The homepage of this Nexus website talks of Opening Life Together, and the Nexus podcast is also titled Opening Life. This assumes that life is in need of being ‘opened’, that we are in danger when we find ourselves in a mode or in a context where re-assessments and re-imaginations of the way we think and live are discouraged or even prohibited. Last week I saw two films which show the mechanisms by which a context remains closed and which make a strong case for our need of ‘opening life’.

The first one was one of the earlier films of the UK director Ken Loach from 1971 called Family Life. Ken Loach is known for his social realism dramas, of which in recent years I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019) were broadly acclaimed and awarded.

In this painful-to-watch film Family Life Ken Loach paints the picture of a traditional, authoritarian family, typical of the time, where the parents are totally unable and unwilling to imagine for their children any other way of life than their own. The younger daughter’s attempts to break out of a dreary life situation are seen by her parents as signs of a mental illness. The film is about the consequences for her, suffocating in this increasingly toxic environment, where every attempt to open up life is belittled and smothered.

Another very recent film on the same theme is Clara Sola, the debut film of Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, selected by Costa Rica as the country’s submission to the 2022 Oscar International Feature film. Clara Sola had its première at the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

The film is set in a rural village at the border of a tropical forest in Costa Rica. Clara is a 40-year old woman, who is intellectually challenged and lives with her mother and a teenage niece, who genuinely cares for her aunt. Clara has a special relation to nature and her mysticism has given her the reputation of a healer in the village. This is promoted and mediated by her mother who resists all change in Clara’s life.

The arrival of a kind, handsome worker on the farm, whom Clara gets involved with through her care for animals and nature, is the beginning of her personal and sexual awakening. This brings her on a collision course with the religious and social conventions that have dominated her life and are  zealously protected by her mother.

Clara Sola is a true ‘Opening Life’ story, about the forces that try to keep things as they are, about the process of opening a life of suppression and about the different people who play an important role in Clara’s awakening. Contrary to the end of Family Life, the end of Clara Sola may indicate that there is a way out of repression and confinement for her. Warmly recommended!

Rinus, Jan 2022

*image posted under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the film