By the end of Oscar season, 2023 has come to be a “source and 88 nations will present their best film in the Best International Film category Voting at the Oscars”. The first one made a thumb list of fifteen pictures and as a result, there were five who were nominated and will be competing for the prestigious one on the 10th March: Ilker Çatak and the film Teacher’s Room from Germany; JA Bayona and the film The Snow Society from Spain; Matteo Garrone and the film I Captain from Italy; Wim Wenders with the film Perfect Days from Japan; Jonathan Glazer and the film Area of Interest from the United Kingdom.
The broadening approach to stress on several regional Cinemas is aimed at not only exploring its subordinate body. The majority of them must have been produced in Europe since they travelled to the short list. However different stories are also present in the following and I Captain is the odyssey of the two Senegalese boys crossing from Dakar to Sicily. The snow society however relives the horror in the Andes.
Thumbing through these films in this manner gives a chance to understand different dimensions including languages, conflicts, messages and cultures. The in-depth tales enriching the soft and hard drama are told using different landscape and era while others are more dramatising exploring the fullness of the human race. They urge us to do a self-appraisal and accept the indelible mark that some events have left upon us as a people, both the good and the ugly.
Small Worlds
Film specific environments of Çatak and Wenders are contemporary and revolve around historical but mundane events with an emphasis on relations of anonymised characters. Teacher’s Room takes the institutional context into the contemporary world and exposes the darker aspects of it – the human dynamics. At school, the combination of too many thefts leads a moral circle to evolve consisting of suspicion, hostility and aggression. There is a young liberal teacher who gets caught in this web; quite ironically, the more she tries to salvage the strained relations, the more she sinks.
This theme progresses with a police operation against students, an unauthorized video shoot, people getting accused for privacy invasion and students carrying out freelance journalism because it is free press. This oppressive destopic piece workings are foregoing that it is a moral fable to western societies today on the sorts of nervousness that one feels when including other people in their view whereas they are not stingy on notions of home inclusiveness.
Perfect Days offers a soothing relief that follows the grinding drama of Teacher’s Room. There is no dramatic conflicting development and rather, the narrative simply observes the work habit of a middle-aged man employed as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo and who takes the job very seriously. Every morning, he gets out of bed to play 70’s music from cassettes, collects plants from the roadside and bears them in his tiny house to look after them. Emotions are muted and he remains quiet and perfectly relaxed, recounting that his life does not involve too much talking, only capturing with a camera the swaying of leaves in black and white photographs.
Komorebi, such is the title which surfaces towards the end of the movie, epitomizes the idea of the film succinctly; it means the interplay of light and shadow interspersed between leaves of trees shaken by the wind. This brief interlude is quite special because it carries a message extolling virtue and modesty, as one of the means of inner peace. In a context where people are often battling the absurdity of Teacher’s Room, Perfect Days shows that the situation does not always have to be that bleak.
The Human Being in the Immensity
Rather than concentrating on those particular narratives, there are the epic narratives featured in The Snow Society and I, Captain. In both movies, grand voyages are shown selecting a humanity beyond measure, and how the flesh can sustain itself, or what the soul holds on to in its last moments of despair.
The Snow Society, directed by JA Bayona, punctuates the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 tragedy by honoring the victims and celebrating the survivors. This movie includes such admirable action movie like pictures that even nutrition is not lost as it addresses significant issues of human being, social… and the courage of human beings in the face of great adversity. He respects the nuances of the disaster genre combining it with drama revealing the greater meaning in these events and lifting the spirit of humanity even in times of despair.
Moving to I, Captain in this year with the help of the eldest daughter of Orso he Igor Sposito also explores the epic battle between the lonely battling ego and a large cool world, this time consisting mostly of other people. This is what two teenagers girls from Senegal decide to do inspired by the internet and otherescapee dreams. They have 6 months savings, assume that their families remain obliviousand its time for them ‘to go underwater, up and across the desert and the Mediterranean sea. Which is why they know so little about the history of their new Intended Country.
“In spite of the portrayal of deep compassion towards the migrants and refugees, which was presented with such mbanan, Russian born Italian filmmaker Garrone paints a strong representation of human barbarism and its most ferocious aspects, depicting the hard truth behind sumped up news of the tragedy of the migrants in the Mediterranean sea. Nina, an admirable film that was shown at the European Parliament and in the Vatican and received awards from UNICEF wants to concern European outlook on the people’s pains when they go to look for better opportunities.”
On the Other Side of Cruelty
Even if I, Captain details also an aspect of barbarity as it may seem incompatible with the human race they belong to, it has the benefit of dealing with this barbarity in the historical time frame most reviled by the western civilization, that of the Auschwitz commandant who is lionized by the Nazis.
Jonathan Glazer’s picture is shattered into yet another image of Nazi Germany; rather than the ‘ideal’ Aryan, it is the fuhrer’s commander Rudolf Hoess, against whom the entire world has no words. Edith Frank’s husband and her daughters live a regular family life at the gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp with smoke and flames drenching their daily activities. Hoess and his spouse are both insidiously mind-boggling and cancerous people that are filled with human patterns, awful as they may seem, greed and jealousy, home chores.
In explaining the way how Höss delights at briefing people about the latest promotion in his career that considers internally revolting and would happen to the masses as sadistic baffles one about the correlation between the thorough perusal aspects of racism embedded in the movie.
Area of Interest vividly depicts the existence of an almost imperceptible border between the daily routine and horrific behaviours, which prods everyone watching the film to question their ethical position in regard to violence.