Once again a week of cineastic delight and inspiration to reflect has come to an end! Our local film festival this year offered 240 films from 82 countries. It is amazing to have access to this kind of advanced storytelling and to be able to share that experience in the company of friends to digest impressions and thoughts with!

In a number of articles I want to share with you the films I particularly responded to and of which I feel that they contain much Nexus related content and inspiration. I hope that it may inspire you to take the occasion to watch these movies when these films come your way.  

These were my top three:

About Dry Grasses by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

After his impressive series of Anatolia set films of the past decade Once upon a time in Anatolia(2011), Winter Sleep (2014) and The Wild Pear Tree (2018), here is another absorbing Ceylan film with once again an impressive cinematography and much poetic contemplation. Winter Sleep was based on an Anton Chekhov story and also this film About Dry Grasses definitely has a Chekhov feel to it with its psychological, subtle, realistic, open-ended story-telling.

About Dry Grasses digs into the complexities of a teacher-pupil relationship that develops into a crisis when the teacher Samet is accused of inappropriate behaviour by a 14-yr old female student. Samet is bored in this remote place and longs for his transfer to Istanbul. Now his career might be in danger. The investigation drags on. His relationship with his young colleague teacher Kenan with whom he shares lodging, has its own complications. Life moves on without coming to a clear conclusion – all in true Chekhov style with its everydayness, its human pretensions and contradictions. And the film gives us time and stimulus to delve into the depths of the human soul!

The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer (UK)

This chilling movie about the Höss family, consisting of Rudolf, his wife Hedwig and their five children. They are living their idyllic lives in their grand villa with its splendid garden, wall-to-wall with the Auschwitz concentration camp, is a shocking experience. But this is not the usual Holocaust film. We don’t get a look inside the camp. We only get a glimpse of smoke coming from the chimneys of the crematoria. Occasionally we hear noises coming from shrill commands and cries of distress. We see the barbed wire on top of the wall.

The zone of interest was the Nazis’ name for the buffer zone around Auschwitz. The fewer witnesses walking around there, the better. The final solution to the Jewish question had to remain unseen. It is also the place where the concentration camp guards were housed. In this same space the Höss family has found their own interest zone of affluence, privilege and family harmony, which must be protected in every possible way.

And there the issue becomes burning for all of us and asks for reflection on our own lives – on our own little garden, and how we protect it. What we are willing to accept to keep that garden nice and clean? It reminds us that, in the world we live in, there is always a wall somewhere with something behind it, something we don’t care about, something we choose not to see.

The Shadowless Tower by Lu Zhang (China)

This meditative narrative gets its title from a white pagoda in the centre of Beijing said to cast no shadow. It is about displaced characters trying to find meaning and connection. The protagonist Gu, once a poet, is now a melancholy restaurant critic, divorced with a small daughter who is raised by his sister and her husband. He gets to work with a new, young photographer who also is displaced. She gets him to think about his father whom he has not seen since he was five, when his mother kicked him out after he was accused of abuse of a woman on a bus.  

His father seems to be the shadowless tower that hangs over Gu’s life. His middle-aged complacency is challenged with youthly frankness by his young colleague, who also is a displaced person and saddened by her orphanhood. He is in his turn becoming a shadowless father for his own daughter, lacking the drive to truly engage her. He has to overcome his aloofness, step into the story he basically has left behind and face his father. It is a very moving story of personal alienation and of regaining neglected relationships.

Rinus Baljeu, February 2024

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