Father of my Children

Le père de mes enfants
a film by Mia Hansen-Løve

Grégoire Canvel has everything a man could want. A wife he loves, three delightful children and a stimulating job. He's a film producer. Discovering talented filmmakers and developing films that fit his conception of the cinema, free and true to life, is precisely his reason for living, his vocation. It fulfils him and Grégoire devotes almost all his time and energy to his work. He's hyperactive, he never stops, except at weekends, which he spends in the country with his family – gentle interludes, as precious as they are fragile.

Grégoire is an independent film producer who runs a well-respected, Paris based production company, Moon Films. For Grégoire, his work is his life, and while he loves his wife Sylvia and their three daughters Clémence, Valentine and Billie, during the week he is practically a stranger to them. He makes a point of spending each weekend with his family at their country house, but even then separating Grégoire from his cellphone is all but impossible, and Sylvia and the girls are reaching the end of their patience with him and his obsession with work. Though there's no question that Grégoire is devoted to Moon Films, he has kept a secret from Sylvia and his daughters about the state of the company, and it's not until his sudden, desperate act of suicide which forces Sylvia into leadership of the company that they come to understand the real reasons behind his unrelenting schedule.

This stunning and outstanding film explores the consequences of Grégoire's suicide on his family and his collaborators – examining the deep sorrow experienced by his wife and daughters, the feeling of unacceptable loss, and of the resentment against the deceased who abandoned them. It is loosely based on a real story examining the central aspect of family love. Mia Hansen-Løve took her inspiration from two real-life models, Humbert Balsan, a brilliant film producer who took his life at the age of 51 when he realised he would go bankrupt, and Donna Balsan, his wife, who for all her grief, did her utmost to save Ognon Pictures, her husband's company, after his death.

The director explains that the making of the film stems from her encounter with Humbert Balsan, whom she first met in early 2004, a year before his suicide. "He had an exceptional warmth, elegance and aura. His energy, passion for films and sensitivity, which I took to be an invincible inner beauty, are what made me write the movie. Of course, there is also his suicide. The feelings of failure and despair that it reveals are overwhelming, but that doesn't replace the rest. It doesn't become the only truth. I wanted the film to express the paradox of contradictory movements within the same person, the conflict that can occur between light and darkness, strength and vulnerability, the desire to live and the urge to die."

Cría cuervos...

Raise Ravens
a film by Carlos Saura

In haunting memories, a woman relives the disturbing summer of her father's death. Outside her father's bedroom, the child Ana hears him making love to his best friend's wife, then take his last gasp of breath, apparently dying of a heart attack. When, years earlier, her mother died of cancer, Ana blamed her father; now she believes herself responsible for his demise. In this compelling vision of the child's world, past and present blend imperceptibly. Fantasy and reality become one as dead characters take their place beside the living. Through a series of scenes played out in Ana's imagination and flashbacks to happier times before her mother's illness, we come to realise why Ana believes she has the power over the death of others and why she is becoming increasingly fascinated by death and suicide in general.

Late one night Ana, a melancholic and mostly silent eight-year-old girl, descends the stairs of the darkened house. As she approaches her father's bedroom door she hears a gasping sound followed by a woman's sobs. The door is opened and an attractive middle-aged woman rushes from the bedroom whilst hastily dressing. They exchange glances but do not speak and the woman, who is in a state of great distress, leaves by the front door. Ana then enters her father's room to find him lying dead upon his bed. On the dressing table is a near-empty glass of milk which Ana removes and takes to the kitchen where she calmly washes it and places it on the drainer. In the kitchen, she sees her mother, who chides her for being up so late and sends her off to bed.

Blaming her mother's illness and subsequent death on her father, Ana has dissolved a mysterious powder, which she believes to be a potent poison, in his milk glass as a wilful act of murder. Her belief in the power of the poison is thus confirmed when her father dies. At the wake of Ana's father, she sees again the mysterious woman whom she had previously seen fleeing her father's bedroom on the night of his death. The woman, Amelia, is the wife of her father's close friend and fellow military officer. Ana's satisfaction at having rid herself of her father's presence is short lived however, for her mother's sister, her Aunt Paulina, soon arrives to set the house in order, turning out to be every bit the cold authoritarian Ana's father had been. The all-female household is completed by Ana's two sisters, eleven-year-old Irene and five-year-old Maite; the children's grandmother, mute and immobile in a wheelchair; and the feisty, kindly housekeeper, Rosa.

Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her 'lethal' powder, and where she is watched by an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. The adult Ana, looking exactly like her mother, recounts her infancy: "I don't believe in childhood paradise, or in innocence, or the natural goodness of children. I remember my childhood as a long period of time, interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown". The little rituals of everyday life fill Ana's days during her summer holidays. Tortured by the memories of her mother's illness, Ana rebels against her aunt's authoritarian style, and in bouts of loneliness she variously imagines her mother's continued presence, and even her own suicide. Though diverted by the presence of her two sisters, Ana's only truly close companions are the housekeeper, Rosa, and her pet guinea pig, Roni, whom she discovers dead in his cage one morning.

Ana's mother's painful death from cancer; her father's presumed murder; her guinea pig's death; and her own imagined suicide weigh on the girl's mind. Ana even offers her grandmother the opportunity of dying, and thus a release from loneliness, by providing her with a spoonful of her poison – an offer that is refused. The adult Ana explains the notion of the mysterious powder that the child Ana had so dearly coveted as being nothing more than bicarbonate of soda that her mother once told her was a powerful poison. She further explains her motivation in wanting to kill her philandering father: "The only thing I remember perfectly is that then, my father seemed responsible for the sadness that weighed on my mother in the last years of her life. I was convinced that he, and he alone, had provoked her illness".

Ana, still believing that she has murdered her father, attempts to poison her aunt with the same powder. She repeats the preparation of milk with the mysterious substance, but the next morning awakens for the first day of school to find that Paulina is still alive. Ana and her two sisters leave the house and march into the vibrant and noisy city that has all but been excluded from their world up to this point. A new school year begins and with it the hope, if not the promise, of new possibilities overturning and replacing the oppressive ways of the past.

Seen also as a metaphor of recent Spanish political history, the story captures the loneliness and inner-world perceptions of a young girl as she and her family live through the final years of Spain's Franco regime, with the hope of a new era about to dawn. A darkly haunting, yet beautiful portrayal of the powerlessness often felt in childhood when the significance of external events and the choices made by adults cannot be fully comprehended.

The Beekeeper

O melissokomos
a film by Theo Angelopoulos

Spyros is a schoolmaster of late middle-age who, like his father before him, is also a beekeeper. Disenchanted and unfulfilled by his life, Spyros takes leave of his wife and grown children to embark on a solitary journey in search of the emerging springtime flowers for his cherished beehives. Moving from village to village, he encounters a young girl hitchhiker who awakens in him feelings that start to become an obsession.

After the wedding of his daughter, Spyros retires as a schoolmaster and leaves his wife and home. He embarks on his annual journey with his bees to follow the flowers, to get honey from different areas. As he begins his journey with several other beekeepers, Spyros finds a young girl, abandoned and with no roots, sitting in his truck. He reluctantly gives her a lift and drops her at main road from where she can hitchhike, but seeing the difficulty she is having getting a lift, he agrees to take her back. The girl is willing to go wherever his journey may take her. She makes some advances which he immediately rejects, yet it is clear that he is ambivalent about her.

During his journey, Spyros meets with and pays his respects to the people who have meant something to him in his life – his ex-wife, an old friend, and his daughter. Each time he mysteriously truncates his visit, and the enigma of what lies unsaid deepens after he encounters the hitchhiker again. Both have lost their perspective of the future – he is living in nostalgic reminiscence of the past, while the young girl's life is one of instant gratification, and she seems to be aware of neither past nor future. They meet and part several times in different places, but as they continue to encounter one another, Spyros' resistance to the girl lessens and he becomes quietly obsessed.

An extraordinary and beautifully photographed tale of self-discovery, The Beekeeper is a poetic and moving film about a man's search for existential meaning in his life, and his final struggle to find release from the spectre of the past.