Here are a few other films that I watched and found highly fascinating at the 2024 Gothenburg Film Festival. They have caught my attention and I continue to remember and care for the stories told in these films. Each one of them drew me in and added something to my understanding of life, of what is meaningful and precious in life.

Evil Does Not Exist by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Japan)

This rural tale got me in its grasp right away from the beginning. It opens with a long, slow tracking shot through the forest, leading us into a quiet awareness that something important is at stake here. The plans of exploiting the area by building a camping site near the village where Takumi and his daughter live threatens their unhurried life in harmony with nature there. Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) continues to impress as the enormously talented filmmaker he is. His observations of nature and of people are so subtle and invitational to keep reflecting.

May December by Todd Haynes (USA)

This was for me personally the opening film at the festival, setting a great tone for me. This is psychodrama at its best. It is about an actress Elizabeth, played by Nathalie Portman, who is doing her research for a film in which she will play the role of Gracie, a 36-year old woman in a scandalous affair with a 13-year old boy. It was a public scandal at its time and Gracie served a prison sentence, during which she gave birth to a child. Elizabeth spends a couple of days at the Savannah home where Gracie and Joe, the young father of the child, live. The backstory of these two women is given to us in pieces, so that we can be engaged in forming our own impression of the two women. It gives us the chance to make lots of character observations puzzling about what it is that motivates the two women.

La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher (Italy)

I love the films of Alice Rohrwacher. Her films have a unique, charming mixture of fantasy and real life. Her characters have a comical side but usually with a deeply sad undertone. In La Chimera it is a former archeologist Englishman who has been drawn into shady practices because of the loss of his beloved. His search for buried Etruscan treasures is at the same time a search into the underworld for his lost loved one.

Red Island by Robin Campillo (France)

This film felt so personal that I had to check how writer-director Robin Campillo was connected to Madagascar, the island country at Africa’s southeast coast. And yes he spent his childhood there    as the son of a soldier family during the last years of French colonial rule and the beginning of independence for Madagascar. Red Island is a tender, personal movie about a child growing up in a racist, hypocritical, mysterious, fascinating world, where the grown-ups aren’t able to explain what’s going on.

March 2024, Rinus Baljeu

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