Culture

From ‘No Time to Die’ to 5 films about grief

It’s been two months since ‘No Time to Die’, the twenty-fifth in the James Bond series, was released. Filming locations included some of my favourite places in the world, such as Italy (Matera), the Caribbean (Jamaica), Norway, the Faroe Islands and London. As much as I enjoyed following the fictional British MI6 agent around the world (SPOILER ALERT FOLLOWS), I was shocked by the ending, where Bond dies. A few weeks later, I attended the Leeds International Film Festival, which took place from 3 to 18 November. Interestingly, five of the six films I watched (chosen either by myself or my friend Jini) were films about grief.

Drive My Car

Drive My Car’ was probably my favourite among all films about grief I watched. It is a 3-hour-long Japanese film based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami from his 2014 short story collection ‘Men Without Women’. It has been selected as the Japanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. A middle-aged actor and director, grieving the death of his wife, travels to Hiroshima to produce a new play for a theatre festival. There he meets a young woman, assigned to become his chauffeur, as well as his late wife’s lover.

The Hand of God

The Hand of God’ (‘È stata la mano di Dio’) is the latest film by Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian filmmaker whose 2013 film ‘The Great Beauty’ (‘La Grande Bellezza’) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. ‘The Hand of God’ has been selected as the Italian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. It will be available on Netflix from 15 December. It takes place in Naples in the 1980s, where a teenager suddenly loses his parents in a tragic accident.

Hope

Hope’ (‘Håp’) is a Norwegian film directed by Maria Sødahl. It was selected as the Norwegian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. Based on the director’s own experience of being diagnosed with cancer, ‘Hope’ is about a middle-aged mother of six who learns that she has terminal cancer.

Petite Maman

Petite Maman’ is the latest film by Céline Sciamma, the French filmmaker who wrote and directed the beautiful ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy ‘Petite Maman’ as much. This 70-minute-long film is about an 8-year-old girl, who has just lost her beloved grandmother. While helping her parents clean out her mother’s childhood home, she meets a girl her own age in the woods. It soon turns out that this girl is no other than her mother.

Queen of Glory

Queen of Glory’ is an American film about a young Ghanaian-American woman, who unexpectedly loses her mother and subsequently inherits her Christian bookstore in the Bronx.

Between Two Worlds

The last film I watched was not a film about grief. ‘Between Two Worlds’ (‘Ouistreham’) is a French film set in Caen, a port town in Northern France. It stars Juliette Binoche, who plays an author who goes ‘undercover’ and gets hired as a cleaner, to find raw material for her new book.

Further reading (and watching)

To find out more about European films (not necessarily films about grief), check out my posts:

25 French films worth watching

12 (+1) Italian films to watch

A cinematic journey to the Nordic countries

A cinematic journey around Europe

Alex

(the Traveling-again-Psychiatrist)