15. My Happy Family (2017, Nana Ekvitimishvili, Simon Gross, Ukraine)

This Georgian film is an example of storytelling through film at its very best! Thoroughly engaging from beginning to end, it draws us into family issues and relationships that I am sure are not remote for anyone. And it has such a natural flow and subtlety in being real to life that you forget that you are looking at acting. It is about a middle aged woman, Manana, who feels compelled to leave her husband and her three generations household in a cramped apartment in Tbilisi in order to build a life of her own. It is about signals of emotional pain and what is missed by those who are closest. It shows how alone and desperate one can feel when pain is not observed or listened to, because maintaining the status quo and holding on to the image of a happy family seems easier. This film reveals essential human truths and pulls you into its drama of emotional need, affections and guilt in ways that feel true all the way.

14. Collective (2019, Alexander Nanau, Romania)

After much deliberation I have chosen Alexander Nanau’s Collective as the most outstanding documentary of the decade 2011-2020.

This powerful documentary about widespread corruption in the Romanian healthcare system is such a timely reminder of the devastating effects of a government lying to its citizens. The film starts with the 2015 nightclub fire in Bucharest that took the life of 27 people and left 180 people injured. In the next three or four months another 37 people died of their burn injuries. Investigative reporters from a sports magazine find a whole web of corruption and cover-ups that has brought death to those who should have survived. It unveils a system that is built on bribery, fraud and nepotism and how difficult it is to stand up to evil in this form. This story needs to be told in our times!

13. Shoplifters (2018, Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan)

It is hard for me to think of any list without at least one of the films of the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda on it! For me he is the master of heartbreaking, tender stories of gentleness in relationships. While Still Walking from 2008 would have been my highest ranked in the previous decade, Shoplifters from 2018 is the one I choose for the decade we have now under consideration.

Shoplifters is about a family who live in a shack in the outskirts of a city in contemporary Japan. Step by step we find out that it is not a family in the usual sense of the word. It is a group of needy people, who don’t belong anywhere. They have come together for survival and because they have shown kindness to one another.  It is a social critique showing the cold realities of Japanese contemporary society for those who are at the bottom. And it is a discussion of what it is that makes a group of people into a family. Koreeda continues to provide us with inspiring and graceful stories of humanness.

12. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2019, Charlie Kaufman, USA)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the third film of scriptwriter-director Charlie Kaufman. In all of his work Kaufman is occupied with the question of what goes on in the mind. In this film he takes it one step further with a complete labyrinth of clues, metaphors and references.  It is not an easy watch and it may need some imaginitive thinking and testing of different possible understandings.  A good film to discuss with others!

On the surface the story seems to be a simple one, particularly in the first three acts out of four. It starts with Lucy and Jake, a young couple in a relatively new relationship, taking a long car trip in a snow storm to meet his parents at their farmhouse. The title of the film is an early thought from Lucy about their relationship probably going nowhere. Their conversations in the car are the first act. The second act is the visit and the dinner at the house, where things become quite awkward. The third act is the drive back to the city in an intensifying snow storm with a detour to Jake’s high school, where they run into the old janitor. That meeting is the beginning of the fourth act, moving towards a surreal climax. It is not easy to describe what happens and how, but that might be the very point of the film. It is about how we construct reality in our mind, about aging and how we are haunted by how things could have been.

11. Burning (2018, Chang-dong Lee, South Korea)

Burning is a cryptic, brilliant tale of tragedy that cannot be recommended enough. Both the story and the visuals are totally captivating and ask for a second viewing. The story starts with a chance encounter of an aimless young writer, Jong-su, with a childhood classmate and then gradually opens a labyrinth of questions with only very few being answered in the film. Based on a short story from the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, it explores, like all Murakami’s work,

‘the loneliness that lurks beneath the trappings of modern life’.

Jong-su, grown up with a dysfunctional family background in a rural area close to the border with North Korea, is plunged into a modern world he neither can interpret nor handle. His encounter with his childhood classmate Hae-mi makes him see a world that looks better than the one he lives in, and the major part of the film is about him being more and more tormented by his inability to get there. The end of the film is a shocking reminder of the danger of this growing loneliness and frustration becoming unbearable.