20. Mountains May Depart (2015, Zhangke Jia, China)

Zhangke Jia is one of the world’s great filmmakers. Every one of his films since 2000 has asked the question ‘What is China’s rapid economic expansion doing to people’s relationships?’ and his films tell us that it is not good news. He is deeply worried and pessimistic about the consequences of the rapid change of China in the modern age. His message is that it is causing a loss of identity and that the next generation pays dearly for it with alienation and meaninglessness.

In Mountains May Depart he paints that picture through three chapters in the life of a woman named Tao, in 1999, 2015 and 2025. In the first part we find her, full of excitement and prospect, at the time of the millennium shift with her two childhood friends, who both pursue her. One is a nouveau-rich who is constantly giving her presents and opens for her a material world of possibility. The other one is a reticent, but kind coal worker. Tao’s choice brings her material comfort and a son. In the mid-section we find Tao as a rich, separated woman, who is estranged from her son who lives with his father in Shanghai. In the third part, through Tao’s ex-husband who lives with their son in Australia, Jia paints the world of Chinese people who are drawn overseas for material reasons, but whose lives have lost cohesion and meaning. Once again, Zhangke Jia delivers a beautiful film with a profound message!

19. Winter Sleep (2014, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey)

This film is abundantly rewarding for those who do not get scared by its running time of over 3 hours and its talkiness, asking for your complete attention and presence. If you can reach beyond that you will be gripped by the amazing beauty of the Cappadocian landscape and by the emotional weight of the film’s character study. Aydin is an aging, formal actor, who has withdrawn to the countryside and runs a small hotel in the Anatolian hills. He spends most of his time writing articles about art, morality and religion. The film starts with an incident in which he tries to avoid getting involved, as if he is above that. From that moment his life of unengaged benevolence starts to crack. A large part of the film consists of lengthy conversations with his much younger wife, who feels trapped and with his recently divorced sister who is not afraid to confront him in his intellectual self-complacency. The strength of the film is that it gives hints of how character flaws may have grown, but also of how these might be redeemed. This is a rich, serious film, based on short stories by Anton Chekhov.

18. A Gentle Creature (2017, Sergey Loznitsa, Ukraine)

A Gentle Creature is a powerful, harrowing film about people being constantly violated by each other and an individual’s resolve to seek justice. It is the story of a nameless woman who lives in the countryside somewhere in Russia. A package that she tried to send to her imprisoned husband is returned without explanation. The only option left to her is to travel to the remote region in Siberia where he is imprisoned to deliver the package herself.

She has to deal with a society completely stripped of care and humanity. ”Man is a wolf to his fellow man”, the taxi driver who drives her to the prison building tells her. Loznitsa shows a society where every human being is a predator, making use of every soft spot the other shows. Whomever the woman, ‘the gentle creature’, meets during her travel to the prison village, whomever she is dependent on during her stay in the village and whatever authority she needs to contact to gain access to her husband, she is met with humiliation and abuse. This tough-to-see film confronts us with what a society looks like in which people only care about their own interests and survival. And it might become clearer for us what kind of world we absolutely don’t want to contribute to and what we want instead.

17. Atlantics (2019, Mati Diop, France)

Atlantics has been one of my absolute favourite films of the past year. It is aesthetically beautiful, it has a musical score full of emotions, it presents the trauma and hardships underlying the migration issue in Africa and there is more to it than meets the eye. French-Senegalese director Mati Diop integrates all of that in a fully engaging love-story. Set in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, located by the sea, the love story is between Ada and Souleiman, who is a construction worker. Souleiman and his co-worker friends, who haven’t been paid for three months, decide to seek their luck elsewhere and set out in an open boat for Spain. The story is really about Ada, whose parents have arranged for her to be married to a man from a well-to-do family. She is unhappy, feels alienated in the relationship and her heart remains with Souleiman. At the wedding Ada is depressed. Her friend tells her that Souleiman has been seen in town and then strange and inexplicable things start to happen!

16. For Sama (2019, Waad Al-Kateab, UK)

The most devastating and emotionally gripping documentary of the past decade for me was For Sama, the journey of a young woman and mother through the experience of war in Aleppo, Syria. Waad Al-Kateab dedicated her reportage of life in a war zone to her daughter Sama, who was born during this war. Waad Al-Kateab was a student when raised hopes during the Arab spring were crushed and the Syrian civil war reached Aleppo in 2012. She lived through its horrific years, fell in love and married a young doctor, Hamza. They got their first child Sama in January 2016 constantly facing suffering, misery and death and the threat of airstrikes on their hospital. They lived as a family through this chaos, destruction and constant danger during this last year of siege. She documented these horrors so that both us and her daughter should not forget. It fits us to honour her act of resistance by watching it!