Movies That Will Keep You Warm During The Winter Season

The last weeks of the fall semester are here: the days are getting short and snow will be upon us before November has ended. It will be too cold to go outside and we will be too busy finishing tying up those thousand-and-one-things that need to be finished before the semester ends. Hibernation will start and that can be a bit claustrophobic.

Here’s a list of three movies that will take you around the world in less than 8 hours:

 

1. France

(Nominated for the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film)

Let’s start in the cradle of movies: La douce France. It was here that film was born, with a project of the Lumière brothers that was called Cinématographe (Cinema is derived from this name).

The movie I’d recommend is Un Prophète (A Prophet) by Jacques Audiard, the movie premiered in 2009 during the Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the Grand Prix by the Jury.  Already during the first scene, it becomes clear how little it takes to start caring for a character. In the first scene, we see nineteen-year-old Malik on the first day of his six-year prison sentence. He is slim and wears dirty rags. The reason for his punishment remains unknown. He has North-African looks, grew up in a foster home and has difficulties with reading and writing. That’s all the information we get. Because Malik doesn’t want to join any of the prison gangs, he stands out as an easy prey. The Corsican prisoners, who hold sway among the cell blocks, conscript Malik as their bust boy.

Un Prophète offers a layered movie experience, which allows viewers to make multiple interpretations of the story. The grim realism of daily prison life is interwoven with poetic images and surrealistic dream sequences. Malik’s slow but sure ascent among the ranks of prisoners is a serious and bloody game, as much as it is an enticing masquerade of identities. The Corsican prisoners think Malik is a Muslim, and the Muslim prisoners think that he is at least half a Corsican. Malik is not a multicultural hero though; he swaps identities, like religion and origin, as if they were sets of clothes, scheming his way to the top.

 

2. Mexico

(Nominated for the 2003 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay)

Let’s go to a sunnier place and pick a more lighthearted movie. This movie kick-starts at the threshold of two best friends’ adulthood, Julio and Tenoch who invite the stunning 28-year-old Luisa for a trip to the imaginary beach Boca del Cielo (heaven’s mouth). Y tú Mamá También appears as a road movie, where the journey is more important than the destination. But there is more to be seen than that. The two main characters, whom the avid movie-goer will recognize from Star Wars Rogue One and the Motorcycle Diaries, are more than two horny teenagers on the road. With dry, deadpan voice-overs, the social background of the two friends is revealed by an omniscient narrator. Julio was raised by his single Mom and has a political activist sister, he is a typical exponent of the Mexican lower leftist middle class. Only Tenoch’s indigenous name binds him to that social class. His father is a very wealthy businessman with friends in all the right places, his mom is a wanna-be hippie who spends her time cleansing her chakras. Their backgrounds may be different, but the two friends are thick as thieves and share a mutual love for weed, girls and Mexico. To further their bond, the boys have knighted themselves as “Charolastras”, Mexican slang for space cowboys.

 

While they are traveling, Julio and Tenoch discover things about each other that they’d rather did not know. What’s more, their friendship appears to be less self-evident than they had thought it would be. The more mature Luisa, who transforms during the journey from an object of (sexual) desire to a mentor and confidant for the friends, functions as a harbinger for these inconvenient truths.

 

3. Germany

(Winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film)

Let’s go back to Germany, and go back in time as well with a film, The Life of the Others. This movie was the darling of many a film festivals around the world and shocked Germany as a nation when it came out. The stage is set in the hay days of the DDR, the Communist Republic of East Germany.  Until the German reunion in 1990, the country was divided into a social-democratic western part and a communist counterpart. This communist state has been called ‘the forgotten dictatorship’  and many associate German dictatorships with the Nazis. The Life of the Others showed that the communist secret service, the Stasi, did not shun violence or blackmail one bit. Before starting shooting, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck spent years researching how the Stasi operated. In this film, Stasi-officer Gerd Wiesler is ordered to install recording devices in the apartment of the successful playwright Georg Dreyman. The Stasi agent listens in on the appealing life of the playwright, and even falls secretly in love with his girlfriend, an actress who is a desired by the ruthless Secretary of State as well. What was supposed to be a routine job becomes a turning point in the life and the career of Wiesler. The Stasi veteran lived his life by two principals: loyalty to the party and his superiors, and integrity as an officer of the law. However, when these two begin to collide, the officer is forced to use his abilities as a spymaster in very surprising ways. The Life of the Others is a harrowing tale about ethical escape routes and the freedom of choice in a totalitarian regime.