El secreto de sus ojos

The Secret in Their Eyes
a film by Juan José Campanella

When a retired criminal prosecutor decides to try writing a novel he finds himself inextricably drawn into the harrowing events of an unsolved crime from twenty-five years before. Benjamín Esposito has spent his entire working life as a criminal court employee. He can draw on his own past as a civil servant for a true, moving and tragic story in which he was once very directly involved. Re-investigating the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful woman, he discovers devastated lives, corrupt government officials and a lost love. But as he delves deeper he finds himself at the dark heart of society, where mysteries lurk in the shadows and danger waits around every corner.

In 1974, Esposito's court was assigned an investigation into the death of a beautiful young woman, Liliana Coloto, raped and murdered inside her house in a district of Buenos Aires. He meets Ricardo Morales, who had married the girl a short time before and worshipped her, body and soul. Moved by Ricardo's grief, Esposito vows to find the killer and bring him to justice despite having to contend with the apathy and ineptitude of the police and legal system. He knows that for help he can count on Pablo Sandoval, an underling at the office yet a close friend, who occasionally seeks release from the routine of his existence by drinking himself unconscious. He can also turn to the upper-class, Cornell-educated Irene Menéndez Hastings, his immediate superior and secretary of the court, with whom he is secretly deeply in love, although there is no hope that she will ever love him.

Argentina in the 1970s is a backdrop for the violence, hate, revenge and death that rule people's lives and fates, and Esposito's investigation takes him deep into a world of terrible violence. No longer an observer, he becomes an unwilling central character in a drama in which he is exposed to ever-greater danger. Although he is aware that historical accuracy is not paramount for his novel, the process of revisiting the case is more an issue of closure for him. As Esposito writes, he relives a past that rises up before his eyes and awakens all his demons. As he moves forward, he begins to see that it is now too late to stop. Telling a story from the past is no longer just a diversion to fill his empty hours. It becomes a narrow, winding path he must take if he is to understand and find justification for his own life, if he is to give any meaning to the years remaining to him, and if once and for all he is to confront the feelings he has for the woman who, twenty-five years on, he is still in love with.

Strewn with ingenious twists and turns, this award-winning crime thriller and love story is a stunning and suspenseful cinematic tour de force exploring themes of memory, corruption, punishment and justice, and how the past is always with us, ever-present in our lives.

The Sacrifice

Offret
a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

Events unfold in the hours before a nuclear holocaust. Alexander is a retired actor who is celebrating his birthday with family and friends when a crackly TV announcement warns of an imminent nuclear catastrophe. Alexander makes a promise to God that he will sacrifice all he holds dear, if the disaster can be averted. The next day dawns and, as if in a dream, everything is restored to normality. But Alexander must keep his vow.

Set in Sweden, the story follows the travails of wealthy patriarch Alexander, a former actor and critic who lives in a remote house on the shores of the Baltic Sea. One year on his birthday, a sudden television announcement interrupts the celebration with news of a nuclear holocaust. His family and guests suffer through violent fits of hysteria and emotional turmoil in the ensuing hours, but the previously troubled Alexander finds a clarity of mind when he makes a pact with God, whom he had long ceased to recognise, offering himself as a sacrifice in order to redeem the fallen earth for his cherished son. "Every gift involves a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be?".

As Alexander goes from self-contented ease to crippling animal fear and existential anguish and finally to spiritual abandon, the troubled journey is illustrated with a haunting succession of images, tableaux, objects, dreams, and gestures, all sewn together in a seamlessly elliptical vision. The tormented characters are forced to come to terms with their own physical and spiritual existence, with redemption coming through faith, in this case, Alexander's faith in his love for his young son.

Supremely poetic, The Sacrifice is filled with astonishingly beautiful images, expertly shot by Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Tarkovsky's vision is a light that illuminates the simplest movements of life such as the offering of a gift, a walk along the bay, the reflection of a naked body in a mirror, and the film's underlying aesthetic and philosophical issues provide a feast for the senses and the mind. This, Tarkovsky's final film, is a visionary masterpiece which won the Grand Prix at Festival de Cannes 1986, the same year that Tarkovsky died of cancer in Paris at the age of fifty-four.

El niño pez

The Fish Child
a film by Lucía Puenzo

Lala, a teenager from the most exclusive suburban neighbourhood in Buenos Aires is in love with Ailín, known as "la Guayi", the 20-year-old Paraguayan maid working at her home. The girls dream of living together in Paraguay, on the shores of Lake Ypoá. Methodically planning their escape, they steal money, valuables and even a painting from Lala's family in order to fulfil their dream. But the murder of Lala's father, a rich and influential judge who has begun to abuse Ailín, rushes their plans to leave together. This is the starting point that spurs the escape through the highway that connects the north of Buenos Aires with Paraguay. While Lala waits to be reunited with her lover in Ypoá by reconstructing her past (the mystery surrounding her pregnancy and the legend of a fish child who guides the drowned to the bottom of the lake), Ailín is detained in an institution for young offenders on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She turns out to be hiding a crime from long ago. Desperate to be with her girlfriend, Lala devises a dangerous rescue plan to get her back.

The legend of Mítã'í Pírã. The Ypoá lake can be found in the heart of Paraguay, in an area called Esteros del Ypoá. In seasons of rain, the floods cover the entire region, devastating huge portions of the land. It is a land of legends and mysteries, with islands that appear and disappear in different places, and wanderers who never returned from the esteros, and buried jewels and gold that were hidden in times of the war of the Triple Alianza. So they say. Years ago, the people from a small village near the shores of the Ypoá lake turned a dead tree which is buried in the water into a shrine. They say that with their offerings, toys and photos of sick babies and children, they ask miracles of the fish child who lives in the depths of the lake. They say some children, playing close to the tree, saw him swimming between the roots with the speed and the grace of the creatures that live underwater. That he has membranes between his fingers, jelly eyes and waist-long hair, dark and green as seaweeds. They say he guides the drowned to the bottom of the lake.

The relationship between Lala and Ailín is complex. Ailín is a survivor through necessity. As a young teenager in Paraguay, she gave birth, alone, to the child of her own father who "fell in love" with her, but who abandoned her during the pregnancy. Following the death of the baby, Ailín fled to Argentina, finding work as a domestic servant to Lala's parents. She is a good and dependable worker who understands her place in society and embraces the few opportunities to better herself when these come her way. Her physical attractiveness and sweet nature make her desirable to men, and she responds to their advances when it is likely to bring her some security and stability. She is fun-loving, thoughtful, caring and kind to others, but knows that ultimately she alone is responsible for her own well-being. Life for her will always be a trade-off, that is her destiny.

Lala, by contrast, has grown up in a secure, bourgeois family environment, although one in which she now feels isolated, possibly due as much to herself as to her parents, who, whilst caring about her, remain distant in her life and are too absorbed in their own interests to really take notice of her. Her privileged upbringing is taken for granted because she knows no other, so it is of little importance to her. She longs to escape from it and to have Ailín to herself, unaware of the hardships she is likely to face in the real world. She is a child, adorable but naive, desperate to be loved but with no real understanding of life or herself.

When Ailín began working as a maid in the household, Lala as a 13-year-old girl fell in love with her, to the exclusion of all others, and over the years that love has grown but has not developed in a mature way. Her desire for their future together is more an escapist fantasy than a real plan for their happiness, and her emotional need for Ailín is child-like, dependent and possessive. This is highlighted by Lala's dream of eloping with Ailín to Ypoá, knowing little of the devastating significance that the memory of the place holds for her girlfriend. Whilst Ailín clearly loves Lala and wants a relationship with her, she is much more hesitant about throwing away what she has made of her life, even though Lala is the only person who has ever shown her true affection and love. In many ways, each sees within the other something that is missing in their life, and their love fulfils a fundamental need to regain something that has been lost.

In the final scene on the bus to Paraguay, Ailín conceals from Lala the fact that her dog is dying, whilst trying to reassure her, and convince herself, that they are on the point of achieving their dream. Life is still a trade-off and always will be for Ailín, and she clings to the hope, as we do, that she can now make Lala's dream come true, and that they will have a future together.

With stunning performances, beautiful cinematography and delicate editing, Lucía Puenzo's second feature takes us on an unforgettable journey. Based on her novel of the same name, written when she was 23 years old and published in 2004, it is a gripping and emotional tale of undying love and trust, with a poignant commentary on social inequality, exploitation, and the deep-seated corruption amongst the rich and powerful.

The Headless Woman

La mujer sin cabeza
a film by Lucrecia Martel

A woman is driving on the highway. She becomes distracted and runs over something. On the days following this incident, she fails to recognise the feelings that bond her to things and people. She just lets herself be taken by the events of her social life. One night she tells her husband that she killed someone on the highway. They go back to the road only to find a dead dog. Friends close to the police confirm that there were no accident reports. Everything returns to normal and the bad moment seems to be over until the news of a gruesome discovery again worries everyone.

The film opens on a rural highway in north-west Argentina. A group of young boys with a dog are playing on the road and in the dry canal which runs alongside. Meanwhile, not far away, a group of friends, parents and children, prepare to leave a gathering. One middle-aged woman, Verónica, who runs a dental clinic with her brother, gets in her car and drives away by herself. On the road she is momentarily distracted when her cellphone rings and whilst reaching across for her handbag, she hears a loud thud from under the car. The impact throws her head back and then forward, hitting the dashboard. She stops the car, but disturbed and in shock, is unwilling to get out to investigate. Instead she drives off, and glancing in her rear view mirror, glimpses what appears to be the body of a dog on the road behind. Farther down the road she stops the car and gets out to walk around while the first drops of rain of an approaching storm begin to spatter the windscreen.

At the local hospital where Veró is x-rayed she appears confused and disorientated. She becomes disconnected from her daily life, barely registering what people are saying and what is happening around her. She is also unable to explain with any clarity anything about the accident but eventually tells her husband, Marcos, that she killed someone. That night he drives her back to the spot where it happened but they find only the body of the dog. Juan Manuel, her husband's cousin and her occasional lover, contacts a friend in the police who confirms that there were no reports of an accident that day. But one week later a missing boy's body is retrieved from the canal, washed down after the heavy rains and blocking the flow of the water. Veró's family and friends then join together to erase all traces of the accident ever having occurred.

Verónica's privileged life, her unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions, her feelings of guilt and remoteness from reality, all serve as a metaphor for the attitude of the bourgeois middle classes towards the suffering that surrounds them but which they refuse to acknowledge. The film, in linking the 1970s period of Argentina's dictatorship with the current time, calls attention to the fact that the blindness of the past continues to the present day in the growing disparity between rich and poor.

Cambridge Spies

A TV mini-series written by Peter Moffat and directed by Tim Fywell.

The story of Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean, the most notorious double-agents in British history. In 1934, four brilliant, but seemingly conventional young men at University of Cambridge are recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. Fuelled by youthful idealism, passionately committed to social justice and to fighting fascism, they begin a 20-year career of deceit and treachery, becoming embroiled in obtaining and passing on vital information. Their careers take them from Vienna to Guernica, New York and Washington, with a final, desperate flight to Moscow.

Anthony Blunt is cool, viciously funny and terrifyingly clever, and is entrusted with the closest secrets of the Royal Family. Guy Burgess is wickedly gifted, full of nerve and verve. His jobs at The Times, BBC and MI5 give him access to national security secrets. Kim Philby is the perfect spy. He becomes head of counter-intelligence at MI6, "stopping people like us becoming people like us". Donald Maclean is the Foreign Office double-agent with a split personality; warm and funny, then wild and confessional.

The four do whatever is necessary to further the cause, with their own promising careers discarded and every aspect of their lives becoming a bluff. Marriages and passions are destroyed, Enigma codes, atomic details and other top secrets are passed on to Russian contacts, and Cold War spies are murdered. By the end of their careers they have become different men. Philby becomes the major agent, with Blunt retreating to the shadows, Maclean experiencing a family and career crisis, Burgess further misbehaving and almost always drunk. But during almost 20 years of counter-intelligence, and despite their personal journeys, the four are bound by their beliefs and their secrets.

A spy drama of the highest quality production, Cambridge Spies concentrates on the personal dynamics of the four men. It begins with a profound closeness based on a passion for a cause, and then moves on to shared sacrifices, stress, strain, and eventually breakdown and betrayal, closely observing the impact that events have on each individual's life.

Hedgehog in the Fog

Yozhik v tumane
a film by Yuriy Norshteyn

The story of a little hedgehog and his friend the bear cub. The two meet every evening to drink tea from the bear cub's samovar, which is heated on a fire of juniper twigs. As they drink their tea, they converse and count the stars together. On his way to meet the bear to count the stars, he passes through the woods and encounters a beautiful, white horse standing in a fog so thick that the hedgehog can't even see his own paw. He is curious as to whether the horse would choke if it lay down to sleep in the fog. The hedgehog decides to explore the fog for himself.

He finds himself in a surreal world inhabited by frightening shapes and creatures, such as an eagle-owl, moths and a bat. But also helpful, benevolent ones, like the snail, the dog and the mysterious 'Somebody' in the river. He discovers a world of silence and rustles, of darkness, tall grass and enchanting stars. He is frightened, but his curiosity keeps him exploring the unknown, and slowly he learns there is nothing to fear. The owl, which has been following the hedgehog, appears near him suddenly and hoots, only to disappear again. He explores a large hollow tree, then panics as he realises he has dropped the raspberry jam he was carrying. A large dog, which is initially frightening to the hedgehog, retrieves the jam for him. Later he falls into a river and believes he is going to drown as he floats downstream on his back until he is rescued by a mysterious Somebody, a catfish, in the river that 'speaks' to him silently.

We hear the voice of the bear cub anxiously calling to the hedgehog. When he finally appears, the bear is so relieved to know his friend has arrived safely but also because it means his life of routine and order is restored. He needs the hedgehog to sit with him and count the stars because that's how it has always been. Without the hedgehog his world would fall apart. He is safe within his comfort zone, happy to live his life without change, without challenge, without fear. He's happy to count the stars but would never once think about reaching for them. But the hedgehog is different. We see the hedgehog's expression, almost of regret, as he listens to the bear. He has now experienced the world in a different way, he has seen the magical world inside the fog, another dimension. He has felt the excitement of exploring new worlds, the fear of being lost, new emotions, new friends. As he sits on the log with the bear cub, he thinks how wonderful it is that they are together again. But he also thinks about the white horse in the fog and wonders, "How is she?". Although he is happy to continue the life he has always known, the hedgehog's world will never be the same again.

A beautiful, lyrical and deceptively simple film with the innocence and wonder of a child's view of the world. The inquisitiveness of a child exploring an unfamiliar and slightly frightening world for the first time. Its dream-like images, symbolism, haunting music and beautifully intoned narration, all combine to make this award-winning stop motion animation from 1975 such a delightful and unique experience.

Hedgehog in the Fog (YouTube)

Three Times

Zui hao de shi guang
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three stories of women and men, played by the same actors but set in different eras. The central theme is love and emotion, and the film comments on our different expressions of love in different periods of modern history. In the first story, based on the director's own experiences, a young man enlisted for military service falls for a beautiful girl in a 1960s pool hall. The second is set in 1911 when a courtesan falls in love with one of her clients, a political activist on the brink of joining the Chinese revolution. The third story, set in present-day Taipei, dramatises a love-triangle in which hidden passions arise when a beautiful bisexual singer becomes involved in a tangled affair with a photographer.

A Time For Love 1966, Kaohsiung
Chen meets May, who works at his favourite pool hall. They play pool together. Soon after he enlists for national service. On a day-release from the army, Chen comes to visit her, but he finds out that she has quit her job and no-one knows where she has gone. An atmosphere of tension is created as the lovers, perhaps like Taiwan itself at this time, must choose between remaining comfortable in their status quo or taking risks to engender more intriguing possibilities.

A Time For Freedom 1911, Dadaocheng
The owner of a tea plantation discusses buying out a young courtesan's contract when his son gets her pregnant. Mr Chang, despite his disapproval of the keeping of concubines, steps in to hasten negotiations, allowing the young couple to marry. Mr Chang then leaves for Japan to join a Chinese revolutionary who fled to escape persecution during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. However, he does not address the issue that his own courtesan is most concerned about – her personal freedom, and he remains indifferent as she expresses her longings. An historical moment which illustrates the gap between the desires of the man and the desires of the woman. He longs for revolution, and for the recovery of Taiwan from Japanese rule, whereas she longs for emotional security.

A Time For Youth 2005, Taipei
Epileptic and losing sight in her right eye, Jing is a singer in present-day Taipei. She lives with her mother and grandmother and also has a woman lover, Micky. Zhen, a photographer, works in a digital photo lab and lives with his girlfriend, Blue. When Blue finds out that Zhen has fallen for Jing, she hits the roof. When the insecure Micky realises her relationship with Jing is in danger, she threatens suicide. Where can the four of them go from here? None of them will find happiness. In the world of modern technology, cellphones and text messaging foster a lack of communication between today's apathetic and disaffected youth.

Hou Hsiao-hsien on the making of the film: "It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel how people's behaviour is circumscribed by the times and places they live in. For me, the film's Chinese title has a very specific resonance. If we speak of 'the best of our times', as invoked in the Chinese title, it's not that we have wonderful memories as such. What makes times 'best' is that they're lost and gone: we'll never have them again."

With beautiful cinematography and deeply moving performances, this trilogy of memory, romance and desire is a testament to the enduring power of love. Three times, three emotions, three affairs. A tender, bittersweet portrait of snatched moments of happiness and transient love.

Café Lumière

Kôhî jikô
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou's centenary tribute to Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, echoing many of Ozu's recurring themes – the breakdown of communication between parents and children, the rhythmic patterning of everyday life. The film paints a compelling and insightful portrait of contemporary Japan, focusing on the travails of Yoko Inoue, an independent young woman researching a project on the composer Jiang Wen-Ye. Born in Taiwan with Japanese nationality, Jiang was the talk of the 1930s and 1940s music world in Japan.

Yoko, a freelance writer becomes friends with Hajime, the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop, and the two spend a great deal of time together in coffee shops. Yoko was raised in the rural town of Yubari by her sight-impaired uncle, but has since created a good relationship with her father and step-mother. One day Yoko tells her parents that she is pregnant. The father of the child is a former boyfriend from Taiwan. Her parents worry for Yoko's future and her choice to become an unmarried mother. Yoko is a young woman who makes her way through life almost casually, not letting anything get her too upset or too excited. But now she must deal with both the concerns of her parents and the pressures and contradictions of her modern life.

As the original title Kôhî jikô suggests a feeling of "settling the spirit and facing the realities of one's life", so the film portrays the moments where Yoko and Hajime are about to restart their own lives. Although he cannot articulate his feelings, Hajime is filled with love for Yoko. In her daily life Yoko comes to re-evaluate her view of her family, Hajime, and the new life growing inside her.

Deftly drawing on the recurring Ozu theme of the relationship between ageing parents and their growing, increasingly independent child, the story plays out slowly, portraying real life with little artifice whilst evincing other things the eye cannot see. Hou reveals so much of the human heart through his quiet, unhurried style and his acute attention to the minutiae of life. Beautifully performed, with long, well-framed shots featuring natural sound and lighting, and incorporating one of Jiang's piano scores, Café Lumière is a gently compelling tale about everyday characters doing everyday things, expressed as pure cinematic poetry.

Adelheid

A film by František Vláčil

In the aftermath of World War II in the Sudetenland in Northern Moravia, a young Czech airman recently returned from service in the Royal Air Force, is given the management of a former German estate. There he meets the beautiful Adelheid, the former owner's daughter who once lived in the estate but is now reduced to servitude. The Czech airman falls in love with Adelheid, but lingering resentment and bitter political strife stand in the way of their happiness.

Though Czech-born and possessing the rank of lieutenant, Viktor Chotovický has spent much of the war in Aberdeen, Scotland, working in an RAF desk job. After a series of misunderstandings concerning his arrival that underline the dominant atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, Viktor makes himself known to Inspector Hejna, and is charged with the task of looking after the Heidenmann's large country house and drawing up an inventory of its contents. It's a job that suits him perfectly, as he doesn't have to talk to many people.

Adelheid Heidenmann is initially assumed to be an innocent victim of widespread anti-German prejudice, but it transpires that she's the daughter of a notorious local Nazi war criminal currently on trial, whose inevitable execution is imminent. Each day she leaves the camp to clean the now unoccupied mansion house that was once her home.

In a near wordless exchange, Viktor finds himself enamoured by Adelheid, even though she is really his servant and has little choice under the circumstances. He allows her to stay in the house and tries to build her trust and affection, but with no common language he has to piece together Adelheid's life from visual clues, old photographs and letters. Soon Viktor discovers that it is impossible to exist in such a vacuum, especially at a time of national turbulence. Whatever his private feelings for Adelheid, it's politically and socially impossible to express them in public, even in a supposedly liberated country. Eventually he will discover that she's much more morally ambiguous than he first imagined, and has to confront his own conscience when he finds that she is sheltering her German-soldier brother.

A tragic, compelling and beautifully filmed love story that transcends the absence of verbal communication. It was, in 1969, the first film to controversially address the Czech treatment of Germans during the expulsions of the mid-1940s.

Flight of the Red Balloon

Le voyage du ballon rouge
a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

A young boy, Simon, must deal with the increasing fragility of his mother, the loving yet preoccupied puppeteer Suzanne. Overwhelmed by the demands of her chaotic existence, Suzanne hires Song Fang, a Taiwanese film student, to help care for Simon. With Song, a unique extended family is formed, utterly interdependent yet lost in their separate thoughts and dreams. All this is mirrored by a delicate, shiny red balloon that hovers above the streets of Paris.

Suzanne, a single mother, is doing her best to raise her seven-year-old son Simon, whilst preparing her latest marionette production, based on the Yuan Dynasty story of Zhang Yu and his beloved, Qiong Lian. Song, a Taiwanese film student who has come to study in Paris and is making her own digital version of Le ballon rouge, is hired by Suzanne as a daytime nanny to take care of Simon. Song goes everywhere with her camera, filming everything she sees. Meanwhile, Simon is being followed by a red balloon that has grown attached to the boy.

The balloon, which seems to have its own personality, hovers over Simon and his family as Suzanne struggles with her daily life. Her entire working day is spent in rehearsal at the marionette theatre. She argues with her absent husband who has relocated to Montréal to write a novel and shows no sign of returning. She has to confront their tenant, Marc, who owes one year's rent and Suzanne must now set about obtaining an eviction order. She needs the flat for her daughter, Louise, who has been studying in Brussels but will soon be returning to Paris. The piano has now to be moved upstairs from Marc's flat in order to make things easier for Simon's piano teacher. As Suzanne's world becomes increasingly hectic and chaotic, Song Fang becomes ever more important in her life. In the end, it is Song's calming presence and Asian perspective that helps Suzanne regain control of her life.

In 1956, Albert Lamorisse made Le ballon rouge, a short in which a young boy, played by his son, Pascal, makes friends with a red balloon. Fifty years later, Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's first French-language film is a beautifully shot meditation on the transience of life and the continuing impact of the past on the present. The film was commissioned by Musée d'Orsay and is inspired by Lamorisse's children's classic. Hou Hsiao-hsien's feature premiered in the Un Certain Regard selection at Festival de Cannes 2007.

Revanche

A film by Götz Spielmann

A nature scene, late summer. A small lake in the woods, no people, silence. Not far away, a newly built house inhabited by a couple, Robert and Susanne. They live an ordinary life like so many other people. Meanwhile in Vienna, nightlife, a red light district, the world of prostitution. Here money rules and most people have jobs that barely allow them to scrape by. Like Alex and Tamara. She is a prostitute from Ukraine; he, the boss's errand boy. They are lovers, but they have to keep it a secret, since employees aren't allowed to get romantically involved.

They want to escape this life, but they need money. Alex devises a plan to rob a bank in a little village out in the countryside. Tamara wants to come along, and he reluctantly agrees. Everything is going exactly as planned until a policeman happens to walk up, Robert. He fires a few shots at the getaway car as it speeds off and accidentally hits the young woman. Overcome with despair, Alex leaves the body behind in a forest clearing. He lies low at his grandfather's desolate farm at the edge of the woods. Silent and withdrawn, Alex begins the task of chopping firewood for the approaching winter. He is consumed with pain, grief, and the hate he harbours for the man responsible for Tamara's death.

A lake in the woods is where Robert finds comfort alone, as he tries to sort out what happened. Alex begins to observe Robert, the policeman, spying on him, and following him as he goes about his daily routine. Then he meets Susanne, the policeman's wife. The lives of all these people will change as a result of Tamara's death, more radically than they suspect. Soon autumn will come, just like every year.

Writer/director Götz Spielmann on the making of the film:
"Revanche is a story – not theory enhanced by images. Maybe what my films are trying to do is to get to the bottom of life by focusing not on a social context but on existential questions. That's my passion, what sparks my curiosity, impels me: tracking down the substance of life, its essence deep down inside. There is, behind all the conflicts and painful things I show in my films, a fundamental spark of optimism – the conviction that life isn't a mistake, that it all somehow makes sense."

A tense and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forests of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

Szerelem

Love
a film by Károly Makk

Set in Budapest in 1953, János has been imprisoned on a false charge as a political dissident and sentenced to ten years. His young wife Luca does not even know if he is still alive. She frequently visits his bedridden mother and in an attempt to sustain her in her last few months, tells the elderly woman that her favourite son is in America, pursuing a successful career as a filmmaker. She fabricates letters supposedly from János telling his news and then listens impassively while his mother reads her the details. Luca herself is dismissed from her teaching job because of her and her husband's political beliefs.

During the exchanges between the two women we read the thoughts and memories of the mother, shown in brief flashbacks – photographs, events from her past or her imagined past – repeated sequences of images, details and textures of stunning beauty. As the dying woman's days grow bleaker, Luca struggles to keep her spirits up. She has also to contend with her own desperate loneliness, relying increasingly on the support of the mother's housekeeper, Irén. Finally, János is freed and he travels home almost in dread of what he might find there.

Makk's haunting and atmospheric film from 1971, brilliantly shot by János Tóth, captures exactly the fear and uncertainty of the time and is a treatise on how such times affect fidelity, faith, illusion and love. It explores, unsentimentally, a love composed of fortitude and forbearance, restraint and fear, with the belief that you may meet again, and the acceptance that you may not.

Mirror

Zerkalo
a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

In this, his most autobiographical work, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky creates a profound and compelling masterpiece in which he reflects upon his own childhood and the destiny of the Russian people. With its unstructured and inconsistent movement back and forth through time, and its extraordinary and mesmerisingly beautiful images, it is cinema in its purest form, experienced as emotion rather than by intellect.

What began as a planned series of interviews with his own mother, evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Often, a person's memories are vague, inconsistent and illogical, with little distinction between concrete memories, dream logic, and isolated events experienced as a child. Time shifts, generations merge, and the film's many layers establish the links which connect people – intertwining real life and family relationships with recollections of childhood, dreams and nightmares – images, episodes, and the sense of desperately clinging to something that has lost all meaning.

Tarkovsky's own memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled, as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of his father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, reading his own elegiac poetry. Tarkovsky transmutes the love he felt for his own wife into his father's love for his mother.

The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is magically captured by the camera – the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a field of long grass – all creating indelible images with deep, if mysterious emotional resonance. As time shifts between the narrator's generation and his mother's, archive newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panorama of memory, history, and nature.

Laissez-Passer

Safe Conduct
a film by Bertrand Tavernier

Based on true events, the story depicts one of France's most controversial periods in history – the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation – against the background of the French film industry. It follows two men who struggle to maintain their integrity while working for the German controlled Continental Film Studios. Aurenche is a writer with a complicated love life who injects his scripts with subversive messages, while assistant director Devaivre uses his position as a cover for his increasingly hazardous activities with the Resistance. The film vividly recreates the day-to-day danger, fear and uncertainty of wartime France.

Paris, March 1942, and the victorious German occupying power demands that France pay a colossal financial contribution, 400 million francs a day, to the German war effort. Continental Films, a German controlled production company founded in 1940 in Paris by Albert Greven, is a snare similar to the one into which the French nation has already fallen. Should French technicians agree to work for Continental? Is it a hiding place 'in between the wolf's fangs, where it cannot bite you', or is it equivalent to collaborating with the enemy?

Jean Devaivre is an assistant director who joins Continental as the best possible cover for his Resistance activities. He is a man of action, rash, impulsive and daring. Jean Aurenche, a scriptwriter and poet, uses every possible excuse to turn down any offers of work from the Germans. He is watchful, insatiable, curious and torn between his three mistresses. Above all, he is an observer who resists when he takes up his pen and writes. Their professional and personal circles include dozens of other people, some resigned to their country's fate, others who carry on the struggle. There are fighters and collaborators, but in German-occupied France, they all have to combat hunger, cold and petty restrictions simply to survive. The film is dedicated to those who lived through this time.

Writer/director Bertrand Tavernier on the making of the film:
"Were things as black and white as people subsequently made out? Where do you draw the line between collaboration, survival and resistance? No film has ever dealt with these issues. Laissez-Passer is set during the German occupation but it is not a war film. The dramatic tension comes from the energy, rhythm and multiple contradictory sentiments – comedy, tragedy, emotion – that ricochet off each other within a single scene. The story is full of paradoxes. I really wanted to show the significance of each choice. I wanted to show that there were various forms of resistance during those four years."

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.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat
a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave – the birthplace of his first life.

Writer/director Weerasethakul on the making of the film:
"I believe in the transmigration of souls between humans, plants, animals, and ghosts. Uncle Boonmee's story shows the relationship between man and animal and at the same time destroys the line dividing them. When the events are represented through cinema, they become shared memories of the crew, the cast, and the public. A new layer of (simulated) memory is augmented in the audience's experience. In this regard, filmmaking is not unlike creating synthetic past lives. I am interested in exploring the innards of this time machine. There might be some mysterious forces waiting to be revealed just as certain things that used to be called black magic have been shown to be scientific facts. For me, filmmaking remains a source all of whose energy we haven't properly utilised. In the same way that we have not thoroughly explained the inner workings of the mind."

The film compliments Weerasethakul's Primitive project, which deals with ideas of extinction and the recollection of past lives. "Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me. The film reinforces a special association between cinema and reincarnation. Cinema is man's way to create alternate universes, other lives."

Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat won the Palme d'Or at Festival de Cannes 2010.

Treeless Mountain

A film by So Yong Kim

When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, seven-year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are taken to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother's promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimatise to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed young girls eagerly anticipate their mother's homecoming. But when the piggy bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, Big Aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children.

Jin and Bin live in a cramped apartment in Seoul with their single mother. Though their lives are on the edge of disaster, both girls remain completely oblivious to the threats of the outside world. One morning, quite unexpectedly, their mother packs up all their belongings and sends the girls to live with their alcoholic Big Aunt – their absent father's sister, a woman they do not know. Suddenly thrust into a hostile and unfamiliar environment, the sisters are given a piggy bank and told that every time they obey their aunt they will get a coin to go in it, and when the piggy bank is full, their mother will return.

Wrestling with feelings of abandonment despite the fact that she's not mature enough to understand why their mother has left or what may become of her and Bin in the future, Jin is forced to accept an imposed responsibility where there is no guidance or security offered by adults. Left to their own devices and imaginations the girls discover a way to fill the piggy bank, and in the belief that this will bring the return of their mother, they wait on top of their little hill without trees for the arrival of her bus. But when their mother does not return, the girls are sent by their aunt to the country to live with their grandparents on a farm. It is here, as a result of their grandmother's care and interest in them, so desperately needed, that the two girls learn valuable lessons about family bonds.

A beautiful, meditative and thought-provoking film in which So Yong Kim draws outstanding performances of naturalism from her two young actresses. The camera staying close to the girls' faces, allows us to see through their eyes, with their understanding of the world. An unsentimental and delicately observed portrayal of the quiet resilience of children.

The Consequences of Love

Le conseguenze dell'amore
a film by Paolo Sorrentino

Titta di Girolamo is a 50-year-old loner from southern Italy who has lived for eight years in an anonymous Swiss hotel. He spends his days in the lobby of the hotel, impassively observing the guests and staff with cool detachment. He seems to be a man without identity and with little to do. A nullifying routine, he is constantly waiting for something to happen, but what is Titta's dark secret? And what is the story of the mysterious suitcases delivered to his door? He once lost money owned by the Mafia on the stock market and has been punished in a gruesome way – he is to deliver the Mafia's money to the bank once a week and is allowed no life for himself.

Elegantly dressed, he sits each day in the hotel lobby, smoking cigarettes with impeccable poise. He observes the hotel guests and especially the beautiful bartender, Sofia, but never acknowledges her attempts to be friendly. At night, he plays cards with the former hotel owners who lost the hotel to gambling, before he gets ready for another night without sleep. His detachment from the world is complete, until he begins to communicate with Sofia. At this point his neatly organised life turns upside down and the terrible truth about Titta's concealed world begins to unravel.

An unusual, gripping and tightly plotted psychological thriller – the personal journey of a middle-aged man eternally trapped in an enforced existence. With masterly restrained performances, the unfolding story is stylishly executed as the characters' inner selves are gradually revealed to us. A wonderfully slow-paced film with very sophisticated and innovative cinematography, elegant editing, and a highly atmospheric use of music.