SelectionThe seven cinema journalists of the “World” review the feature films that have marked them the most this year.
Shaken up by the Covid-19 epidemic, the cinema was not let down and as soon as theaters were able to reopen, the 2021 offer proved to be rich, surprising, daring. The seven critics of the “World” share their favorites with us, among which stand out the film by French director Julia Ducourneau. Titanium, awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in July, First Cow, by the American Kelly Reichardt, Drive My Car, the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Memoria from the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul (cited three times).
Véronique Cauhapé’s selection
- “Drive My Car”, by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
- “First Cow”, by Kelly Reichardt
- “The Event”, by Audrey Diwan
- “The Unquiet”, by Joachim Lafosse
- “Freda”, by Gessica Génus
The mourning of a love in Hiroshima, then the sadness taking the road in a red car, multiplying the trips from one point to another, from oblivion to memory, from death to life: that trip (Drive My Car), was one of the most beautiful, the most poetic that was offered to us this year. It cannot be separated from First Cow which brought us back to life in the heart of a dark Oregon forest and laid us down in the cradle of a forgotten humanity – this lost paradise where man still had a close bond with his fellows and with nature. The contemporary era, on the contrary, has shown a world bristling with walls, men and women huddled in the hollow of their suffering. A time that forces them to clench their teeth, in silence, and force into solitude the young girl who has no other choice but to abort illegally (The event). Or who makes the young bipolar father scream and bang himself Uneasy. Fortunately, in this hectic year, a heroine named Freda has reached us, a luminous little fighter who made the wind of eternal spring blow in the rooms.
The selection of Maroussia Dubreuil
- “Titanium”, by Julia Ducournau
- “Julie (in 12 chapters)”, by Joachim Trier
- ” A hero “, by Asghar Farhadi
- “Soul Kids”, by Hugo Sobelman
- “The Kamsé Perimeter”, by Olivier Zuchuat
Emerged like from nowhere, like a scorching wave, Titanium slipped this summer into our skin and into our cartilages. From this film which speaks as much of motherhood, of pain as of desire, emerges a superpowered creature of flesh and metal, carried away by a monstrous fate. Unlike this magnificent punch set with shadows and wounds, which makes humanity spring from a cold and sterile material by decompartmentalizing all forms of love, there is the more naturalistic trajectory but no less anecdotal about Julie, same age, who tests her vocations and her desires in twelve chapters. What does a young woman want at the time of the #metoo post where each learned page is deconstructed? Between these two intimate and instinctual explorations of the metamorphosis of the feminine, there is also this group of village women, in Kamsé, in the north of Burkina Faso, who are scrapping in the furnace, to push back the desert and give birth to a new world. And then this shot: under the white sky of Memphis, two teenage girls sing soul to say that life does not scare them.
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