After watching a year of art films, I’m reassured: the Cinema won’t die anytime soon

With the end of the global pandemic, the art film scene has once again returned to its lively and bustling state. Faced with the double whammy of the onslaught of commercial films and short videos, art films have successfully broken through and gained new vitality. This has also convinced film lovers like us that art films, as an art form, won’t die anytime soon. We’ll now review in detail this year’s memorable and representative artistic masterpieces from a few aspects – namely female-centric films, documentaries, works by esteemed directors, as well as films by newcomers.

It’s confirmed, men really can’t make it

There has been no clear definition of what a “female-centric film” is. Anything from having a female director (or producer), to films focusing on women’s stories, to having the female perspective can be considered a “female-centric film”.

The year 2023 birthed many female-centric films worth discussing. Some of the creators are up-and-coming mavericks, whilst others are female filmmakers already in the spotlight. Regardless, they are all committed to making more innovative female-centric films, expanding on the development of said films in the past few years.

The most important female-centric film this year (2023) is undoubtedly Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. French director Justine Triet has been nominated once before with Sibyl for the same award, and she surprisingly won the top prize with just the second nomination. She’s truly a young and promising director.

Anatomy of a Fall talks about how a couple and their visually impaired son have spent a year in a remote mountain chalet. One day, the husband is found dead outside the house, and police launched investigations into this possible murder immediately. Under uncertain circumstances, the wife is indicted – is it a suicide or a homicide? A year later, the son stands at his mother’s trial, and this is also a true analysis of his parents’ relationship.

The film’s biggest breakthrough is how it uses the perspective of a suspenseful court trial to depict the dilemma women encounter in intimate relationships. When watching the film, the audience may first be more concerned about the identity of the murderer and the causes for the husband’s death. But as the story progresses, we gradually discover that the truth isn’t that important. What’s important is how a supposedly harmonious marriage can turn sour and force a couple to become enemies. Women are in a particularly awkward situation in intimate relationships, and male hypocrisy and cowardice are heavily criticized in this movie, though the movie didn’t shout it out loud for all to hear as Barbie did. Instead, it puts the audience in the female lead’s shoes, allowing for deeper empathy and greater immersion; it gives audiences that chance to truly get a feel of becoming the target of public criticism.

It's even more gratifying that Poor Things, a hit at the Venice Film Festival, was equally successful in telling a female story despite being directed by a man, Yorgos Lanthimos. Bella, played by Emma Stone, is a capricious, hypersexual and unfettered woman, as well as a female Frankenstein. She had drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, only to have a scientist replace her brain with that of her still-living baby and resurrected.

This is a strange story that combines elements of realism, fantasy, and science fiction, but it essentially focuses on the growth and awakening of women’s self-awareness. It expands both horizontally and vertically, spanning from a woman’s childhood to adulthood, and analyses a woman’s life from various aspects like psychology, philosophy, sexual desires, emotions, and world views.

In addition, films such as La chimera uses a fable-like narrative to describe female psychology, and Tiger Stripes uses audiovisual language to tell the story of a girl's painful adolescence, while Past Lives is a Korean female director's story about women. Female directors in Latin America are also assiduous, with two films by female Latin American directors shortlisted in the Berlinale Main Competition – 20,000 Species of Bees and Tótem – where both view this complex world from the perspective of a little girl. Amateur actors were selected, making shooting difficult, but the final results of the film were pleasantly satisfying.

Narrative films are so bad we’re better off watching documentaries

In recent years, documentary-making has been experiencing a trend of recovery globally. An iconic change is witnessed in the 2022 Venice Film Festival when the Golden Lion is awarded to the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The rise of documentaries can, to some extent, be related to the inadequacies of narrative films. It is hard to be innovative in narrative films, especially for original screenplays, hence countries are all fighting to purchase successful scripts to adapt or remake. Without the treatment and status they deserve in the industry, screenwriters thus turn to other fields. This is when the importance of documentaries is underscored.

At this year's Berlin International Film Festival, French documentary master Nicolas Philibert returned with his latest work On the Adamant. The film focuses on a daycare center called L'Adamant located in the Seine in the center of Paris, which welcomes adults with mental disorders and provides them with on-site care to help them rehabilitate or maintain their mental state.

What’s interesting about this movie is that it breaks the boundaries between space and the narrative subject. Although the movie portrays the lives of patients, it doesn’t paint them as miserable or demonise them, and instead depicts their interesting daily lives. When watching the movie, audiences might wonder: are they really sick? Is it possible that they’re the normal ones whilst we’re the ill ones? Who defines who is normal and who is sick anyway? These humorous and natural narrations of daily life truly showcase Philibert’s skills. As a pleasant surprise, the Berlinale ultimately awarded the Golden Bear to this film, highlighting the significance and recognition of documentaries within the industry.

Another important section of the Berlin International Film Festival is ‘Encounters’, which awarded the Best Director Award to Tatiana Huezo – a Mexican woman – securing another victory for Latin American creators. Huezo's new film is a documentary called The Echo, set in the remote Mexican village of El Echo and records the real-life poverty and hardship faced by the children in the valley. Here, where frost and drought plague the land, children care for sheep and their elderly grandmothers, and learn to understand death, disease, and love from every word and silence of their parents. It’s both a calm and objective documentary, while also featuring the tender and compassion of Huezo as a woman.

Of course, one thing that makes filming a documentary much harder than a narrative film is the longer timespan and waiting time. For instance, Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), which got nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, is also a documentary that had a significant impact globally that year. Wang spent five years shooting this film while expressing his creative views through it, "I am not interested in grand narratives. Although Youth (Spring) is as heavy as a 30-hour documentary involving dozens of/ close to about a hundred personnel, it doesn’t mean it’s an epic. It’s just an ode to life, telling us to respect every individual. People can live meaningful lives even in their most difficult times.” Such a sincere attitude towards creation is particularly worthy of encouragement.

Removing esteemed directors from their pedestals and focusing on the “losers” instead

In 2023, the return of many familiar film masters gave us some works of varying quality. For example, the three great directors, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen, have released new works this year. Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the better ones with a guaranteed quality, though many viewers think that there isn’t much of a breakthrough despite Scorsese maintaining his consistent style. But for films like The Palace and Coup de chance, feedback wasn’t so ideal. Audiences around the world are gradually becoming disenchanted with great directors, and they will not lower their standards for popularity or establishment.

In contrast, some young directors have produced good films this year, all focusing on those who "aren’t living a good life": from the perspective of the lower class. For instance, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film Monster tells the story of a peaceful lakeside town, where the stable lives of a single mother who loves her son, a straightforward teacher who cares about her students and innocent children, are upended when a campus conflict turns into a social uproar, attracting attention from the media and society. When the situation worsened, both children disappeared on one stormy morning.

A bizarre incident is thus told through the mother’s, teacher’s, and children’s point of view. This is Kore-eda’s attempt at a breakthrough; though many of his past works utilise children's perspectives as well, the suspense is never as strong as in this movie. Moreover, the incident is filmed three times from different perspectives, which requires a good control over the overarching plot and pacing. The final focus on the blooming innocent, same-sex love between the two lower-class boys stemming from their mutual comfort is an element rarely appearing in Kore-eda’s films before.

Perfect Days is the product when famous director Wim Wenders also set his sights on Japanese society. This film takes minimalism to the extreme. The protagonist played by Kōji Yakusho is a toilet cleaner who’s satisfied with his ordinary and systematic work life; he also loves music, books, and taking photos of trees. This film doesn’t have any major conflicts, simply the repetition of the protagonist waking up day after day, freshening up, going to work and scrubbing toilets, before finally knocking off and going home to sleep. However, audiences didn’t find it boring, for they could feel how the countless, unnamed ordinary citizens can live equally interesting lives. Kōji Yakusho’s acting is also a bonus, earning him the Best Actor Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival with this portrayal.

In addition, Aki Kaurismäki's new work Fallen Leaves, Christian Petzold's Afire, Shinkai Makoto's Suzume, and Angela Schanelec’s Music all have differences. Some subtract from form, some subtract from the plot; some use the simplest human relationships to illustrate complex societal problems, while others expand upon the genre elements. Yet all that’s shown in the end is just the simplest love between people and the truth. I’d say that it’s all thanks to these creative directors that the field of art films did not disappoint. And by focusing on the lives of the lower class, they’ve also revealed a strong sense of humanistic care and human touch.

The pandemic is over, but will the world be alright?

So what are the young directors just starting out actually doing? In fact, we can glimpse from their films the exploration, anger, restlessness, and uneasiness that are rarely seen in the films of many predecessors or great directors.

For example, this year's (2023) well-received Chilean film The Settlers which was shortlisted for the Cannes “Un Certain Regard” section, tells the story of Tierra del Fuego of Chile at the southernmost tip of South America in 1901, where a wealthy Spanish businessman owned vast land and erected fences to graze his sheep. However, the indigenous people who have lived here for a long time didn’t understand the capitalist concept of private property and hunted sheep without authorization, enraging the wealthy owner. The businessman then hired a cruel British former officer, an American mercenary, and a local Chilean mestizo as a guide to clear out a safe route to the seaside.

The film is a very intuitive and brutal presentation of the history of violent colonialism. The entire film is neat, crisp, and has a complete narrative structure. It’s hard to believe that this is Felipe Gálvez’s directorial debut, which is also a film that many film critics consider as one of the most important Latin American films of the year. In fact, many directors would rather avoid touching on such grand themes like the birth of a country, but young Gálvez, born in the 1980s, went straight for it, and successfully at that.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell which won the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival was directed by Phạm Thiên Ân from Vietnam. The film tells the story of a mysterious pilgrimage to rural areas in Vietnam and explores its little-known Christian minority. Of course, this movie has also caused a lot of controversy. Some say that this movie is too heavily influenced by Apichatpong and Bi Gan with the huge amount of long shots used in the movie. But unlike these two directors, we can clearly feel the confusion, restlessness, and feelings of loss of the youngsters in Vietnam’s humidity from Phạm Thiên Ân's lens. This may be one of the reasons why this movie is so charming.

Another work by a newcomer that has sparked widespread discussion around the world is Here, winner of the “Encounter” section in the 2023 Berlinale and directed by the Belgian Bas Devos. This film goes even further than Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, almost abandoning conventional film narratives whilst amplifying the most primitive elements of visual art such as sound, light, and scenery shots. It is in essence, a criticism of modern day humans going against nature and a call to return to the latter. We won’t feel at peace after watching it, but we’d feel the uneasiness conveyed by the director.

The rendering of these emotions is also naturally related to the arrival and end of the pandemic. Undeniably, the pandemic has upended global culture and creation. We have also seen a large number of young creators using the pandemic as a backdrop in their creations, and the most memorable one among them is the Romanian director Radu Jude, winner of the 2021 Golden Bear. His new film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World combines various current phenomena such as the pandemic, short videos, and society’s despair and pessimism, displaying them all via his usual academic style of discussion. Though it might be a setback for some, audiences who can understand it will certainly find it bold and fresh.

All in all, global art films in 2023 show a trend of having younger creators and more diversity. Of course, this is also related to the blows short videos have on art films. The current audience has become accustomed to fragmented viewing, and with the rise of AI, directors have become a dispensable profession. What creators can do is invest in more warmth that artificial intelligence and machine algorithms cannot achieve. Let’s hope we can see more warm and realistic art films we can emotionally connect to in 2024.