The word that stays with me after the closure of our local Gothenburg film festival is imagination. I am once more impressed by the potential of film to stir and exercise the imagination. I have been allowed to think thoughts and explore emotions that I would not have done without the films I’ve watched. The ability to see beyond our currently experienced reality towards new possibilities is so important for our emotional well-being. It energizes, reduces stress and enhances empathy.  

Imagination is the language of the soul. It is the inner conversation with an outer world which presents us with new realities and unknown experiences. A rich imagination allows us to respond to such new information, enhancing therewith empathy and growth. For the past twenty years, film has been the medium that has broadened my imagination and has helped me to keep continuously looking for something richer, deeper and higher than the reality I experience now. 

The films that particularly stirred my imagination at this festival:

Secret Friend by the Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi was one of the films that I made high priority to see after her 2017 film On Body and Soul made such a lasting impression on me. In Secret Friend she explores the connection between the human world and the world of plants. It tells three stories throughout the past century, one from 1908, one from 1972 and one from 2020. They all happen in the botanical garden of an old university town in Germany. All three stories have a protagonist who is drawn into attempts to connect deeper with the world of nature. A huge gingko tree in the center of the garden plays an important role. Enyedi does not try to lead us to a conclusion but invites us to look more curiously and possibly adjust better to the rhythm of plant life. It also showed me that in today’s world, powerful influences distance us from our sense of connection to something greater.

Gloaming in Luomu by Lu Zhang, a Korean-Chinese director who has a background as a university teacher in Chinese literature. His previous movie The Shadowless Tree impressed me with its meditative narrative and its dealing with topics like alienation and grief from broken relationships. Gloaming in Luomu is the story of a former dancer, who travels to the remote town of Luomo after having received a postcard from her boyfriend who vanished three years ago. Her career is damaged by alcohol addiction and she suffers deep grief. In the boarding house where she rents a room, she meets some people who become a small community for her, suggesting that human contact is often the only way forward in times of emotional pain and gloom. Can she take a step towards a more harmonious and hopeful future? This is a movie more interested in moods than in action, demanding patience from the viewer, but also offering access to deep emotional experience. 

Dry Leaf by Alexandre Kobaridze (Georgia)

Another film for those who have patience and dare to take time for contemplative films. Kobaridze got known with his 2021 film What do we see when we look at the sky?. He makes his films into an exercise in beholding, claiming that we only need silhouettes and blotchy images to come a long way in receiving messages and meaning. He challenges us with the question: what do we need to perceive so that we start to understand. There is a story: Irakli receives a message from his daughter, a 28-yr old sports photographer, that she has left home and needs some time for herself. Irakli knows that she was working on a project to photograph deserted football pitches in villages throughout the country. He is concerned and decides to travel around to those fields to see if he can get clues to her whereabouts. 

The whole film is recorded on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone camera to underline that we don’t need to know a lot to learn a lot. It asks us to have patience, to wait. We need to let things happen and keep using our senses. Good art does not tell us what we should see and feel; it inspires us to see and feel differently. 

Rinus, February 2026

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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