Much of this vitality stems from the output work. One Fine Morning by French director Mia Hansen-Løve certainly lives up to its best, combining all the great qualities of cinema – quiet emotional drama, keen observation of human interaction and character development, stories rooted in cities and places – in a straightforward story about the new woman’s relationship that develops side by side. Combined with the mental deterioration of her elderly father.
Germany’s Angela Chanelke also added a beautiful film to her already impressive filmography. “I Was Home, But” tells the story, through a series of domestic scenes that range from a charming dance routine to negotiations over a faulty bicycle, from a mother’s complex reaction to her son’s return after a week’s absence. Originally released in 2019, the film was delayed by the pandemic, like many others – and didn’t hit French cinemas until 2022.
The year also saw a continued flowering of workers’ films, or proletkino, a genre that was born in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The proletariat was once more independent than it is today in post-industrial Europe, but in recent decades there has been an impressive and surprising resurgence of films of this kind. type across the continent. This new proletkino, as I called it, had another great year.
The Dardenne brothers, Belgian filmmakers who have made their careers out of social dramas set in a former steel city, have produced one of their strongest—and darkest—films to date, “Tori et Lokita,” about two Beninese immigrant children who disembark in France and the new hell they enter when One of them cannot obtain the required papers. Portuguese author Pedro Costa also returns to his longstanding theme of Cape Verdean migrants in the slums of Lisbon with his pictorial and poetic work Vitalina Varela.
In France, Stéphane Brizy concludes his remarkable trilogy of films that reflect the modern world of work. In Another World, it focuses on the pressures felt by the middle manager, once close to his staff but now forced to meet increasingly impossible demands for greater efficiency and force mass layoffs. As a report on the changing nature of work over the past few decades, there is nothing better than the Mr. Breezy trilogy.
