At the beginning of his 1985 documentary Tokyo Ga, made due to a production delay in his then-forthcoming fiction feature Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders speaks of his desire to capture the distinct pastel hues of the Tokyo landscape. Ever the aesthete, he tries to make sure he has the correct cameras and lenses for this particular job, and the film documents how he takes inspiration from the laconic, precise work of the late, very great filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu, in achieving his aims.

It is in this context that Wenders’ new, Oscar-nominated feature, Perfect Days, plays out, a wistful examination of society and culture as presented through the lens of an easygoing public toilet cleaner. As with the ironically-titled Lou Reed song with which it (almost) shares its name, it’s a film about happiness as an elusive ideal that is inextricably tied to sadness, loss, regret and pain, but something that’s still very much worth striving for.

Just as the filmmaker’s work is pockmarked with his own personal, sometimes intriguing and esoteric passions, Perfect Days is about not just appreciating, but losing ourselves in the everyday minutiae around us. Wenders’ camera imbues the small things we take for granted – including visiting the restroom – with a sense of the miraculous.

Wenders’ global peregrinations have been thoroughly documented in the films he has made, a reflection of the fact that his production company, established in 1976 and still truckin’, is famously called Road Movies. And while he harbours a deep fascination for places such as Berlin or the American South, his cinematic obsession with Ozu lends Tokyo a certain emotional import within his oeuvre. Much like its director’s yen for looking beyond cultural borders, Perfect Days is a film about a man named Harayama (Koji Yakusho) whose cultural fixations geographically straddle both his hometown (collecting and cultivating Bonsai trees), and the United States (collecting classic American rock albums on tape, watching baseball, reading William Faulkner novels).

In Tokyo Ga, Wenders approaches his film with referential fascination for the country and its people. Like all good documentaries, it is a lovably rambling chronicle of the research process rather than an encapsulation of a pre-ordained thesis. There’s a slight anthropological bent to it, in the way the filmmaker wants to tease out the things that make Japanese culture unique from the rest of the world, such as its busy Pachinko parlours, its love of wax food models, or an obsession bringing cutting-edge technology to even the most banal domestic chores.

On the evidence of Perfect Days, one can detect that Wenders now has a clearer sense of the lay of the land. His depiction of the landscape and his emphasis on certain details is now a little more muted and focused. He is no longer a stranger in a strange land, a cine-tourist who is soaking up and processing an overwhelming barrage of sensual stigma. This is the other side of Tokyo, one that the cameras (certainly those being clutched by Western hands) depict much less often than usual.

It is possible to chart the evolution between the more wide-eyed Wim of Tokyo Ga and the more circumspect Wim of Perfect Days. Tokyo was one of many stops in his globe-trotting sci-fi folly, Until the End of the World, from 1991. For a relatively short 15-minute segment (part of the film’s epic five-hour runtime), he stages a screwball shoot-out in one of the city’s famed capsule hotels. As with Tokyo Ga, he selects this particular location, with its cantankerous salarymen attempting to nap, as an example of one of the city’s more eccentric innovations, and it feels a little as if the director is still trapped in his exoticising tourist mode.

But the real gateway through to Perfect Days is Wenders’ 2009 photography exhibition, Journey to Onomichi, in which he pays direct homage to his favourite film of all time: Ozu’s Tokyo Story. The show and accompanying book chart his visit to the sleepy seaside town where the majority of Tokyo Story takes place, and while it’s possible to see the architecture of the 1950s in the images, you have to see it through a process of modernisation and industrialisation. Just as Ozu told a story of bittersweet generational rifts and the melancholy of time passing, so does Wenders in Perfect Days show a world – and social attitudes – from yesteryear just bubbling beneath the shiny surface.

Perfect Days is released in UK cinemas on February 23. Find screenings and book tickets at mubi.com/perfectdays

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My first encounter with the work of Aki Kaurismäki was on an awkward date. Which, if you’ve seen any of the filmmaker’s work, is very on brand. It was a press screening of his typically doleful 2006 comic feature, Lights in the Dusk, in which a hangdog night watchman with no friends hooks up with a gang of criminals in a bar purely for the company. The film’s gracefully lethargic plot, deader-than-deadpan humour, its strident critique of capitalism and the sudden bursts of classic rock’n’roll music made me feel like I was in the company of an old hand – someone more-than-worthy of further exploration. I’ll admit, we both were a tad bemused at the fact we were dropped so suddenly into Kaurismäki’s singular world without a road map, so for those planning to head out to see his scintillating, award-winning new work, Fallen Leaves, here are some bits and bobs to look out for.

It’s immediately apparent from seeing his brilliant new film, Fallen Leaves, that there’s no-one in the world of cinema quite like Aki Kaurismäki. He’s an armchair rebel from Finland who tells stories about beautiful losers, hard-drinking miscreants, and working class heroes not so much striving for wealth and comfort, but just to do whatever it takes to maintain the cosy status quo. For every moment of piquant, finely-judged humour, there’s a corresponding moment of aching tragedy, and life according to Kaurismäki – as so perfectly encapsulated in Fallen Leaves – is a slow merry-go-round gloom and bliss. The story, about an alcoholic labourer and an odd-jobbing loner trying to work out if falling in love would be a wise option in such a commercial climate, is delivered in classic Kaurismäki style, from the perfectly-judged deadpan performances, the crepuscular Helsinki landscapes, and the showcase of various local bar bands. But to endear you to his wonderful world, here are some other stylistic and thematic touchpoints coined over his incredible, one-of-a-kind oeuvre.

1. Timo

Director-cinematographer partnerships don’t come tighter than the one between Aki Kaurismäki and Timo Salminen. He has shot every one of the director’s films, starting with the 1981’s doc on the Finnish local music scene, The Saimaa Gesture. The Salminen touch is both highly distinctive and hard to define; his compositions are simple, uncluttered, subtly expressive, and are imbued with the melancholy lyricism of the painter Edward Hopper. The power of Salminen’s contributions to the Kaurismäki project is emphasised by the fact that, even when a story takes place outside Helsinki, maybe in London or Paris, the foreign locales still have that same, unmistakable dusky hue.

2. Teal

We may be diving in early on this one, but it cannot be emphasised enough how much Kaurismäki loves the colour teal. Houses, offices, bedrooms, walls, gates all happened to be doused in the blue-green shade that symbolises the cold, hard-wearing aesthetic of postwar architecture. It’s a colour you’d most often see in administration buildings as a practical solution to retain cleanliness, but Kaurismäki uses it not so much as a mood enhancer, but as an ironic mood suppressant. It also works beautifully in concert with Timo Salminen’s cinematography, especially when you have it as a background contrast for human faces in the foreground.

3. Local bands

The local music scene is a vital part of the Kaurismäki ecosphere, and while the majority of his films contain rowdy live music performances (often by obscure, ageing Finnish bar bands in powder blue tuxedos), he also made three (very funny) features and numerous shorts dedicated to the apocryphal Russian folk-rock outfit, The Leningrad Cowboys. One thread that runs through his selection of music acts is the ever-expanding influence of Americana on traditional musical styles, and 1989’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, sees the band, with their insane pompadour hairstyles, tour the American South and adapt their playlist to the venue and clientele.

4. Matti and Kati

There are a number of regulars on the typical Kaurismäki call sheet, but there are two that stand out as his most iconic performers – whose look and acting style embody the director’s tragicomic mode. The first is the late, very great Matti Pellonpää, who graduated from smaller roles in early features Crime and Punishment (1983) and Calamari Union (1985) to play the lead in the gorgeous paean to an abrasive dustman looking for love, Shadows in Paradise (1986). Pellonpää is characterised by his bushy tash, plump jowls and thin, oily, slicked hair, and he stands as the ideal avatar for Kaurismäki’s gruffly sentimental worldview. We also have the sad-eyed Kati Outinen, who has a face that instantly makes you want to break down and weep. She first appeared as the female lead in Shadows in Paradise, but her greatest role is in the 1990 masterpiece, The Match Factory Girl, a Bressionian dark comedy about a woman who is oppressed and abused so relentlessly that – like a match – she finally breaks.

5. Booze

It’s often the case that the men in Kaurismäki films just cannot stop drinking. 1994’s screwball road movie Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana features two characters who literally cannot stop drinking: one, mini bottles of noxious clear alcohol; the other, coffee which he brews via a portable device attached to his car. While Kaurismäki has a certain fondness for the hangdog wino for whom the acquisition of booze is central to existence, he’s also unequivocal in his belief that, on the majority of occasions, imbibing to excess leads us to do regrettable things. Fallen Leaves is largely about one character’s fight against the demon drink and how it might tarnish his macho credo. On the other hand, in 1990’s London-set I Hired a Contract Killer, Jean-Pierre Leaud’s introverted office drone acquires a taste for liquor when he pays an assassin to kill him and realises he wants to live.

6. Movies

There’s a fair amount of cinemagoing in the films of Kaurismäki, and it’s usually the go-to venue for an awkward date. The director will often have fun with the posters and lobby cards that appear at the cinema, often for obscure world cinema classics that are part of his own foundational viewing. One utterly heartbreaking scene features in The Match Factory Girl, in which Kati Outinen’s character sits alone in a cinema bawling inconsolably while a Marx brothers film plays – one of cinema’s great depictions of utter despair. Yet the best cinema trip sequence can be seen in his new film, Fallen Leaves, where the prospective couple head on a chemistry-testing date and opt for a truly bizarre choice of film. And once they exit, we’re allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between two fellow patrons and their hilariously misguided assessment of what they’ve just seen.

7. Cameos

Kaurismäki’s films are littered with cinephile references, whether in the production design or the dialogue. But the director is always looking for ways to shoehorn in the people he admires for background roles. Samuel Fuller crops up in 1992’s La Vie de bohème as a cantankerous Parisian magazine publisher, while Louis Malle features in the same film to pick up the restaurant bill of a character who’s had his wallet stolen. The French comedy director Piette Etaix turns up in 2011’s Le Havre as a doctor at the local hospital, and there’s also a moving cameo from French mid-century icon, Serge Regianni in I Hired a Contract Killer – there are deep cinephile subtexts to the fact that he saves the bacon of compatriot Jean-Pierre Leaud by allowing him to hide out as a fry chef in his greasy spoon café. Kaurismäki himself even cameos as a Chaplin impersonator in 1994’s Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses.

8. The News

Filmmakers often use TV and radio as a quick shorthand for plot exposition, but Kaurismäki uses them to boldly anchor his fantasy-flecked comedies into the grimness of geopolitical reality. The Other Side of Hope from 2017 is the filmmaker’s response to Finland’s regressive response to the “migrant crisis”, while the radio supplies a running commentary on the conflict in Ukraine in Fallen Leaves. The films he’s made in the 21st century certainly skew towards a tradition of neorealism, where questions of social consciousness and the cruel mechanisms of political power come into play.

9. Classic cars

In Kaurismäki’s Helsinki, everyone has a fin-tailed vintage American luxury auto in their carport. In 1988’s moving miniature crime saga, Ariel, about an unemployed mine worker’s search for work and romance, a disgruntled father (feeling like the whole world has turned to shit) leaves an ice-white Cadilac convertible to his son before committing suicide in the restroom of a divebar. There’s a real sense that Kaurismäki pays a lot of care and attention to the cars in his films: some memorable ones include the three-wheel Robin Reliant used by the trio of artsy layabouts in La Vie de bohème; and the black stretch Cadillac sold to the Leningrad Cowboys by none other than a surprisingly loquacious Jim Jarmusch.

10. Dog Days

Aki Kaurismäki tends to premier his films at the Cannes Film Festival, and that only means one thing: he’s also in contention for the coveted Palm Dog award, given to the best dog performance in the festival. If there were ever a lifetime achievement Palm Dog, then Aki would be a shoo-in. Tähti won 2002 for for his performance as Hannibal in The Man Without a Past, comes from a long lineage of mutt movie stars – her mother and grandmother performed in earlier Kaurismäki films. And he loves dogs so much, he even opened a dog-friendly cinema in the Helsinki suburb of Karkkila called Cine-Laika, named after the famous Russian dog that was sent into space, but also the dog who starred in the 2011 film (playing himself!), La Havre.

Fallen Leaves is released in UK cinemas on 1 December Find screenings and book tickets at mubi.com/fallenleaves‘

Exciting news for UK cinemagoers: Picturehouse Cinemas have joined MUBI GO’s ever-expanding network of partner venues across the country. For the uninitiated, a subscription to MUBI GO allows you one cinema ticket every week to watch their specially selected ‘Film of the Week’, as well as access to a thoughtfully curated selection of films from across the globe to watch on demand. Past ‘Film of the Week’ titles include Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean and Lukas Dhont’s Close.

This week’s free cinema ticket comes in the form of the first collaboration between husband/wife filmmaker duo Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch: The Eight Mountains. This film tells the tale of an unlikely brotherhood, charting the bond between two boys as they grow into men and drift apart until their paths eventually lead them back to where they first met. Our reviewer, Rafa Sales Ross, calls the film a “gentle epic, equally accomplished in its minimalistic approach to intimacy as in its grandiose portrayal of landscapes”.

And if you’re looking into planning next week’s cinema trip, we got word that the next Film of the Week is Ari Aster’s much-anticipated, Kafkaesque Beau is Afraid. This one has garnered a mixed reception from audiences and critics alike, so head down to your local Picturehouse, show your MUBI GO code at the box office, and see what you make of it.

MUBI are offering two months of MUBI GO for the discounted price of £20. That’s eight trips to the cinema to see the best new releases hand-picked by MUBI’s curators, plus hundreds of films to stream anytime.

Sign up for MUBI GO by heading to mubi.com/promos/go_lwl

One of the greatest fears of my (admittedly fairly sheltered) life involved a formative trip to Tokyo. As is the custom for such primo vacations, one tends to book early in the hope of saving a few yen in the process. As such, this left me with six months until my departure date.

Instead of eager anticipation and a sense of swelling excitement, the overwhelming mindset I experienced during that half-year wait was one of extreme trepidation and anxiety. That wasn’t in any way related to my desire for adventure and wanting to visit this deeply alluring city on the other side of the globe – it was more to do with a fear of being, as the title of the movie goes, lost in translation. That I would arrive at the airport, and the culture would be so distant to me, that I would barely be able to make it to the hotel.

I wish Davy Chou had made Return to Seoul 15 years ago, as it would’ve provided a balm for my pre-flight jitters. Even though it is centred around another major South-East Asian capital city, it is a film which traffics in the idea that, by hook or by crook, people somehow manage to communicate with one another despite language barriers or any perceived cultural chasms.

Its central protagonist, Park Ji-min’s tenacious and exuberant Freddie, was born in Korea, but was adopted by French parents and received what appears to be a fairly affluent upbringing in Paris. She’s a native French speaker, and due to her understandable apprehension to return to her birth country, is not able to converse in Korean.

And yet, in the film’s opening chapter, she is in Seoul, dominating the conversation in a bustling bar with the kindly Tena (Guka Han) assisting her with translation. With her natural charisma and allure, a group of semi-soused guys are swiftly eating out of the palm of her hand, and the sequence sets out one of the film’s thematic stalls: that if people see value in making a connection with another, they will refuse to allow language to inhibit their efforts.

Maybe my fear of going to Japan was a product of the storytelling conventions of previous decades which had sought to exoticise and distance any place that isn’t the west in the name of dramatic intrigue. All types and genres and film have traditionally traded in such tactics, from titles as tonally and stylistically distanced as 1967 James Bond caper, You Only Live Twice, to Miyazaki’s charming witch-in-the-city rite of passage movie, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and some more tactfully than others.

Yet there are more recent, more pertinent examples of a sub-genre of movies that explore this notion of communication transcending the limits of language. The story of Oscar-nominated wonder, Drive My Car, by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, orbits around a production of Chekov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ in which cast members are drawn from different locales and the essential power of the play goes undimmed. Lee Issac Chung’s Minari, too, documents the efforts of a Korean expat family trying their hardest to build a farm in America, despite their extreme cultural disconnect from the land and the people. Lulu Wang’s bittersweet The Farewell – which perhaps shares the most DNA with Return to Seoul – sees a Chinese-American woman returning “home” in an attempt to keep her cultural roots well watered.

In Return to Seoul, it’s enervating to see Freddie take such charge and question this notion that loneliness and alienation should be our default setting when we’re out of our geographical comfort zone. Chou then caps things off by having Freddie hump and dump one of the drooling onlookers.

Later in the film, Freddie makes the decision to spend this small window she has in Seoul to head to the adoption agency that processed her case and see if there’s any way she could connect to her birth parents. Her estranged biological father takes the bait, and her visit with him instantly proves uncomfortable, even if she’s able to chalk it up to a loss of nuance in their communication.

There’s something quite radical about having a character who has an innate feeling that this potentially fraught moment of belated reconnection was perhaps not the best idea she had ever made. Freddie is an empowering presence, even though she is most definitely not what some might call a “morally pure” character.

She takes a giant leap across the language barrier in a way that demonstrates the possibilities of such endeavours, even if they don’t result in unalloyed happiness. The lesson to my more youthful self is, don’t worry that people won’t understand you, worry that people might think you’re a dick when they do.

Return to Seoul is released in UK and Irish cinemas Friday, May 5, and streams exclusively on MUBI from July 7. Find screenings and book tickets here: mubi.com/returntoseoul

If you buy the theory that all narrative cinema contains at least some biographical elements connected to its creator, then the casting of the lead character would seem to be a vitally important creative decision. It’s one that French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve clearly does not take lightly, as she has through the years exercised a unique sensitivity when it comes to selecting actors whose job it is to not just represent, but to enhance the feelings she felt and the things she saw, way back when.

Biography doesn’t necessarily mean that Hansen-Løve tells stories explicitly about herself, as she is someone who has channelled her subjective eye through the experiences of parents (2016’s Things to Come), siblings (2014’s Eden) and professional associates (2009’s Father of My Children). Yet her career as a writer-director has been pockmarked by stories which appear to feature a direct avatar and which deal with nakedly personal stories such as the birth and death of her first burgeoning romance (2011’s Goodbye, First Love), the poetic and ethical impulses that come from making films concerning lived experience (2020’s Bergman Island), and now, a lilting chronicle of a rekindled love affair and an ailing father (2022’s One Fine Morning).

In One Fine Morning, which opens in UK cinemas on 17 April, the ostensible “Mia Hansen-Løve” character is played by a crop-haired and sad-eyed Léa Seydoux, who in the film acts as dramatic go-between for two entirely separate but emotionally devastating events. The subtly radical film proposes that we only know someone to the extent that they’re willing to open themselves up to us, and in this instance, Seydoux’s Sandra is attempting to partition the happiness she is accruing from a romance with an old flame (Melville Poupard) from the immense sadness that comes from witnessing the physical and mental deterioration of her philosophy professor father (Pascal Greggory). In a sense there are multiple versions of Sandra, and each one contains its own element of performance and benign obfuscation.

In terms of Seydoux’s presence, the film offers something a little different for an actor who is known for playing parts that take advantage of her stern sense of confidence, her coquettish allure and her plucky resolve when it comes to matters of the heart. Only recently was she seen as an ultra-confident French news anchor in Bruno Dumont’s France, or as the lascivious (but string-pulling) maiden to a literary sage in Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception. One Fine Morning presents something new, a fragility that comes from a loss of control, and a confusion born from wanting to forge the best life for herself and those around her.

One particularly striking element in One Fine Morning – and one that Seydoux’s finely textured performance nudges to the fore – is how she depicts those moments that suddenly tip us over the edge of reason, where we can no longer hold back the tears. Yet here, the tears are triggered by more innocuous moments, often in private, which allow Sandra to keep up the façade of courage and strong headedness. She watches on with studied poise as her father is ferried into a wheelchair and transported to a hospital – possibly exiting his beloved, book-filled flat for the last time. Yet she bursts into tears when the realisation hits her belatedly, while she’s off in his bedroom packing his case.

By the same rationale, Sandra’s sense of joy is never pure and unalloyed, always dashed with doubt and the feeling that her actions and her situation might drive her new boyfriend away. Sandra transforms her tiny Parisian flat into a lovenest after packing her young daughter away on summer camp. Yet this outlet for her dormant passions comes with the crippling sense that, once she lets him go outside, he’ll be lost forever and the dream will be over. She begrudgingly wanders around the Orangerie Museum to see Monet’s Water Lilies, but the ultimate tranquillity and escape offered by the giant canvases is lost on her. Seydoux is canny enough not to just look bored, but instead presents a feeling of neutrality that cuts even deeper to the heart of her situation.

One Fine Morning is, in many ways, a classical weepie of the type Douglas Sirk used to make in Hollywood during the 1950: a story of a strong woman trying her best to stand tall under the crushing weight of professional, personal and romantic obligation. And like Sirk, Hansen-Løve (and Seydoux) do not pander towards cheap sentimentalism and bald-faced histrionics. Instead, it is a celebration of eternal resolve and an acknowledgement of the fact that no trauma in life is an island in and of itself.

One Fine Morning is released in UK and Irish cinemas now, and streams exclusively on MUBI from June 16. Find screenings and book tickets here: mubi.com/onefinemorning‘

No-one knew what planet she was flung in from when they first clapped eyes on Adèle Exarchopoulos. For me, like a lot of critics I imagine, it was the 2013 Cannes press screening of Blue is the Warmest Colour, for which the actor went on to share the Palme d’Or with the film’s director and her co-star, Léa Seydoux. Which was an unprecedented move at the time, but one for which commentators did not bat an eyelid, because it was so obviously deserved.

By that I mean this was a film in which the dedication and intensity of the performances were so integral to its success that it would seem strange to direct the plaudits elsewhere, or to just a single point of that central creative triangle. And that year’s jury head Steven Spielberg was clearly aware of the fine alchemical balance the film achieves.

Blue is the Warmest Colour might be remembered for its lengthy and graphic sex scenes, but in fact the abiding image that comes back to us over and over again is that of Exarchopoulos slurping up over-cooked spaghetti drenched in marinara sauce. An iconic scene that only works because of the blithe way she eroticises what should be a completely banal action.

Fast-forward to present day and Exarchopoulos is back doing what she does best: immersing herself in a role which, on paper, would seem fairly straightforward, but enhancing it through her dedication to the small tics and glances and expressions she pulls between moments. In Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils, she plays a loving if confused mother, an emotionally absent wife, a dedicated swimmer and diver, and a yearning and excited lover – sometimes all of the above simultaneously.

It’s hard to pinpoint what it is about Exarchopoulos that makes her so unique as a performer, but it’s perhaps a natural sensibility she brings to performance: she exudes a level of confidence that means she’s rarely a completely pitiable presence in a film, even when her character is being passed through the emotional mill. There’s clearly something very wrong going on in the background of The Five Devils, as her errant daughter goes off and makes potions and her husband’s estranged sister returns to their life, but she’s able to transmit a sense of ambient control.

One of the markers for this sensibility may be her voice, which is almost baritone in its bass-heavy timbre. It is rich and velvety and hugs the words as they emanate from her lips. In Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre’s 2021 scathing workplace satire Zero Fucks Given, she plays a flight attendant on a budget airline who is simply going through the professional motions so she can enjoy the random nights and evenings in far-flung locales.

Even when speaking in English, she manages to bring a don’t-mess-with-me edge to her various altercations with passengers. In one scene, a young woman attempts to bring a bag over the size limit into the cabin, and Exarchopoulos gives her no quarter in saying that she’ll have to pay extra to bring it on board. It’s a harrowing, if strangely recognisable sequence in which we see that the dehumanising practices of the airline are starting to rub off on her and roll back her natural deposits of empathy.

Her upcoming role in Ira Sachs’ Berlin-set three-way romance, Passages, is something a little different for Exarchopoulos in that her character has to suffer the humiliations brought on by the impulsive Tomas (Franz Rogowski) who romances her character despite, until very recently, being partnered up with printmaker Martin (Ben Whishaw).

There’s something quite cold and practical about the way she enters into this lopsided relationship. She’s hopeful that Tomas may be sincere in his professed love, but there’s a maternal aspect to her – which comes through in scenes of her day job as a school teacher – which suggest that, secretly, she knows he’s an impetuous and ill-behaved little boy.

As she does in The Five Devils, Zero Fucks Given, Passages and more, she continues to subtly elevate characters who would otherwise sink or swim in terms of how they’re projected towards the camera. The range she goes through in The Five Devils is astonishing, particularly as the story does have an otherworldly bent to it. And in Zero Fucks Given, there’s a employee training segment where she has to demonstrate her best on-the-job smile, and it’s completely haunting.

The Five Devils is released in UK and Irish cinemas this Friday, and streams exclusively on MUBI from May 12. Zero Fucks Given is now streaming on MUBI. Passages will be released in cinemas and on MUBI this year.

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Casting an eye back over the long and storied history of cinema, it seems as if it’s only relatively recently that we’ve started to take kids seriously on screen. A film such as Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated Close, about the intimacies and rituals that develop in the relationship between two pre-teen boys in a Belgian farming community, feels like a world away from the stereotypical depictions of children in Hollywood films of the late 20th century, where contrived precocity has always been the order of the day.

In Close, the two boys at the centre of the drama, played by Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele, are written as being emotionally mature rather than having discernable adult feelings and words placed in their heads/mouths. In the film they play 13-year-olds Léo and Rémi (respectively), best friends whose bond verges on the brotherly. However as they start a new school year, the changeable tides of adolescence place pressure on a relationship of singular closeness. There are hints, too, that the pair are experiencing the initial pangs of impulses that they may not yet have the psychological apparatus to discern or decipher.

The film also suggests that, sometimes, when we feel things we don’t understand, our bodies and minds can switch into panic mode. Close is a film which searches for an objective, albeit fleeting authenticity rather than using its protagonists as cyphers for the makers’ own nostalgia (although, personal experience no doubt plays a part in the telling of the tale). Dhont has form in this domain, as Close is a follow-up to his drama Girl, about a trans teenage ballet dancer’s fraught and sometimes shocking journey towards gender affirmation.

One of the great films about childhood which cuts a fine balance between the romantic and the tragic is Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue (Naked Childhood) from 1968, which forges a tender character study around a behaviorally-challenged orphan who is being passed through the brutal French foster care system. The lyricism and thirst for genuine understanding displayed by its maker makes this a revolutionary film in its own modest way and, like Close, it is an attempt to look at a child while kneeling down to meet their own eye-line. Pialat was fascinated by the idea of empowering youth on screen, and did so in films such as Graduate First (1978) and A Nos Amours (1983).

Though there are notable great childhood films from around the globe (Yazujiro Ozu’s Good Morning from Japan, Andrei Tarkvosky’s Ivan’s Childhood from Russia, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive from Spain), it seems that France remains at the vanguard of creating challenging and empathetic portraits of confused and bemused youth. Indeed, Celine Sciamma has made it the basis of her career, exploring pre-teen lesbian desire in her aquatic wonder from 2007, Water Lilies, and exploring similar themes again in young women with her Sight and Sound poll-plundering Portrait of a Woman on Fire from 2019.

Perhaps the film which operates best as a handy forerunner to Close is Sciamma’s gorgeous 2011 film Tomboy, about a gender non-conforming 10-year-old (Zoé Héran) and how their casual defiance of perceived social norms plays out among a group of largely untroubled peers. It also explores the relationship that blossoms between Héran’s Laure (who identifies as Mickaël to friends) and Jeanne Disson’s Lisa, offering a celebration of honest desire which boldly intimates that love and friendship come from a place of primal provenance that doesn’t ascribe to rigidly imposed or archaic ways of thinking about sex and gender.

Though the lineage of Hollywood cinema has given us the crass comic archetype of the child comic relief, it has through sheer volume of product also used kids as an outlet for moral panic (Larry Clark’s Kids, or Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen) and as a locus for nostalgic wonderment and adventure (Stephen Spielberg’s ET, Richard Donner’s The Goonies).

However, two more recent titles have gone about challenging these mainstream standards of kids being used as a way to talk about adult concerns, and they are Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016) and Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017). Both of these films adopt a more European sensibility in asking thoughtful questions about the sometimes banal, sometimes transcendent trials of growing up outside of a conventional middle class family unit. The former subtly frames the evolution of gay consciousness against hardscrabble Black lives in a Miami suburb overrun with drugs and unchanneled machismo. The latter, meanwhile, offers a non-judgemental depiction of a sexually-fluid Brooklyn-based loner and the confort he feels in using his body as a commodity.

Close draws on the work started by Hittman, Jenkins and Sciamma while also offering something new into the mix, namely its attempts to comprehend just how a person of limited emotional capabilities might react to an event they might struggle to comprehend as being even possible. It’s a film which stands back and comes forward at the right moments, giving its protagonists space to explore the extent of the pain and joy they experience from one moment to the next.

CLOSE is in UK and Irish cinemas now, and streaming on MUBI from April 21. Find your nearest screening here: mubi.com/close

Don’t forget you can watch CLOSE with 2 months of MUBI GO for just £20. That’s eight trips to the cinema, plus streaming anytime. Offer ends March 10: mubi.com/promos/go20_lwl

The European Film Academy is a body that provides tools for the promotion of and education about European filmmaking across 52 countries throughout the continent. Most may know the Academy for its annual award ceremony which celebrates the cream of filmmaking in Europe, but the Academy is currently expanding its scope of work: the new “Month of European Film” is part of a more expansive project to spread a passion for European film as far and wide as possible. Here are just a few examples of the vital work the Academy is doing…

1. Hosting Europe’s most spectacular movie award ceremony.

This is the big one. A group of 40 pioneering European filmmakers, spearheaded by the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman, formed the European Film Academy in 1988, at the first ever presentation of the European Film Awards. Their objective: bridging the gap between cinematic artistry and the film industry by taking a love for a wide range of European cinema and opening it up to the public, while also making sure that European films don’t disappear in cinemas

Since this year, the Academy is honouring films and filmmakers via the Month of European Film, which culminates in the annual awards ceremony. After an entirely virtual affair in 2020 and a hybrid event in 2021, the 35th European Film Awards ceremony will take place as an in-person celebration of filmmaking in Reykjavík, Iceland, with nominated titles being announced on 8 November 2022.

2. Bringing the best European cinema to the people.

This year, Academy has partnered with flagship cinemas and venues across 35 countries – from Iceland to Greece, Portugal to Romania, Latvia to the UK – to celebrate an eclectic and diverse selection of European films throughout the Month of European Film. Instead of presenting a uniform catalogue across all regions, each participating venue has had the freedom to explore and curate their own unique programme, combining screenings, talks, seminars, workshops and dedicated retrospectives. The celebration runs between 13 November and 10 December, and details of all titles and venues can be found at monthofeuropeanfilm.eu

3. Building cinematic monuments

The Academy’s pan-European film heritage network has been steadily connecting film archives, cinematheques and institutions across the continent in order to increase public access to culturally diverse film histories and make them widely available to new audiences. On the occasion of the 35th Awards ceremony, 22 additional heritage locations have been unveiled, bringing the total number of Film Culture Treasure locations up to 35.

Sites such as the Parisian Café des Deux Moulins (AKA Amélie’s café), the marble-paved street of Stradun in Dubrovnik and The Notting Hill Bookshop join an ever-growing list of symbolic spaces including the Moulin d’Andé (a temple of Nouvelle Vague artistic creation), the Tabernas Desert (home turf of the Spaghetti Western) and the infamous Odessa steps, where Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering use of dialectical montage left its indelible mark.

4. Paying homage to the masters

The great Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman (Introduction to the End of an Argument, Divine Intervention, It Must Be Heaven) will be presented with the European Achievement in World Cinema Award for his outstanding and subversive and body of work. Suleiman – whose absurdist sensibilities draw frequent comparisons to Jacques Tati – has built a body of work that is distinctively and irrevocably charged with a Palestinian political fervour, and often displays the complexities that lie at the intersection of cultural politics, aesthetics and affect through the condition of Palestinian statelessness.

A Lifetime Achievement Award will be awarded to the revered filmmaker and central figure of New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, Marianne and Julianne, Rosa Luxemburg). Foregrounding female subjectivities and a nuanced political agency, von Trotta’s work as a filmmaker refracts history through fiction, and is imbued with poeticism, compassion, and incisive feminism. Italian master Marco Bellocchio will be honoured for his groundbreaking work and receive the award for Innovative Storytelling, for his drama series Exterior Night. These awards will be presented during the ceremony and all awardees will be present.

To explore further, head to europeanfilmacademy.org