost her husband in extreme circumstances. She goes away to process it, and in processing it effectively finds herself haunted by memories, or maybe a kind of physical manifestation of her husband or his anger, his unreasonableness, or whatever you want to call it.

 Then there’s a bunch of other stuff, and it’s layered. The key thing from my point of view is that none of the different layers are in conflict with each other. They can all just sit side by side and the viewer can find their own interpretations, or find their own levels that they’re interested in or not interested in. I just step back and say, “There’s the film, take it or leave it. 

You’ve got Rory Kinnear playing lots of different parts. What was your thinking behind that?

 It wasn’t the original idea. When I wrote it, I was assuming there would be lots of different actors, but at a certain point I thought there was something interesting about the title being a plural and having one person doing all these roles.

 I like setting up questions without necessarily forcing an answer. I think films often feel a need to provide answers to all the questions. In the case of Jessie Buckley’s character, if I have one actor playing all the parts, what inference can the audience draw from that? One of them might be, “Oh, well, all these men are the same, but she doesn’t realise it. Or she sees all men as the same, but they’re not.” They’re two inferences that sound very similar, but have really very, very different implications. So that bit of casting just jams that kind of question into the story.”

 BFI, May 25, 2022.

 

 

La Nuit du 12, directed by Dominik Moll, France, Belgium, 2022.

 

It is said that every investigator has a crime that haunts them, a case that hurts him more than the others, without him necessarily knowing why. For Yohan Vivès, just been promoted to chief inspector at the Grenoble Criminal Investigation Department that case is the murder of Clara. She was gruesomely killed on the night of the 12th, but there is no trace of the perpetrator. Vivès and his seasoned partner Marceau interrogate suspect after suspect, but they do not reach a solution.

"Even though it’s a man’s world, you focus on your characters and your casting from a very different perspective. Take for example Anouk Grinberg, who plays the judge, or Charline Paul as the mother of the victim. They play small parts, but their contribution to the film is crucial. Charline Paul appears in three scenes, and when she doesn’t even have to say one word, her presence is still all over the screen.

 I am very lucky to work with two female casting directors that I admire, and they know the actors in France and Belgium very well. We’ve known each other for quite some time, so they know what I’m looking for. The casting process took quite some time, especially for small parts, like the mother, but also all the suspects as most of them only have one scene. The suspect who hit his wife, for example, he’s despicable and horrible, but he also has something fascinating and you can feel that she was attracted to him. I want all characters, even the villains, to exist in their complexity. And if a character—any character—has only one scene, it becomes even more difficult to ensure that he or she exists, than when you have several scenes and you can see the character’s evolution. The casting directors saw a lot of actors and did many screen tests; also for the actors who play the crime squad and their colleagues, like Yohan [played by Bastien Bouillon] and Marceau [Bouli Lanners], it was important to have that group dynamic which is also very present in the book. For some, it’s not even their second family; it’s their first family. You feel that without that group, they would blow a fuse rather quickly. I spent a week with the crime squad in Grenoble and I felt very strongly about how important the group was, and how they got along and supported each other. That was something we paid a lot of attention to when we were casting. But to get back to your question, for the role of the mother, we saw quite a lot of actresses and it didn’t work, until they had the idea of casting Charline Paul. She is a comedy actress who is also very funny in real life. Another casting director probably wouldn’t have thought of her because it’s a dramatic part and she only does comedy, but she was just great. And we knew that right away. Sometimes it’s a long process to find the right actors, but when it works, it really does, and you feel it immediately.

The film makes a statement by saying that twenty percent of all crimes are unsolved. But I suppose it has a bigger message or purpose?

 Message films are tricky because delivering a message is a bit presumptuous. If you deliver a message, that means you almost have the answer to the question, and I don’t. What’s important for me is to ask questions, and the most important question that I got with this film is that in this world of the police, dominated by men, how do they question their reflexes or their thoughts. And I was also interested in how the character of Yohan evolves throughout the film, and the exchanges he has with the few women characters, the first one being Nanie [Pauline Serleys], the friend of the victim, and see how he thinks. Because, at one point, he’s always asking who the victim had been sleeping with, and Nanie tells him, ‘By asking those questions, it’s almost like suggesting it was her fault.’ When a girl or a woman has been killed and you hear that she had many lovers or that she enjoyed hanging out with bad boys, people jump to the conclusion that maybe it was a little bit her fault. That’s just completely absurd, and it’s something you would never suggest for a man who has many adventures. Because for a man, it would be something positive, he’s a ladies’ man. So these kinds of reflexes and thoughts are things I wanted to focus on throughout the whole film.

 In your films, those provincial mountain areas seem to be important to you, don’t they? What attracted you to shoot the film in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in the French Alps?

 I indeed have an attraction for mountains, even as a person. I like to hike in the mountains, although that’s not a reason to make films there. I always wanted to shoot a film in Grenoble because it’s a big city surrounded by mountains; it’s almost as if you were a prisoner of those mountains. In the Maurienne valley, it’s even more because it’s a very steep valley. The mountains are very beautiful, but at the same time, they have something threatening and overpowering. For me, it also symbolizes the fact that you can’t see the horizon, and the investigators in the film are also stuck; they can’t see far enough. That’s a bit theoretical as an explanation, but we had that idea in mind. What I also like about the Maurienne valley, and Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in particular, is that it’s a city that’s full of contrast. It’s in the mountains and normally you’d say, ‘Okay, a mountain city, that’s pretty and picturesque.’ But Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne is not at all like that; it’s a very industrial city with a big aluminum factory that employs over seven hundred people. The valley is very polluted. So it’s industrial, and at the same time you have the ski resorts, you have housing projects but also very nice, small houses. It’s a mini world where you can find all kinds of different atmospheres, and that’s something I liked about that city.”

 Filmtalk, July 12, 2022.

 

 

Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik, United States of America, 2022.

 The film, following a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, is a thinly veiled fictionalisation of Monroe’s life and death, with a particular focus on her difficult childhood, her troubled relationships with men and her own gynaecological trouble, as she struggles to bridge the gap between Marilyn the star and Norma Jeane the traumatised woman.

 

“Would you say that in this story you see Monroe as a symbolic vessel for a story about childhood trauma or abuse?

 I’ve read everything there is to read about Marilyn Monroe. I’ve met people that knew her. I’ve done an enormous amount of research. But in the end, it’s about the book. And adapting the book is really about adapting the feelings that the book gave me. I see the film, in some ways, as Joyce’s vision of Marilyn, which is also really Joyce. So I think the film is about the meaning of Marilyn Monroe. Or a meaning. She was symbolic of something. She was the Aphrodite of the 20th century, the American goddess of love. And she killed herself. So what does that mean?

 Joyce is trying to understand how it expresses a certain female experience, or a certain human experience. You have to play fast and loose with the truth in order to have a certain narrative drive. But there are a lot of psychological processes that are dramatised in Blonde, a lot of Lacanian and Freudian ideas. For me it was just the scenes I found compelling. I went with my instinct and wrote it pretty quick. And I didn’t change it that much, even though it was sitting around for 14 years. I know the ways in which this is different from what people seem to agree happened. Not that everyone’s sure. Nobody really knows what the fuck happened. So it’s all fiction anyway, in my opinion.

 Do you think the film does much to unpack or reverse the idea of Monroe being crazy or difficult?

 I think… it explains why. I mean, everyone’s crazy. When we’re talking about Marilyn, whether you’re reading a book by Gloria Steinem [Marilyn: Norma Jeane, 1988] or by Norman Mailer [Marilyn: A Biography, 1973 – which Steinem’s book was written in response to], both are projections and fantasies. Marilyn represents a kind of rescue fantasy. And the film is no different. The film is a rescue fantasy. We feel we have a special intimacy with her character. That’s the attraction to Marilyn, that feeling that we’re the only ones who understand. That we could have saved her somehow. And maybe the flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or a sexual fantasy. 

What you said about the idea of transposing modern values on people from the past, I agree that that’s not healthy. Because I think it’s very important to understand that women in particular had to exist within the confines of the world that they lived in. But I feel there are cultural repercussions to making certain choices in terms of how we present a figure from the past. What does it say to an audience that we’re not seeing that she formed her own production company, or that she was involved in opposing the anti-communist witch-hunts by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s? Or that she fought against segregation on behalf of Ella Fitzgerald, and so on?

 That stuff is not really what the film is about. It’s about a person who is going to be killing themself. So it’s trying to examine the reasons why they did that. It’s not looking at her lasting legacy. I mean, she’s not even terribly concerned with any of that stuff. If you look at Marilyn Monroe, she’s got everything that society tells us is desirable. She’s famous. She’s beautiful. She’s rich. If you look at the Instagram version of her life, she’s got it all. And she killed herself. Now, to me, that’s the most important thing. It’s not the rest. It’s not the moments of strength. OK, she wrested control away from the men at the studio, because, you know, women are just as powerful as men. But that’s really looking at it through a lens that’s not so interesting to me. I’m more interested in how she feels, I’m interested in what her emotional life was like.

 Your version, or Oates’ version, of this character is so relentlessly unhappy. Even though she’s capable of radiating so much joy on the screen.

 Well, I think her life would have been incredibly unhappy. There are moments of joy and love, but years of unhappiness. If she found joy, she could potentially be alive today. You could be talking to her.

 Tell me about your use of foetal imagery in the film: of the unborn baby in the womb and with some scenes from inside the uterus during an abortion.

 Well, she wants to have a child because she wants to rescue herself. Her own experience of motherhood is disastrous, based on her own mother [who spent years in a psychiatric institution]. But that baby is real to her, and so that’s why you see the baby. I don’t think the scene would feel as real [otherwise]. And also, she’s having a reluctant abortion. So it would be pretty horrible. I’m trying to create her experience. I’m trying to put the audience through the same thing. I’m not concerned with being tasteful.”

 Sight and Sound, September 27, 2022.

 

 

Un bon matin, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, France, United Kingdom, Germany, 2022

 A young single mother raising an 8-year-old daughter struggles to take care of her father, who's been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. While trying to secure a decent nursing home, she runs into a married friend and they begin an affair.

 “I was struck by the title of the film—One Fine Morning in English, Un beau matin in French—because it refers within the film to a suicide, but it also represents serendipity in a positive way. It’s on one fine morning that Sandra and Clément, two long-lost friends and soon-to-be lovers, suddenly run into each other. To me, this duality seems to represent the role of chance in all your films. 

 I knew I had the idea of the title when I started writing, and it helped me a lot by giving me some kind of direction. But I don’t know exactly when the title came to my mind. One of the things I enjoyed about it when I found it was that I felt like I was writing some kind of diptych with L’avenir [Things to Come (2016)], which in some way could be a film about my mother. And this one would be like the reverse: even though it’s a portrait of a woman, it’s a portrait of my father as well, even if he is not the main character. We feel a lot about his past life, even though we don’t know it exactly. L’avenir had the same kind of openness and ambiguity. L’avenir [or “the future,” in English] could be seen as an ironic title because it is about this woman who is so unsure about her future, and the film brings her back to thinking there is a future for her.

 I’m always happy when I find very simple titles. You often realize that the most simple titles have never been used. I also think it’s very right for the film because the film is about the cruelty of life—the fact that [Sandra] has to leave her father at the end in order to live her own life and to be happy—but there is also openness and light in it. When we say Un beau matin, we see light.

 In the press notes, you say that you can’t make a film with a tragic ending. This is true of many of your films, but especially this one—it has this coexistence of grief, mortality, and the cruelties of life with a lightness that never seems forced. Since so many of your films are inspired by your life, I was wondering if that’s how you view life, or is cinema a fantasy for you, a way of imposing a happy ending on life?

 Your question connects with what’s at the heart of everything for me as a director. It deals with what cinema is really about, why we make films. For me, the whole point is to find a way to do two things at the same time, and those two things can be contradictory sometimes. One thing is capturing life the way it is in the most truthful, honest way you can. Achieving lucidity, I would say. And on the other hand, I want films to help me to live. So the whole question for me is: how can I be as honest as possible—how can I be true about my experience of life—without provoking despair? If I just focus on my father’s life, the last chapter of his life, I will find no consolation. It’s so sad, and not only because of his sickness, but because after that, he got COVID-19 and died in the most horrible way you could imagine.

 If you just look at one aspect of life, you find reasons to despair, but if you look at more things, you realize that maybe we just have to broaden our lens. Then you find reasons to hope, and that’s what I try to do. But while I was making this film, I didn’t feel I was betraying the truth—I just felt I was closest to the truth, because life is never about only one thing. When my father was dying of COVID-19, I was pregnant, to give you another example of how life confronts us with very opposing things. I don’t think I’m cheating or artificially creating some happy ending where there shouldn’t be one. It’s more the opposite to me. Sometimes when writers make films about difficult topics, they just press and press and press again as if there was more realism to it. But to me there’s even more artifice in pressing the same button.”

 Film Comment, May 24, 2022.

 

 

 

 

Nuevo orden, directed by Michel Franco, Mexico, France, 2020.

 In 2020, the gap between social classes in Mexico is increasingly marked. A high-society wedding is interrupted by a group of armed and violent rioters who are part of an even larger uprising of the underprivileged, and take the participants as hostages. The Mexican Army exploits the disorder caused by the riots to establish a military dictatorship in the country. It involves the kidnappings of young adults, extortion, assaults, torture of the kidnapped while being held, and execution upon receiving no ransom, some of it, or all of it, by the Mexican military.

 “Naian Gonzalez Norvind’s character plays the role of the rich helping the poor against her own benefit. Just briefly, please tell me a little bit about both the character and the actress.

 As a matter of fact, the actress and the character are quite similar; I wrote it specifically for her. There is a lot of Naian in that character. I have known her since she was 14 because she’s the sister of the actress in After Lucia. She’s that kind of positive person wanting to help and make things differently, and that might get her disappointed. She’s not as naive as the character but she’s as kind as her. There is a lot of heroine in the character.

 Do you think she plays that turning point in the story where people realise that not everything is black or white but a yin and yang sort of thing?

 She’s a reminder within her family that things are not right. But does she fully understand their situation? She is willing to leave her own wedding for a little while to make a very good deal, but is she really willing to sacrifice more than that? I don’t think she understands what that means… To me, that’s also interesting. She’s very naive.

 Nevertheless, the film winds her up in a situation that looks more political than socially critical. Could you please elaborate on that point?

 The second part of the movie talks about the military. When I made the film, I didn’t want to talk about left or right wings or any kind of political ideas as it would’ve been much smaller than it is and people from different places wouldn’t relate to it. I would be giving a narrow point of view.

What I do want to talk about is who can think and defend militarizing. Is that a good idea? Have we learned anything from the past? Look at all the dictatorships in South America in the last few decades. Even now with the pandemic, some governments are taking advantage of the situation to fully control the population. Will they give away that control once the pandemic is over? I don’t know whether they will tell the truth. What I want to say is very clear, and that’s why my main character is put in their hands. It’s so devastating.”

 Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro, Alejandro Iñarritu; I believe all these figures have helped to establish Mexican filmmaking. How do you see the current filmmaking scene in the country?

 I think Mexican cinema is very powerful, one of the strongest in the world. I identify myself a lot more with the likes of Amat Escalante – he's my favourite Mexican film director. Then, of course, there is Lorenzo Vigas, my business partner; we produce films together. He won a Golden Lion with his first movie and has a new film coming out next year. I think the difference between the three big names and ourselves is that we are still living and shooting in Mexico. That’s a big difference.”

Metal, November 25, 2020.

 

 

 

Huda’s Salon, directed by Hany Abud-Assad, Egypt, Netherlands, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, 2021.

 Nadia, a young mother married to a jealous man, goes to Huda's salon in Bethlehem, for a haircut and an attentive ear. But this ordinary visit turns sour when Huda, after having put Nadia in a shameful situation, blackmails her to have her work for the secret service. As Nadia escapes the salon, that same night, Huda is arrested by Hasan. They find nameless pictures of all the women Huda recruited, including Nadia's. Huda knows that she will be executed the moment she gives up the names. She tries to bide herself as much time as possible.

 “HtN: Well, it’s a very complex story and I really appreciate the way you approach multiple sides to every issue. Your ideological perspective is not monolithic. How is the film being received back home or, if it has yet to screen there, how do you think it will be received?

 HA-A: So far it has only been playing at festivals. But Arab women are the ones who will most understand this story, because they understand exactly how vulnerable they are in a society where some of the men are misogynistic and will prefer to punish the victim rather than to lose their authority. Because in this kind of situation, they cannot punish the real perpetrators; they have no authority over the occupiers, but they still have authority over the victim. They prefer to punish the victim and keep their authority.

So, although not all men in Palestine are misogynists, in general the women will understand this kind of situation more than men. And it was shown at a festival in Saudi Arabia and when the lights came up, I watched the faces of the women in the audience and saw the horror of what they had experienced. And some of them were crying. So I felt as if I had captured the experience from a woman’s point of view.

 HtN: And certainly your ending doesn’t resolve anything, so I can imagine how women who may empathize with Reem would be left in a certain kind of tragic place. How did COVID-19 affect the production. I understand you had to shut down for 7 months. Is that right?

 HA-A: Yes. You know, it was a nightmare, I have to say, although there is a good side to it, because when you shut down for so long you have more time to write your story. And in some ways, I really made it a better script. But during the shoot I had the constant fear that somebody would get sick and I would feel responsible. And at that time, no company would insure us from COVID or the consequence of COVID. So many times I made compromises and decided not to do things as I had originally planned, hoping to maybe fix it in the editing room. And I therefore felt, while editing, that I did not have a lot of options to explore. So, that was a negative effect. But the rewriting of the script over those 7 months was a positive.

 HtN: You have many long takes in the movie, particularly in that opening scene where, yes, you do shock us because Huda suddenly reveals herself to be something we didn’t think she was. How did you devise that aesthetic for this particular movie?

 HA-A: The reason why it is one shot is because I realized I wanted to make a movie where the audience is stuck in time and place. Editing makes the movie digestible: you can accept the passage of time easily. With a single take, you have to wait while they move from one room to the other and you are stuck with them. This intensifies the experience of Reem being drugged and effectively raped … for her, it is like being raped.

 And in the same sense, I wanted to explore the cinematic contradiction between the objective and subjective points of view. When you are stuck in time and place, you are a witness and you are not subjective, as an audience. And I wanted to explore a way to make even this objective point of view a subjective one. So I played with the camera movement in a way that when I wanted it to become subjective, the camera became a mirror for the character, coming closer to her, and what she sees, we see. But meanwhile, you are still stuck there in the objective position, as somebody who cannot be manipulated, stuck there in time and place.”

 Hammer to Nail, March 5, 2022.

 

 

Nope, directed by Jordan Peele, United States of America, Canada, Japan, 2022.

 A man and his sister discover something sinister in the skies above their California horse ranch, while the owner of a nearby theme park tries to profit from the mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon.

 “The Eadweard Muybridge loop looms over Nope; your characters are said to be descendants from its unnamed rider. To you, what does it mean that the erasure of Black men was there at the foundation of cinema?

 It’s a sad part of this industry. It was something I was learning at a good point for myself in this story. I felt like five, 10 years ago, I would never have been able to sell this movie to anyone. So I’m juxtaposing this origin story of film at the same time I’m trying to make a story that’s scary and joyous and adventurous and everything I love about film. It just felt very fitting for that starting point to be acknowledged and have ancestral implications for our main characters.

Do you think of your movie as like an antidote to that film?

 Yes. I’ve been trying to put that together. It’s a sequel, it’s an antidote, it’s a reboot, it’s an answer to the way films began and have continued.

 Kaluuya and Palmer’s characters work on movie sets and Nope centres on their attempts to capture something on film. To you, is Nope about the movie industry?

 It became very meta very quick. Making a movie is basically like chasing the impossible, trying to bottle something that doesn’t exist. I was inspired by films like King Kong and Jurassic Park that really deal with the human addiction to spectacle and the presentation and monetization of that. The meta part is you’re commenting on this notion at the same time you’re trying to utilize it and trying to create something that people can’t look away from.

 Why do you think in writing Nope your thoughts went back to the beginning of film?

 Part of the world of Nope is flirting with real Hollywood and the Hollywood that takes place in my liminal dreams and nightmares. In real life, of the prominent Hollywood horse trainers, there’s not an African American one I’m representing. The Haywoods are a very made-up family and notion. It was fun to weave the Hollywood fiction with reality and try and make a seamless immersion into what’s real and what’s not.

 Since seeing your film, clouds have taken on a sinister appearance to me. What led you to build your film around that image of an unmoving cloud?

 The beauty of the sky is enthralling – the first movies, in a way. Every now and then you’ll see a cloud that sits alone and is too low, and it gives me this vertigo and this sense of Presence with a capital P. I can’t describe it, but I knew if I could bottle that and put it into a horror movie, it might change the way people look at the sky.

 How much were you thinking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

 Yeah, Close Encounters is something I think about a lot, as is Signs by M. Night Shyamalan. These are big-vision directors who have taken flying saucers and science fiction and have brought magic to the way they told those stories. I wanted to toss my hat in the ring to one of my favourite sub-genres, in UFOs, and do it in a way only I can.”

The Globe and Mail, July 22, 2022

 

Memoria, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Colombia,Thailand, France, Germany, Mexico, Qatar, United Kingdom, China, United States of America, Switzerland, 2021.

 Jessica, a woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon it becomes apparent that she is the only one who perceives it. It leads to a meandering, sensory exploration of Bogotá and beyond. With the help of a young sound designer, she attempts to reproduce the sound-a thump? a bang? a thump? a rumble from the bowels of the earth?

While visiting an archaeologist friend, she views and touches human bones thousands of years old, excavated from the site of a tunnel being built. In a village near the site, she meets a man who can remember every event of his life-complete with a few painful memories of others.

 ““Memoria” is in a way a film about communicating and connecting – this is performed through many layers, one of which is sound. You connect the sound with the earth; the metallic “bang” appearing in the first shot of the film sounds “earthly, like the core of Earth”, as Jessica explains its sonic structure. How did you establish this connection – sound with Earth?

 The way I operate is really transparent with each film. It connects with my experience. That is genuinely the feeling I had when I went through the episode of the Exploding Head Syndrome. When you lie there, your head is on the pillow, on the bed, with all the noise in your head, you start to feel that everything’s connected – to your body, the floor, the different floors down below, and finally, to Earth. It felt to me that this sound activated the sense of connection – between self and Earth. Essentially, the experience became about self-realization, it came afterwards as an understanding of the peculiar notion, that everyone is connected through different sorts of vibrations. It’s not only the planet but the way you talk, the way you move, the way our minds vibrate; everybody is connected and we have really no choice but to be part of this – vibration.

There are so many scenes revolving only about the act of listening: Jessica listening to Hernan’s music, where we can only hear a slight change of the weather; Jessica participating in the concert, of which we have no vision at first; Jessica listening to the sounds of the monkeys across the river, which we don’t see. These scenes become about participation – and I must say I’ve never participated in something like this. How did the premise of these scenes appear in your head?

 For me, memory is a vehicle for listening and participating, inasmuch as it is a way to experiment with the soundscape of cinema. It comes from me: my own preference of living, my experience, my perspective. When I want to stay focused or when I feel stressed, sound becomes the first sense that I resort to – sound is the first element that comes to my mind. I think that more than visual contact – watching or seeing – it is always the sound that calms me down or makes me focused. It’s a very acute notion. And since there is a complicit relationship with Jessica, we have to listen. Maybe in other films, sound is not that important, but for “Memoria” you’re superimposed to do so, as it becomes a kind of conditioning for participation. When I first watched “Memoria” after we finished it, I felt that the film made me calm down. The whole process also made me realize I needed to make almost real-life like instructions on how to focus and stop for a moment, and tell yourself – hey, just ‘be’.

 I found in your notes that sound is the last sense to go when you die.

 This is what Tilda [Swinton] told me, actually. I think during the pre-production, we met from time to time and she was recounting the experience of being with her dad shortly before he passed away. This is when she told me this, “the sound is the last sense we experience”. I didn’t think of that this way. But I really hope this is the fact. It was very moving for me, to absorb this information at that particular moment, but also – it was very moving to have this form of a unique collaboration that we established.

 And so is the research you’ve made for the film. Fungi, archaeology, human bones, tired mountain syndrome – it’s all very organic. The last time we spoke, you described the process of gathering data as a synchronization – with the information, but also the rhythm, your rhythm and that of the narrative. What made you connect it this way with the research?

 I think it’s always been a similar process for each of my films. It’s about how I gravitate around the topics I’m finding interesting at the time of being. But more so in “Memoria”, because it’s concerning Colombia, I felt I was a kid back again. With a completely new and foreign environment, I could explore and through that, I could re-activate my curiosity – about archaeology or infections, but also everything, in general, that is able to give me the spark to move in a certain direction, to different places. So it’s also organic in a way, that it was entirely there; it was there to be found and I didn’t know what was gonna come up. I just needed to collect all of these.

Asian Movie Pulse, April 24, 2022.

 

 

 

Drii Winter, directed by Michael Koch, Switzerland, Germany, 2022.

 In a remote mountain village, the still young love of Anna and Marco is put to serve a test. As a result of the brain tumor, Marco increasingly loses his impulse control. In the tense relationship between the village community and the effects of Marco's illness, Anne tries to preserve a love that in the end outshines even death.

 

“How did this come about?

 Michael Koch: Years ago, I met a young woman in a remote mountain [town] who told me her story about her husband who changed a lot during illness. I was really touched by the way she coped with her challenges and how she reacted to it, especially how she found this difficult period a way back to her husband and accompanied him to his death. It was such a great human gesture, and I thought I would like to write a story about her, and I met all these people in this remote Alpine village and I thought it would be really nice to include them in the movie. So the idea was born to make the movie with nonprofessional actors because they bring something really special to the film and I decided to shoot my movie with them together.

 With all the research you did Michel, how much did you want to give to the cast when what you liked about them came naturally?

 Michael Koch: I always told them “Stay yourself. Don’t act,” because I wanted something really personal from them. Michèle was an exception, but the other protagonists, I told them stay yourself and I adapted the screenplay a lot to these characters and I just wanted to have something really authentic about them. Besides the story of Anna and Marco, [I wanted to express] how it is to live in this remote place on these steep hills in this narrow valley, and what it is like to work there with the animals in the mountain farmer’s life. I think they’re really special and they taught me that you often have situations in life that you cannot control and you have to learn to accept this. They [have] this really strong, stoic behavior because nature teaches them that they cannot control everything — you have like avalanches coming down and this heavy weather, so you have to adapt and stay calm in order to succeed. That’s what they taught me.

 It was important for me to have a lot of shooting days, so that we could react to what happens, to the weather for example or also to some work the farmers did. For example, there’s one scene where hay bales are coming out of the white sky down [from the mountain] and it wasn’t planned in the script because I didn’t know they do it in winter. When I talked to the farmer and he said, “Okay, we’re going to get some hay bales down” the next day, I thought, “Okay, we have to shoot this scene” and then we waited here until the moment when the weather changed a little bit, so we have this nice foggy atmosphere, and then we see the mountain on the other side. For me, this way to shoot the film, you get some unexpected lovely scenes and you have to be really prepared, but then you get some wonderful things and from time to time.

Is it true it actually took two years to convince Simon to be part of the film?

 Michael Koch: Yeah, because I met Simon years ago on a cattle show and he stayed in my mind. I was sure that he’s the one, but he told me really early that he was not interested in movies and he hasn’t got time. But I kept visiting him over the years, telling him about the project and how perfect he fits the main character’s role, trying to persuade him over two or three years. In the end, he said, “Okay, I’m going to accept it because I like you, but I’m just going to do it for you. I don’t do it because I want to be in the movies.” I was really happy to have him because he has a great presence. His physicality is really impressive, but at the same moment, he has something quite melancholic inside him. It’s like a treasure hidden inside himself, so I was really interested in this, but actually this was quite a challenge to get all the nonprofessional [cast] — all the people you see — in the movie because everyone was not excited about it in the beginning, except Michèle. But it’s also understandable that these farmers have a lot to do, especially during summer, and the more they didn’t want to be in the movie, the more I was fascinated by them, so at the end, I was just asking them again and again until they said, “Okay, we do it for you.” [laughs]

 The Moveable Fest, November 28, 2022.

 

 

Ali & Ava, directed by Clio Barnard, United Kingdom, 2021.

Ali is an always good-humoured and concerned landlord. When he picks up a child of one of his tenants from school, he offers Ava, an Irish-born teacher and single mother of five, a ride. They immediately click because of their shared love of music, even though Ali's tastes, with their preference for fierce British punk and hip-hop, differ from Ava's. A relationship blossoms that is soon overshadowed by the traces of Ava's previous relationship and the collapse of Ali's marriage.

 

“For this film, you did a workshopping process where the real-life inspirations for the characters are participating with the actors. What does that look like in practice?

 There are different phases to it, I suppose. The first is the sketch of the idea, as I didn’t have a full script. I’ve worked with Adeel Akhtar, who plays Ali, and Rebecca Manley, who was in The Selfish Giant. Rebecca had gotten to know Rio, who Ava’s based on, while making The Selfish Giant. Adeel had listened to lots of recordings that I’d done with Moey Hassan, who Ali’s based on. I devised a workshop with Rebecca around potential themes, and then they improvised. We took just two days trying out different things. The scene in the car, quite a bit of that came from that initial workshop, as did the scene in Ali’s basement when Ava comes to visit him. And, I think, the scene on the doorsteps came from that initial workshop.

 I’ll go away [after] and write a draft, and then we did another set of workshops in Bradford with Rio. She sat in the room with us, and Rebecca was working with me again. Shaun [Thomas] was playing Callum, and Rio was watching and giving notes. We were encouraging her to get up and get involved in doing some performing as well! But she’s a funny mixture of sharp, shy, and not shy. She’s very apt to say, “No, that’s not right,” very confidently. That’s what those two different workshops were like. Then, I went back to the script and spent time in my shed at the end of my garden where I am now. Using those workshops to build a script from, or going back to chat with Moey or Rio, there’s a kind of back-and-forth process.

 Was Claire Rushbrook not involved in the workshopping stage at all?

 She wasn’t. By the time Claire got involved, we actually had quite a honed script. Like I said, Adeel was involved from before the beginning. We had a more conventional casting process for Ava. We met Claire first and had a chat. We met a few different people from quite a short list—I think three people—with [casting director] Shaheen Baig. We did a casting workshop, and they did three different scenes that have been written but I then asked them to improvise around. They did the scene on the sofa with the headphones, and Claire just really made me laugh and moved me. You could see that there was a real spark between her and Adeel.

 I had wondered if Claire brought any expertise from her collaboration with Mike Leigh, who has perhaps the most storied workshopping process in cinema.

 I love her in Secrets & Lies, she’s so brilliant. I don’t know whether she drew on that experience with Mike Leigh. I know that once she came up to Bradford, because the production was sort of up and running when we were in prep, she went and spent a lot of time with Rio and her family. She did this brilliant thing of creating this on-screen family, because her granddaughters are all non-actors who had never done it before.

 What’s the goal of having real people so involved in the production process? Is it to make your performers feel like they’re channeling real people rather than characters?

 Not really. I’ve been making films in that very specific way for over 10 years now. It’s more about meeting people, feeling inspired by them, and wanting to see their stories on the big screen. I would say these are fictional biographical portraits that are made in collaboration with the people who inspired them. The Selfish Giant was inspired by real boys I met when I was making The Arbor, and The Arbor is a semi-documentary about real people. It’s about lives that often go uncelebrated or unseen and wanting them to have a place on the big screen.

 

Slant, July 28, 2022.

 

 

P.S. 

1. Other notable films : (alphabetical) : Avec Amour et  Acharnement, directed by Claire Denis; C’mon C’mon, directed by Mike Mills; Close, directed by Lucas Dhont;  Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde, directed by Dominik Graf; The Innocents, original title De uskyldige, directed by Eskil Vogt;  Les Intranquilles, directed by Joachim Lafosse; Lamb, original title Dýrið,  directed by Valdemar Jóhannsson; Mothering Sunday, directed by Eva Husson; Pink Moon, directed by Floor van der Meulen;  The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by  Joel Coen; The Worst Person in the World, original title Verdens verste menneske,  directed by Joachim Trier.

 

2. Definitely in my top 5  if  it was distributed in The Netherlands.  Serre moi fort, directed by Mathieu Almaric, France, 2021. In this masterpiece Clarisse (Vicky Krieps)  leaves her husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) and children (played by four different actors at various points). But, was it this morning? Yesterday? Tomorrow? Or, ever? Amalric's screenplay adaptation of Claudine Galea's play, immediately makes it clear that little of what we see can be taken either linearly or even, literally. The film was shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022. 

 

3. Actress of the year : Vicky Krieps

Actor of the year : Franz Rogowski

Filmscore of the year : Matthew Herbert for The Wonder

Best photography  Robbie Ryan for C’mon C’mon (b/w) & Ari Wegner for The Wonder (colour)

Best Dutch film : Pink Moon by Floor van der Meulen