It is always the ambition of Nexus to stimulate people to look a little deeper and to reach a little higher. When we get stuck in our own perspectives and understandings, we stagnate and are in danger of judging people on the basis of our own fixed frame. We need new impressions to stay alive, flexible and responsive. Film is a relatively easy and accessible way of getting engaged in other experiences and imaginations that stir our ways of thinking. It invites us into other worlds and into other levels of pain or joy than we are used to. That makes us more ready to face those realities when they come to us.

In light of this here are some films that have made me think deeper and higher in the past weeks:

• Belfast by Kenneth Branagh (2021)

In the closing credits it says that the film is dedicated to those who left, to those who stayed and to those who lost their lives. Kenneth Branagh looks back at his years as a child in Belfast in the late 1960s and to the place and value of his family throughout these volatile times. He does not focus on the conflict itself, but on how a 9-year old boy lives, observes and feels in the midst of these tensions. His family struggles with a decision to make, either to stay where their roots, family and home are, or to leave for England where his father has got a good job. Plunged into outbreaks of sectarian violence in the street where they live, they decide to leave but there are no winners in times of conflict and war.

• Parallel Mothers by Pedro Almodovar (2021)

Parallel Mothers also has a backdrop of violence and conflict. This time it is the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. The film ends with a quote from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015): “No matter how hard you try to silence it, human history never shuts up.” The theme of the film can be described as the recovery of truth.

Photographer Janis, played by Penelope Cruz, is trying to find the unmarked mass grave that holds her great-great-grandfather and others who were murdered by the Falangists during the war. Her younger friend, Ana, remarks if it is not better to let the past be the past. Janis reacts with indignance: a painful past should not be shoveled under the rug. Parallel with this issue is the story of the parallel mothers. Janis, pregnant after an affair with a married archeologist, shares a room in the hospital where she is to give birth, with Ana, a pregnant teenager. Both give birth at the same time. Without giving away the plot, also among them after a while there is a truth to be uncovered. No one can go on without facing the truth, sharing the pain and tending the scars. History will not shut up.

• Nowhere Special by Uberto Pasolini (2020)

This is the only of these three films that does not deal with the scars of war and conflict. But it shares with the other two films themes of dramatic change, emotion and sadness. Nowhere Special was inspired by a true story in a newspaper about a single father John, who is diagnosed with a terminal disease and forced to find a foster home for his 4-year old son before he dies. He wants to find the best possible family for his son, but what is best? and do you know your son well enough to know what is best? And how do you do this without traumatising your son, while being confronted with the end of your life closing in on you?

Uberto Pasolini is a veteran Italian filmmaker, born in 1957 in Italy, who now works and lives in the UK. In the Eighties he got involved in various film projects, worked as a producer and has made so far three films as a director: Machan (2008), Still Life (2013) and this one Nowhere Special (2020).

In an interview about this last film he remarked:

“It’s a film that hopefully encourages you to hug your friend a bit closer, to give another kiss to your child, to look at your neighbours with positive emotion.”

Rinus, May 2022