5. Leave No Trace (2018, Debra Granik, USA)

This third feature film of independent filmmaker Debra Granik is a thoroughly lovable piece of work. There is not a single step out of tune in this character-focused story. Its characters are completely believable and every step they take makes your heartfelt sympathy with them grow. Will is a PTSD-suffering war veteran who has retreated from the world with his teenage daughter Tom into the forest park west of Portland, Oregon. They live completely off the grid, illegally, without any modern life comforts. Their conversation is minimal, but they live in an easy, content, tender relationship with each other. One day they are observed by a jogger and soon the police and the social services are on their heels and set to change their life circumstances. Will is however deeply damaged and does not cope with the company of others. Tom starts to see that there are other ways to live and that there are other good people to be around, sensing a life path that may be truer to her. The final scenes are truly heart-wrenching! A film you will carry with you for a while!

4. The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick, USA)

This deeply meditative film of the cinematic genius Terrence Malick definitely belongs for me to the greatest films of this decade. The Tree of Life was received ambiguously, many criticising it for its pretentiousness, its lack of dialogue, its voice-overs and its spirituality. Many others were deeply moved and called it a visionary, ambitious, humble and passionate work of art. It is trying to make sense of the wider mysteries of life, of the forces of nature and those of grace, of the question if there is redemption after all the suffering, failure and pain we endure through a lifetime.

Jack is a middle-aged architect who is tormented by a midlife breakdown. He mentally returns to his childhood memories in 1950s in Texas, where he grew up with his two brothers, an overbearing, disciplining father and a gentle, forgiving mother. His middle brother dies at the age of 19 in the military service and this causes deep wounds in the family.  Jack revisits all these feelings of anger, guilt, love and hate as well as all the summer days of play and family life. And all this plays out against the backdrop of the big issue how the forces of nature and those of grace can be integrated into a redemptive wholeness and what place man has in the universe. And all throughout the film we hear the deeper questions being voiced. A serious, bold undertaking!

3. The Turin Horse (2011, Béla Tarr, Hungary)

Prior to images coming on the screen, we listen to an opening story, the screen still being black, about Friedrich Nietzsche being in Turin in 1889, having a mental breakdown after witnessing a horse being whipped by its carriage driver. The film is the imagining of what happened after this event to the horse and its driver. The opening scene is the journey of him and his grown-up daughter back to their home shack in the Hungarian countryside. The horse-drawn cart slowly moves forward, battered by the wind on a desolate rural plain. There is minimal or no conversation, nor tenderness between the farmer and his daughter. Having arrived at their shack we stay with them for six days on the wind-swept plain following the step-by-step extinction of life giving elements and then finally the light turns off.

This gloomy film, with which Hungarian director Béla Tarr closed his filmmaker career, is an apocalyptic view of a darkness that we don’t like to look into. Tarr doesn’t let us off the hook, we have to walk along all the way into the dead-end street where all conversation, tenderness and hope has faded. A life without hope and love is the ”something’s wrong” with life that Tarr gave  expression to in a conversation about his film.

2. Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuáron, Mexico)

Roma is for me among the richest film experiences I’ve had in the past decade. This extraordinary film is for me a great example of how you can revisit your childhood and start to recognize patterns and failures you impossibly could grasp in those days.

Roma is a contemplative, deeply personal film based on the childhood of the director. Cuarón’s childhood nanny obviously played a profound role in his life. It is through her prism he looks at the bubble he now is aware of that he grew up in and through her prism he relives the painful trauma of the family falling apart and of the absence of a father. These memories of life of a high-class Mexican family in the neighborhood Roma of Mexico City, of their way of living, their relationships and their social setting are intimate and tender. The gift of a true storyteller!

Roma invites us to revisit the story of our own childhood and to see the cracks in that story, as well as the people and the attitudes that have been redemptive to us on our journey to adulthood.

1. An Elephant Sitting Still (2018, Bo Hu, China)

Bo Hu’s first and last film has made a deep impression on me. Earlier I had read about the director killing himself at the age of 29 after he had completed his film. It made me curious to understand what it was that had brought him to this depth of despair.

Seeing An Elephant Sitting Still about life in a small industrial town in Northern China is a tour de force. It has a length of almost 4 hours, the story develops slowly and you find yourself in a bleak,  almost ghostly world. Life is problematic in this nihilistic environment, where selfishness abounds and people are bending under economic pressures. The film follows four main characters over the course of one single day. Each one’s life is crumbling and being emptied emotionally. All four have plenty of reasons to be sad, angry and unhappy. They are trapped in an existence from which love and affection are absent. Each one of these characters is still vivid in my mind, feeling deeply for their personal predicaments.

In different ways they have heard the story of an elephant at the circus in a neighbouring city Manjhouli. On their journey to Manjhouli the four enter into each other’s orbits. The elephant sits still in his cage and ignores people who try to irritate him. The elephant becomes a symbol of hope. Is there a way of life, in which you can stay calm and keep your dignity when you feel abandoned and life runs sour?  Can they overcome the alienation that the sole pursuit of economic progress has led this society into