Antti Alanen

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Barque sortant du port / Boat Leaving the Port

Société Lumière. Catalogue Lumière, vue N° 9. The art of observation, the art of the poetic image, a timeless vision in less than a minute.

Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's Cine-Eye vision at its most exciting. All possibilities of the moving image are dynamized, including the capacity for self-reflection. Cinema like this is not for passive consumption but for changing the world, yet a wake-up call like this is also stimulating entertainment.

City Lights

"You can see now?" The finale is unforgettable, and its grandeur is based on all that has happened before. The figure of the Tramp has never been more topical. There will be hundreds of millions of tramps as refugees from the global climate crisis.

Letter from an Unknown Woman

One of the best-known and least-known films. We seem always to miss the point just as Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) always forgets Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), who has loved him all his life. This story of the mysterious power of transference is an anti-romantic tale told in the most tenderly romantic manner. It is a double narrative: we are enchanted by the love illusion while constantly awakened to reality.

Kahdeksan Surmanluotia

A rich and engrossing family saga from a period of violent transformation for an agricultural country. People who have always lived in harmony with nature are about to face modernization, urbanization and globalization. The universal theme is that of being out of time, obsolete: what happens when the world we knew suddenly vanishes around us. It is also a seismic blow to patriarchy and masculinity in general. The father is no longer able to sustain his family and loses respect and self-respect. As a director, Mikko Niskanen masters both action and duration. As an actor he creates an enduring portrait of an alcoholic.

Sambizanga

Sarah Maldoror's revolutionary masterpiece about the liberation and resistance movement of the Angolan people against Portuguese colonizers is also a great story of love strong as death, told in the glorious colours of the African light.

YEK ETTEFAQ-E SADEH

Before Abbas Kiarostami, there was Sohrab Shahid Saless and his A Simple Event, focusing on the ordeal of a little boy. The intensity in the account of the everyday is tremendous. Such cinema of duration is about being itself in the same sense as the concept of byt (быть) in Russian literature. In cinema, Shahib Saless is most clearly the heir to Anton Chekhov.

Grave of the Fireflies

The ordeal of children in the firebombings of the Second World War is a subject that transcends the limits of understanding. Animation is the very means to handle even such a subject. From Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story Isao Takahata created an anti-war masterpiece of cosmic grandeur.

Dekalog (Decalogue)

The culmination of Kieslowski's 'cinema of moral anxiety': a panorama of life inspired by the ten commandments. In collaboration with the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieslowski obeys the classical unities of action, time and space to a certain extent, although all episodes tell different stories with different actors and almost all have different cinematographers pursuing different visual expressions.

Nomadland

Female directors have been reinventing the western, and it took a Chinese woman, Chloé Zhao, to create the greatest work in this recent trend. The powerfully landscape-driven film brings fresh insight into the classic Western figure of the wanderer. It also evokes The Grapes of Wrath, Dersu Uzala and The Ballad of Narayama. It includes a topical sequence at Amazon, and opens to the cosmic view of Shakespeare: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" from Macbeth's "sound and fury" monologue.