The past week I happened to see three 2025 films that had in common the theme of pains and deficits in close relationships.

Father Mother Brother Sister by Jim Jarmusch

I missed Jim Jarmusch’s latest film during the Gothenburg Film Festival in January due to illness, but got a new chance to watch it in the cinema. I first discovered this fiercely independent director in the early days of my fascination with narrative film through films like Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986) and Dead Man (1985). More recently his film Paterson (2016) re-ignited my interest in his moviemaking. Almost all his films deal with very different people in terms of race, generation, nationalities or culture, trying to relate and to understand one another.

Father Mother Brother Sister is a panel of three short films about the relationship of adult children and their parents. The three parts are unrelated apart from its theme of communication between generations. The first story presents a brother and sister on their way to visit their aged, widowed father who lives in the countryside. They are anxious to visit him, well aware of his unwillingness to engage. It is an awkward meeting as the father is unwilling to go beyond pleasantries and to open up about anything. The second story is about two sisters bringing their annual visit to their mother, an accomplished novelist, living in Dublin. The sisters are in competition for the affection of their mother, who is rather cold and demanding. The third story is about adult twins who visit the apartment of their parents who recently died in a plane crash. They look at old photographs and are reminded of their family history — a great film to open thoughts and feelings about family relationships and memories!

Die My Love by Lynne Ramsey

Lynne Ramsey is a Scottish filmmaker known for high-ranked films like Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002), We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017). They have in common that they deal with harmful human behavior of lonely, distressed people. Die My Love is the story of a writer and young mother who feels lonely, most of the time left alone with her baby in an old house in the countryside in Montana. Her young husband does not understand much of the postnatal depression and mental breakdown she slips into. It is a raw, challenging study of growing alienation in a relationship and of the pain it causes.

My Father’s Shadow by Akinola Davies

This directorial debut of the British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies took me by surprise. I kept thinking of this rich and rewarding story of an absent father who gets reunited for a short while with his two sons. He shows up unannounced in their remote village and tells them that he has to return immediately to Lagos for a day related to his work and to unpaid earnings. He wants the boys to follow along with him. During their complicated trip to the city and while meeting different people in the city whom their father seems to know, the boys get an opportunity to discover more about their father — how he fell in love with their mother, why he is absent in the family, what his responsibilities are as a father and provider, what true love is. It invites us to
think deeply about the bonds within a family, about what has been missing and how things of the past might be understood differently.

Rinus Baljeu, May 2026

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