Learning to engage with stories through film has been a major field of precious discovery for me in the past decades. It has given me more than one life. It has offered me a rich palette of human and cultural colors in life’s diverse experiences and challenges. I have been allowed to share in the challenges, the joys and the griefs people have experienced in a multitude of cultural situations, some very similar to my own, many very different to mine. It has helped me to understand better my own perceptions, emotions, strengths and weaknesses. I am sure that it has enhanced my empathy, to understand better how the same experience can impact people in very different ways.

Let me introduce you to some of the more memorable watches of the past weeks:

Pictures of Ghosts brought me to Latin America and the childhood town of the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho. This is a documentary of 2023 in which he revisits the places where he grew up, in his hometown Recife. He takes us to his childhood home, relating affectionate memories of his mother and revisiting the origins of his passion for film. In the second part he takes us on a tour of Recife’s film history with memories of the 20^th century movie theaters that once were so important to him and now are closed. It is a strong reminder of the importance of memories. We all have haunting places where ideas and passions were born, worth revisiting, preferably together with some others who are eager to listen along and perceive.

The White Balloon by one of my favorite Iranian directors Jafar Panahi. This is Panahi’s debut feature of 1995. It is countdown to New Year’s day in Iran. It is a warmhearted tale of a 7-year old girl, who wants to buy a particularly colorful goldfish for the celebrations. To calm her down, her mother entrusts her with the only bill she has left. The girl enters the marketplace where she meets a cross section of the population of her city context. She is cheated upon and then retrieves the bill, only to lose it into the grate at the side of a closed shop. She engages people who pass by to help her to get it out, but everyone has his or her own life to live. The White Balloon stands for purity, beauty and hope with which the girl meets humanity.

A Private Life, the latest film (2025) of the French director Rebecca Zlotowski, is an interesting character study of a psychiatrist who starts to lose her grip, as a person and professional, after the suicide of one of her patients. Challenged that she might have overlooked warning signals, she gets convinced that her patient is murdered and starts her own investigations. Her thoughts move from one possible explanation to another, causing her once orderly life to unravel. The more she discovers, the less clear everything seems, the more pleasant her personality becomes. It reminds us that there is a private life behind every public role and appearance. It only needs something unexpected to happen and we may be surprised about whom we then discover.

Rinus Baljeu, March 2026

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