45. Makala (2017, Emmanuel Gras, France)

This documentary film, awarded at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, has stayed vividly alive in my mind as a profound metaphor of life. It is the story of a young family father, Kabwita, living in the Congolese countryside who decides to make charcoal in order to create a future for his family. The film starts with the cutting down of a huge tree, the chopping up of the wood and the burning of it in a self-made earthy oven. The transportation of the overstuffed bags on a bicycle to the nearest city, 50 km away, is a superhuman effort. The selling of his charcoal at the city market is laborious and brings meagre profit. He reinvests the little money he made in materials that he needs for his plan to build a larger home for his family. Nothing comes easy. It takes all his strengths to realize the pursuits that he sees as worthwhile. Nobody else seems to care much, it is his motivation and his set of values that makes the difference. The film strikes an impressive balance between beauty and pain, as life tends to do.

44. Beware the Children (2019, Dag-Johan Haugerud, Norway)

The Norwegian film Beware of Children (Barn) has its start in a school context, where the accidental death of a thirteen old student gets deep relational and political consequences. It is a multi-narrative movie where everyone involved, the teachers, students and parents get involved in lengthy conversations and are drawn into the search for how it happened, what could be avoided and how it will impact their personal lives. Haugerud is mainly interested in the emotional traumas caused by this tragic incident. From every angle he takes a thorough look at the pressures on functions and relationships within this local network of people. Everyone is pressured by the loyalties one has and feels. Nothing is simplified or becomes melodramatic. It has the kind of emotions that we easily can identify with, making this film a great starting-point for group conversation.

43. Mustang (2015, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Turkey)

This story of female empowerment (co-written by the Turkish director and Proxima‘s Alice Winocour) is the coming-of-age account of five very lively, restless sisters in a village in Northern Turkey. Orphaned, they now live with their grandmother and an uncle. After an innocent play on the beach, with boys included, the caretakers feel scandalized, take them from school, severely restrain their freedom and start to marry them off one by one. The film keeps the girls in the centre, their resilience, the strength of the bond between them and their stubborn resistance against the repression of their family.

42. Our Little Sister (2015, Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan)

Since I saw his film After Life (1998) about an imaginary place in which we receive help to choose our happiest memory, and then get ”promoted” to live in it forever after we die, I have eagerly awaited every new film of Koreeda. I love the thoughtful, gentle and meditative story telling in his films. Many of his films focus on the intricacies of family relationships, on the impact of loss in families and on the importance of revisiting memories. Our Little Sister is about three sisters who live happily together in a house belonging to their grandmother in a seaside town. When their estranged father dies, they find out they have a teenage half-sister, whom they invite to live with them. Her coming into their lives causes a journey of self-discovery for each of the sisters. Koreeda is masterful in attention for little moments of joy and sadness. This is the kind of film that might make us slow down and take stock of our lives’ important moments.

41. A Private War (2018, Matthew Heineman, UK)

A Private War is the biographical story about the war correspondent Marie Colvin. She was an American journalist, born in 1956, who started to work in 1985 as the foreign affairs correspondent for the British The Sunday Times. As such she became a close observer of all major wars and insurrections of that time period until her death in 2012 in Homs, Syria during the bombardment of that city by the Syrian army. The focus of A Private War is the psychological drives and motives behind Colvin’s going to the most dangerous places on earth. Colvin maintains in the film that the real stories of war are those that record the fate of civilians caught in the crossfire. So, she has to be there seeking their reality ”so that we, the readers, can see”.  But the film digs deeper and explores to what degree a war correspondent like Colvin is as much driven by personal needs than by a higher cause. The war she reports on coincides with a private war, the battle with her post trauma syndrome, her loneliness, her alcoholism. So moments of heartfelt, emotional involvements with the wounded and vulnerable, alternate with darker, less sympathetic aspects of her life, including her careerism and her addictions. An important exploration of ambitions and drivenness in life!

Rinus, Jan 2021

*image posted for non commercial purposes under ‘fair use’ of copyright material in recommendation of the film

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