Welcome to Life, Cinema, Action!

We are back with another Cannes review, this time looking at “A Woman’s Life” by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, one of the just five women directors represented amongst this year’s 22 films in this year’s competition lineup. Five out of 22, that’s right…

A Woman’s life is part of the “In Depth” series, where we use films as a starting point to explore questions about human experience. This review follows two such questions: What does it mean to live a fulfilled life? And what happens to female desire as women grow older?

But first, the film.

The Film

(contains spoilers)

A Woman’s Life does not revolve around a conventional plot. It follows Gabrielle, a successful surgeon in her fifties, through a year of her life. The film opens with brief, erotic but non-pornographic close-ups of a woman during sex. Beginning on this sensual note and through such intimate framing is a brilliant choice that we will talk about later. It then cuts abruptly to Gabrielle’s high-speed reality navigating Paris traffic on her way to the hospital. At the hospital, Frida, a writer researching a book, approaches her. Gabrielle initially mistakes her for someone involved in an aid project in Ukraine, before realizing Frida is there to shadow her daily life at the hospital for a month.

As Gabrielle juggles her many roles as chief surgeon, daughter to a mother with Alzheimer’s, wife, aunt, stepmother and a woman with her own desires, Frida becomes increasingly fascinated by her, eventually seducing her into an affair.

From there on, the film observes Gabrielle across these shifting identities, tracing how Frida’s presence affects her life. Not in a disruptive, earthquake manner, but a subtle, slow force.

Gabrielle is a fully rounded character, far from perfect, yet truly affable and believable. She is a caretaker in both her family and professional life, yet can be harsh with colleagues. She is composed and in control, yet also vulnerable. Much of this realism comes from Léa Drucker, whose performance anchors the film with fascinating precision. Through small gestures and restrained expressions, she builds emotional depth that feels effortless and authentic.

The film’s visual language repeatedly evokes a female gaze: composed, attentive framing that observes bodies without objectifying them and captures sensuality without spectacle. It is aesthetic without being aestheticized.

From the everyday life of a surgeon to intimate domestic moments everything is rendered with a grounded realism that never loses its sensitivity. The scene where she is bathing her mother with Alzheimer’s is one of the pinnacle realism moments in the film, full with tenderness and sadness, yet still remaining light-hearted.

In the end, the film peaks in its quiet circularity: although much has happened, little has fundamentally changed in Gabrielle’s life. She goes through the relationship with Frida, her long-time work partner at hospital leaves the service and is replaced by another doctor, her mother moves to a nursing facility, Gabrielle experiences joy, sadness, abandonment and nostalgia. In the final scene, she is on a trip in Turin with her husband, yet her phone rings again, another urgent call from the hospital breaking through as always. And it is alright.

What makes a human fulfilled?

A Woman’s Life, to me, is a film about fulfillment as much as it is a portrait of a woman we rarely see in cinema. Gabrielle is a caretaker by nature. We learn that her father died when she was a child, her mother abandoned the family and she grew up raising her sister and later her nephew. She also helped raise her late husband’s two children from a previous marriage and today cares for her mother again after their relationship is restored following an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As a surgeon, she not only cares for her patients in Paris but also volunteers in war zones. Her phone never stops ringing. Even in the mountains with her lover Frida, she rarely disconnects. She is sometimes overwhelmed, but never complains, never plays the victim. And the character that we watch is a fulfilled woman: with purpose, with passion and deeply rooted in life through her relationships. Gabrielle is not comfortable, but she is content.

Bourgeois-Tacquet, intentionally or not, portrays a woman who reveals what fulfillment might look like. As she has often said in interviews, she challenges the idea that motherhood is the defining path to female fulfillment. But Gabrielle is not only a portrait of a woman; she feels more universal than that. As a psychiatrist, one of the first things I’d observerd repeatedly was that chronic depression often appeared in people who struggle to locate meaning outside themselves. They cannot find purpose because their lives are turned inward or lack meaningful bonds in which they feel useful. Fulfillment, in contrast, arises when we feel needed, useful and connected. It is also the basis of resilience. In today’s hyper-individualistic culture, this may sound contentious, but I have seen repeatedly in and outside the hospital the emptiness that comes when people lose that sense of being anchored in others through care and responsibility.

This also connects to the feminist dimension of Bourgeois-Tacquet’s film: the rejection of motherhood as the sole route to womanhood or fulfillment. The idea that reproduction is the ultimate purpose of a woman’s life is, as the film suggests at times through Gabrielle’s words, “an incredibly narrow, bourgeois vision of existence”. It reduces fulfillment to blood bonds and ignores how deeply we are shaped by the breadth of our relationships. To limit care to one’s own bloodline is a form of closure rather than openness.

Small details throughout the film reinforce this. It is structured in chapters, one of which is titled “Break-Up.” We expect a rupture with a husband or with Frida. Instead, the break-up refers to her long-time colleague and friend, who leaves the hospital to open his own practice. Gabrielle reacts with both anger and sadness, because this relationship has been very central to her life.

For many reasons, the film reminded of Marlen Haushofer’s book, The Wall, in which a woman in a dystopic future who one day wakes up to a chalet surrounded by a transparent wall with all life seemingly disappeared from the world outside, and has no companions but a cow, a cat and a dog. She passes her days taking care of the animals and writing a journal of which she is not sure if it will serve anything, as she seems to be the last person surviving on earth The following passage tells a lot about what makes life worth living:

For many reasons, the film also reminded me of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, in which a woman finds herself isolated in a forest, surviving only with a cow, a cat and a dog. She spends her days caring for them and writing a journal of uncertain purpose. In one passage she writes:

Just like the nameless protagonist in The Wall, who finds meaning to continue living because there is the cow, the dog and the cat to take care of, for Gabrielle life is fulfilling and worth living because of all the people she loves and takes care of.

Women who do not desire to have children remain subject to a persistent taboo, with the assumption that something must be wrong with them: narcissism, selfishness, you name it. But the question might be the reverse: is it not more self-referential to center one’s life on producing a replica of oneself? What creates a more lasting legacy, caring exclusively for one’s own offspring, or shaping the lives of many others, making them easier, richer, more bearable?

The next taboo the film dismantles is female desire, especially in older age, which leads us to the next question.

What happens to female desire later in life?

The opening scene matters because before we meet Gabrielle in a moment of intimacy, before we see her face or learn anything about her. We watch a woman having sex, but without clearly seeing her face, her partner’s body, or even knowing whether she is alone or with someone. What we register first is vulnerability, sensuality, desire.

The next scene could not be more different. Gabrielle is stuck in traffic on her way to hospital (her workplace), simultaneously on the phone sorting out missing paperwork for her mother, whose legal guardian she is. As she arrives in the hospital, the phone keeps ringing.

A middle-aged female surgeon is not someone that collective imagination associates with sexuality. From its opening scene, the film makes its intentions clear: sexuality, desire, romantic love do not disappear just because we move beyond the socially defined "prime" of our lives.

Starting with menopause, the (rather limited) evidence we have suggests that hormonal changes can alter sexuality, libido and desire. What is often reported is a shift of desire from the physical to emotional, intellectual and relational.

But beyond the physical reasons, there is a role of the collective imagination that limits a woman’s sexuality to the “fertile age”. In the words of Sayaka Murata, the incredibly talented, quirky author of Convention Store Woman and Vanishing World, if a woman’s purpose in the world is to serve as a “baby factory”, there is no place for their sexuality once they pass their fertile age. In fact, it turns out that the passing of the fertile age can open a new window of liberation and exploration, both in and off bed.

The film however shows from its opening scene on that a middle-aged woman is a sexual being. Gabrielle's desire is presented neither as a joke nor as a crisis. It simply exists. The film's sensuality is never pornographic, but it is unapologetic in portraying female desire beyond the age society tends to consider a woman's "prime". Shot with natural light and remarkable restraint, the sex scenes between Frida and Gabrielle capture both tenderness and desire without ever slipping into voyeurism. It is a portrayal of sexuality that feels clearly shaped by the female gaze: attentive to intimacy rather than spectacle.

What is perhaps more interesting is that Gabrielle falls in love with a woman. Not because the film is making a grand statement about sexual orientation (also, being a French film, sexual orientation is somehow irrelevant to love), but because of what Frida represents. Gabrielle is someone who masters everything. She is a surgeon, a caregiver, a woman constantly anticipating problems before they arise. She is respected, relied upon and needed. But as many people in her situation, she is rarely seen fully.

Frida is herself an independent soul, an artist little worried about societal norms, a daring and assertive woman. She encounters Gabrielle with curiosity, her questions and her attention expose the vulnerabilities that usually remains hidden beneath Gabrielle’s competence. She takes Gabrielle into paradise by letting her experience what it feels like to not be looked at as a function, a responsibility or a source of stability, but as a person. And maybe the most important of all, she seduces her. She sends her flowers, texts her assertively about desiring to see her, takes her out to a magical night and tells her in the middle of a crowd that she likes her before demanding that Gabrielle kisses her. That again, speaks to something universal in human experience: how seductive it is to be tried to seduced. Gabrielle is not attracted to Frida from the first sight, it is not a coup de foudre, it is seduction. And seduction belongs and always belonged to the realm of the cerebral, not the physical.

Lea Drucker says in her interview, that Gabrielle masters everything, but no one masters love completely. That is true, too. The theatre scenes where Frida confesses her love to Gabrielle and is met by Gabrielle’s composed awkwardness are incredibly cute, yes, cute, because they expose that age and experience does not protect you from being caught off-guard.

On another note, Gabrielle falling in love with Frida reminded me of a passage in The Wall by Haushofer. The narrator, seemingly only surviving person on earth, reflects on what kind of companion she would choose if she had the choice. A man, she thinks, might be useful for physical labour, but might also leave her carrying most of the burden. Another woman, on the other hand, would understand her, share responsibility and laugh with her. It is a small observation, but one that captures something I have heard repeatedly from women later in life.

Interestingly, I've spoken to many women later in life who preferred the romantic company of other women. Perhaps this should not be surprising. Under traditional gender roles, women often carry much of the emotional and domestic labour for their partners and families, becoming so accustomed to caring for others that they themselves become almost invisible. Gabrielle is an excellent example: she is taking care of others 24/7 but little do others think about her needs. When her grown-up step-children refuse to move out and party frequently at the apartment where they live with Gabrielle, she ends up moving back to her apartment from her singlehood, her husband carrying little understanding for her needs.

Many of the women I've spoken to describe female companionship as a relief: a space where they feel understood, cared for and truly seen. And perhaps, once society's expectations of them as mothers and objects of desire begin to fade, they find a new freedom to define their lives and loves on their own terms.

Watching the film, I kept thinking about a woman I once met at a tech festival. Amid a crowd largely made up of twenty- and thirty-something engineers, she, a professor in her fifties, was somehow an unexpected participant. We started chatting by coincidence and our conversation quickly evolved into a discussion of female desire in older age when I told her that I was interested in the subject. She told me about her her divorce from a man she used to be madly in love with and married to for more than twenty years (typical story, midlife crisis, younger woman), she was now exploring a whole new chapter of life dating women. She was clearly excited and nervous and confessed feeling like a teenager with this whole new dating situation and the butterflies in her stomach. Many in her group of friends, all accomplished women of a similar age, were exploring new forms of intimacy, companionship and freedom that they had never anticipated earlier in life.

There is still a lot to explore in female desire, sexuality and romance past the fertile age, and A Woman’s Life is an accomplished contribution to its genre.

Verdict: Female gaze, yes please!

A Woman’s Life is not a pioneer, nor tells something new, but it is a film worth watching for the sublime performance of Léa Drucker, for its realism and not least for the fact that it is a successful example of female gaze.

It is a film that achieves to be light-hearted even when what is happening on the screen (and in real life) is heavy by its nature and a film that is funny without trying too hard. Its realism is noteworthy especially because despite everything its protagonist goes through, very little ultimately changes in her life. Just like in real life.

Welcome to Life, Cinema, Action, dear reader! Cannes film festival just concluded on Saturday and without much delay, you will find the takes on the best and the worst of this year’s edition.

We will start with Minotaure, which is my personal favorite and also the one film that is hard to reduce to a synopsis, but here is an attempt.

We are somewhere in an unnamed provincial town in Russia. As the war with Ukraine goes on, Russia is hemorrhaging people. On billboards, half a million rubles (approximately 6,000 euros) are promised to those willing to volunteer for the front. On the background in television, footage shows crowds fleeing to Georgia and Kazakhstan to escape the draft. Those with means find a way out, while those without are ground up.

Gleb, our protagonist, is among those with means. He runs the town’s most important company, has direct access to the mayor and lives in a luxury dacha deep in the woods, isolated and protected from the world outside and its troubles. His wife Galina shares little else than the house with him. She is bored, distant and having an affair with a 33-year-old photographer.

Gleb’s problems are, by his own measure, practical ones. His company is losing staff, with employees either fleeing the country or drafted to the front, which naturally makes his profits suffer. When the mayor demands he provide a list of 14 men fit for military service, Gleb finds a solution: he instructs his assistant to hire 14 men in good physical shape at twice the market rate, knowing they will be drafted before he has to pay them a single salary.

Then he finds out about the affair of his wife. He has had many affairs himself in the past, but that doesn’t prevent him from going after the wife's lover. What follows is one of the great murder scenes in recent cinema: an amateur killing, clumsy and improvised, unfolding in near-silence for twenty minutes, with no plan and a lot of improvisation to hide the evidence. It is both excruciating and brilliantly executed.

As the film unfolds, no one from the lover to the 14 hired men, of whose fates Gleb decides, will have any say in what happens to them.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must?

The film’s title “Minotaure” is a reference to Greek mythology, in which the half-human, half-bull monster Minotaure lives in a labyrinth on Crete and demands the lives of 14 Athenians as tribute every decade to let the Athenians continue to live in peace. The film’s main theme is found in another Greek reference, Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The film unfolds across two parallel stories: Gleb's revenge against his wife's lover and the fate of his employees who are about to be drafted and sent to war. One might assume that the almost certain and soon deaths of 14 men dispatched to the front would dwarf the drama of a betrayed husband. But the film is deliberately constructed so that the infidelity and its revenge are given more weight and screen time than the war and the lives it will consume. The drafting, while ever-present, becomes somehow a parallel story. This is not a flaw, it is the point. While Gleb himself is troubled by his wife’s infidelity (and although we know that he himself has been unfaithful in the past), he does not seem to lose any sleep over a moral reckoning over the fate of the men on his list of expandables to be sent to war. He is reluctant to lose those who are valuable to his business, but the others, employed to be sent to death, barely ever register to him.

Like the Athenian nobles who comply with the Minotaur's demands and return home to live their lives undisturbed, Gleb and his circle can dispatch men to the front or have someone killed and face no consequences. They are the strong who do as they wish, while the weak suffer what they must. There is one especially powerful scene, where Gleb is asked by his assistant to come to the meeting room to greet the 14 men to his company. He goes in, in a hurry, throws a few sentences to the men, whose nameless faces are shown in a sliding movement of the camera and then goes out of the room, scoffing to his assistant who just wasted his time.

And then, there is the parallel to “La Femme Infidele”. The murder of the lover is the magic formula that brings the couple back together, it reestablishes the order in their bourgeois marriage and the next thing we know, they are on a plane to Crete, her head resting on his shoulder.

Zvyagintsev's cinema is powerful because his work refuses easy answers: he does not simplify, does not preach, does not offer consolation. He traces the complex dynamics between the macro and the micro. Corruption, decay, systems of oppression are not depicted as simply social phenomena, but as forces that feed on the individual and, in turn, are fed by them. The system does not exist outside and independent of people, it is made of them, upheld by their conformism and their indifference, by their quiet willingness to send others to die and then return to their carefully ordered lives.

And as the weak suffer what they must, sent to the front as numbers, not people, murdered with evidence left behind and yet protected by a call from above, nothing reaches those responsible. Impunity is the baseline. Zvyagintsev doesn't paint a naive picture. The old security guard dispatched to the front becomes a face on a billboard glorifying the martyrs. And then the billboard gets changed, his face forever forgotten.

Verdict

This film is a 10/10 and should have won the Palme d’Or. In cinemas in October, mark your calendars!

The Film

Kristoffer Borgli is, without the slightest doubt, one of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge in recent years. His 2022 film Sick of Myself, a ruthlessly funny portrait of narcissism on steroids, was a tour de force, the kind of film you rarely encounter.

Borgli’s cinema is built on moral transgressions. He makes hilarious films about terrible people, people he shows at their worst and makes us laugh hard while doing it. He makes films where we don’t like any of the characters but still can’t look away, excited to see what happens next.

In Drama, he takes us into the final week before a couple’s wedding. We meet them at their best and cutest, only to discover shortly after that one of them was keeping a dark, disturbing secret. As their picture-perfect wedding preparation unravels and things turn ugly and uncomfortable, it’s impossible to look away.

The film has all the characteristics of Borgli’s work: short, sharp flashbacks that destabilize our sense of what’s real and what’s fantasy, impeccable sound design that elevates the film to near-perfection, and awful characters impossible to sympathize with.

Drama leaves us with three questions: Is violence a way of claiming recognition and being seen? Do we ever truly see what’s in front of us? Is ignorance bliss in relationships?

How far would you go to feel seen?

One of the film’s merits is its observational distance. Borgli is not a moralist. He is a filmmaker with an extraordinary eye for human psychology. His films give the impression that he watches the world with all of its pettiness and absurdities while eating his popcorn, then goes ahead and makes films about them that blatantly show us the most hideous yet common things about humans and society that makes us feel very uncomfortable while laughing a lot.

In Drama, he approaches gun violence in schools from a sober perspective: human nature. Emma’s fundamental need is recognition. She wants to be seen, which a basic human drive that shapes most of what we do. But she isn’t seen, and when she is, it’s only to be bullied. At the same time, she has a father who served in the army and keeps guns at home. This is her normal. School shootings are regular news in the US. Another kind of normal, however perverted and atrocious. The normalization of violence is portrayed subtly, but brilliantly in the final scene of the film too: Charlie, covered in blood, goes to a diner, and the lady directly takes his order, not showing the slightest disturbance of the fact that he is covered in blood and not asking whether he needs help or an ambulance.

Chronic invisibility and occasional humiliation push her to find a way of gaining the recognition she so desperately needs. What is available around her are guns. She looks up to tough rappers, their posters on her wall, and arrives at the idea that feels both logical and terrible. Using what her environment has already made available, she decides to do a school shooting. She’s a teenager desperate for recognition, and violence is not only the most readily available tool, it is somehow embedded in the normality of her life.

Then comes Borgli’s insight into human adaptability. After a shooting at her school, Emma casually mentions that school shooters aren’t only male. A classmate is impressed by her knowledge and invites her to join an anti-gun violence group. Of course she joins. Of course she becomes an activist. It’s the very same drive. The activism gives her exactly what she always wanted: community, belonging, visibility, recognition.

Does this absolve Emma of responsibility? No. She clearly has aggressive tendencies and a temper. But aggression isn’t destiny. It can be redirected into socially acceptable forms through sublimation. Her childhood plans don’t reveal a murderer. They reveal someone with an intense need for external validation who was willing to go to extremes to get it. The guns were simply the available means. In a different environment, with different tools normalized, her need for recognition would have found different expressions.

However, once we established that while the environment is the decisive element here, we cannot absolve Emma from responsibility, further questions emerge: if Emma's anti-gun activism was driven by her need for recognition rather than moral conviction, does it count? What matters more: intent or action? Are you a hypocrite if your behavior serves self-interest rather than principle? And can we condemn people for things they never did?

Do we ever see what we see?

The film’s central tension lives here: Emma planned an atrocity but didn’t execute it. Her conversion later to anti gun violence activism was self-serving, not ideological. When Charlie discovers this, he faces an impossible question: Who is the woman he is about to marry really? Can he still marry her?

Putting ourselves in Charlie’s shoes and realizing what an impossible question that is, is truly disturbing. But at the same time, there is something else that Borgli shows with ruthless accuracy that we need to examine: We usually do not see what we see.

The movie starts in a rom-com fashion, with Charlie seeing Emma in a coffee shop and feeling attracted by her looks, asking her out. Then fast-forward some years we watch them rehearsing their wedding vows, Charlie portraying Emma as the perfect woman: empathetic, kind, funny and they have great sex. Jackpot. Once Charlie learns about Emma’s past though, everything changes about how he sees her. Suddenly, the perfect woman is gone with Charlie now reinterpreting their entire relationship and past moments he had with her. Moments when she lost her temper, snapped at people, showed impatience now all appear in a different light. What seemed like normal human irritability suddenly looks like evidence of something darker. The perceived perfect woman is now a perceived psychopath.

Think about it: the actions or the woman haven’t changed, yet they are being completely rewritten in Charlie’s mind. Everything she does or says is now being perceived through the filter of “Emma-who-once-planned-a-mass-shooting”. Consider what this means: If Emma-as-Charlie-understood-her can be entirely overwritten by Emma-as-she-now-appears, was the first Emma ever real? Do we ever perceive people as who they truly are or are they only temporary constructions we build through our own narratives? Can we ever see a person for who they really are if the stories we tell ourselves about them can collapse the moment new information arrives? Charlie thought he knew Emma well enough to marry her. Now he’s scanning their history for clues he missed, evidence that was always there but invisible within his previous narrative. The relationship hasn’t changed, but the narrative through which he understands it has.

This is the real point the film is making: we don’t see what’s actually there. We see what we project onto other people, what our current narrative allows us to see. Borgli lets Charlie and the spectator ponder with the question throughout the whole film: Is Emma a psychopath? Is it okay to marry her or is he committing to a relationship that will one day ruin him? He doesn’t answer the question. As the film moves on, we are constantly given given new bits and pieces that make us think for one second that what happened was in the past, and the next we are not sure if Emma is not a psychopath. Then there comes Charlie’s despair making him -almost- cheat on her. Almost. Just as Emma almost did kill people. And the dynamic shifts again. Then, as he is moving on with the preparations of the wedding and seems not to give up on Emma, Charlie now rewrites his narrative of their friend Rachel, who was supposed to be the maid-of-honor but decided to cut Emma off after finding out about her past. A constant rewriting of narratives. As the final scene closes, what we know is that we don’t know anything.

Is ignorance a bliss?

After the film, one is left with many questions but one is particularly difficult to answer: If we could access everything that’s ever passed through our partner’s/best friend’s/parents’/childrens’ minds, would we want that knowledge? Would we really want to know every violent fantasy, every dark impulse, every shameful thought? All the awful things they almost said and done? Does us not knowing them make them inexistent?

Relationships function through strategic editing. We often curate what we reveal. This is not necessarily dishonesty, but the realization that some level of opacity is structurally necessary for human connection. Total transparency would make relationships impossible. No one could bear the weight of another person’s complete inner life: every petty resentment, every moment of attraction to someone else, every cruel thought that passed through their mind in a moment of anger or exhaustion.

Our social contract depends as much on what we don’t share as what we do. We need the freedom to have thoughts we’re not proud of, impulses we don’t act on, fantasies we’d never pursue. If all of this became visible, we’d be constantly defending or explaining our interior lives rather than living them. Privacy isn’t a failure of intimacy, it’s a precondition for it.

The film dramatizes this through Charlie’s paralysis. He now knows something about Emma’s inner world that she never acted on, something that happened in adolescence, something she’s presumably moved past. But he can’t unknow it. And that knowledge has poisoned the relationship forever. Which suggests that some doors, once opened, destroy what they were meant to protect. Would Charlie go back and unknow what he now knows if he could? Is ignorance not a bliss?

By the time the credits start rolling, we are still not sure: Can we judge Emma for thoughts she never acted on? Does the self-interested motivation behind her activism invalidate the activism itself? Some tensions can't be resolved, only lived with or walked away from. We don’t know how the story of Charlie and Emma will end. We only know that their tension is not one to be resolved. It is either to be lived with, or to walk away from.

Verdict:

Borgli can do so much better, but it is not going to be a waste of your life. Once you survive the first half, it will get disturbingly hilarious or hilariously disturbing, and you will leave the movie theater having had a good laugh. No veto.

Bonus: One of the best films of the last decade, Sick of Myself, a portrait of how the digital age put narcissism on steroids:

LinkedIn warriors, white-collar fighters, corporate sweethearts, yesterday’s idealists turned today’s suburban dreamers, former leftists now lost in neoliberal nothingness. This one is for you.

“Once upon a time, in a distant kingdom called TINA, everyone was for themselves and the strongest won. All was fair in war, and all was war. Appearances were everything. Might made right…”

Except that, the distant kingdom called TINA is not a fairy nightmare from Grimm Brothers. It is the narrative of neoliberalism that has been shaping our lives and dismantling hard-won advances toward more humane societies, a narrative that champions ruthless competition over cooperation.

TINA. “There is no alternative.” Although the slogan became emblematic of Thatcher’s free-market politics, there is more to TINA than just Ms. Thatcher. But more on that later. First things first, let’s dive into our film.

No Other Choice

The true cinephiles among you will already know and appreciate Park Chan-Wook through his now-classic “Oldboy”, along with “Handmaiden” and “Decision To Leave”. “No Other Choice” is his latest film that was nominated for and should have won the Golden Lion at Venice last year, except that the jury decided to give the Lion to the absolute, absolute, ABSOLUTE disaster called Father, Mother, Sister Brother. But, Park Chan-Wook wins the Lion of hearts with each of his films, so who cares about naked emperors, really?

No Other Choice is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Axe (previously brought to the screen by Costa-Gavras). It follows Man-Su, a man who already has the full little bourgeois package: a beautiful house, a pretty wife, two kids, and two dogs. His wife plays tennis and takes dance classes, while their daughter is busy with private cello lessons. Everything screams “perfect middle-class life”. Man-Su built this sweet bourgeois life by being a hard-working engineer for all his adult life in the paper industry (he even won awards), but one day he is suddenly laid off. With so much to lose, he evolves from a proud unionist into a clumsy yet cruel murderer.

As any LinkedIn warrior would put it, Man-Su quite literally goes the extra mile to get employed again, even if that means eliminating the competition, one potential hire at a time. In the end (ATTENTION SPOILER!), after having murdered three would-be hires, he finally gets the job. We watch him celebrating his victory in a factory empty of humans since all workers have already been replaced by machines. While Man-Su’s murders are the implicit “No Other Choice” in the film, the ending in the robot-run factory is explicit. The board that hires Man-Su proudly announces that they replaced the humans, because that was the only way to increase the revenues, there was no other choice.

Man-Su on LinkedIn:

When I suddenly found myself unemployed after decades in the paper industry, I didn’t give up. I did whatever it took to get back into the workforce, I went the extra mile, gave more than 100%, and ensured that no competition stood in my way.

After eliminating three would-be hires (yes, three, tough decisions had to be made), I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve secured my new role and will be supervising a fully automated facility. Humans? Not a single one left. Machines now handle the day-to-day operations. Efficiency is off the charts!

Key takeaway: persistence, adaptability, and commitment pay off, even if the system is ruthless and the road back is… unconventional.

#CareerGrowth #NeverGiveUp #Adaptability #Automation #CompetitiveEdge #ExtremeLeadership

In a way, Man-Su is the ultimate neoliberal subject: competitive, compliant and utterly expendable while blind to the fact that he can never really win in such a system. How long before his next position is made redundant? How many bodies will it take to claim the one after that? And what if someone else decides they need to kill him to get his job? Man-Su never asks himself these questions. He merely internalizes the violence the system inflicts on to him, only to externalize it onto others who are in the very same boat called precarity.

Park Chan-Wook masterfully dissects the mechanisms that keep the system running: the middle-class comforts that quietly entrap people; the patriarchal logic that reduces a man’s worth to his income; the atomization of social life into the nuclear family, eroding solidarity and any sense of collective struggle; and the seductive myth that success is merely a matter of mindset (a narrative that conveniently ignores the system itself as the massive force shaping our lives).

Now, while the consequences of decades of neoliberalism are causing pain across the globe, South Korean society seems to offer one of the starkest lenses through which to examine the system’s perversities, as can be seen from the stellar productions coming from there within the last years. It is the unique blend of a collectivist tradition with a hypercompetitive market mentality fully imposed on a society. Maybe that is the reason why contemporary Korean cinema has been excelling at capturing this reality, blending cut-throat humor with startling cruelty and bursts of gore to expose the violence embedded in contemporary urban middle class life. You are probably all also thinking about Parasite while reading this. But let me assure you that No Other Choice may be even more merciless in its indictment. The film’s dark humor masterfully exposes the absurdity of a world fixated on status, governed by a twisted notion of the “good life”, reducing human worth to economic value and the persistent myth that there is, indeed, no alternative.

Question: Is there really no alternative?

Now, back to TINA: There is no alternative. As much as TINA is being treated inseparable from Thatcherism, it actually is a narrative tool that existed well before Thatcher. The “There is no alternative” narrative is a manner of twisting political positions and interests into the illusion of objective, universal truth. Just look around today and you will see TINA everywhere:

There is no alternative to remilitarization.

There is no alternative to AI-isation.

There is no alternative to mass automation of jobs.

There is no alternative to deregulation.

There is no alternative to factory farming.

There is no alternative to capitalism.

There is no alternative to austerity.

There is no alternative to privatization.

There is no alternative to “profits first”.

There is no alternative to working until 70.

There is no alternative to dismantling welfare state.

…

Really?

Who owns the your imagination?

For most, conforming with the system is a matter of survival. For the privileged, it is cowardice, conformism, lack of imagination.

Man-Su’s story shows the cruelty of a world insisting there is no alternative to a system imposed upon us. He kills, competes, destroys to survive in a system that has but very few winners. A system in which he, and he alone, bears all responsibility for what happens to him, but paradoxically not the freedom to choose a different game.

Now, why is this relevant to us? Because the next wave of TINA is here. The TINA of there is no alternative to mass surveillance, remilitarization, isolationism. And, of course, the TINA of AI. This time, AI is coming for knowledge workers, the white-collar labor, those who until now felt safe thinking they were winners of the system, seduced by the little bourgeois package.

But jobs will vanish, wages will collapse, labor itself will be devalued. In fact, all of this is already happening. Mass precarization is already here. All the while the very few real winners, who are busy concentrating power and resources, are singing us the familiar tune: there is no alternative.

Except there is. We create it by reclaiming our imagination. To imagine differently is to refuse inevitability, to think of societies where care, community and solidarity matter more than competition and profit. Societies where we can win together. It starts with imagination. With the imagination that with all the technology and resources we have, we can go beyond materialism, scarcity, individualism and the “winner-takes-all” mindset.

If not, prepare your weapons, because there will be blood.

Verdict

Well, this film is a perfect 10/10. Go watch it, you won’t regret it.

Bonus: The scene in this video is going to go right into the legends of cinema history.

Have you already watched “No Other Choice”? Leave a comment below or send me a message with your thoughts!

Until next time, protect your imagination!

The filmography of Sorrentino is a filmography of nihilism, if not of cynicism. Like the unconventional interpretations of what legitimizes an euthanasia in his latest feature La Grazia, we could name his cynicism a disease in terminal stage. In order to make something that is not an iteration of what he has been doing for the last 20 years, maybe his cinema needs an euthanasia as well. Maybe the nihilist Sorrentino needs to die in order to give birth to a Sorrentino that can use his enormous talent to create new masterpieces.

The Film

21 years after “The Consequences of Love”, the true pinnacle of his filmmaking, and one year after “Partenope”, the absolute bottom of his career, Paolo Sorrentino is back on screen with “La Grazia”.

La Grazia is the story of a fictive president of Italy, Mariano de Santis, in the final 6 months of his tenure. We learn that he is a former judge and a widow, and slowly realize that he is a character far too little Machiavellian to be occupying the position of a president. De Santis is immediately portrayed as a man who is delaying uncomfortable decisions such as approving a law to legalize euthanasia or granting pardon to two people who killed their partners. He is also strangely obsessed with the fact that his wife, who passed some eight years ago, has cheated on him 40 years ago. In fact this history of marital betrayal seems to be the only thing that can stir emotions in Mariano, a man whose composure seems very difficult to break.

De Santis is living in what you could call a symbiosis with his daughter Dorothea, also a jurist: she is in charge of both his professional and private life, so much that she chooses his daily meals and keeps him on a diet of quinoa and lean fish. Then there is his son, who has gone to Montreal, and apparently makes tones of money by making commercial music (Why Montreal though? Why a son figure who traded classical music for pop? Okay Derya, don’t ask too many questions. Narrative cohesion died ages ago). There is Ugo, a high school friend of Mariano who wants to succeed him as president and feels like an ambitious antithesis to De Santis. Then there is the very Sorrentinesque (read: caricaturized) figure, Coco, who speaks fast and shoots one aphoristic line after the next. We also have a Black Pope with earrings and dreadlocks that speaks Italian with an endearing accent and travels on a motorbike.

Some will read this film as political, others as ethical. It is neither. Sorrentino is not a moralist and never has been. The film is not really about euthanasia either. As he explained in the post-screening Q&A, the idea began simply with a newspaper story that caught his attention. He was equally frank about his intentions. When audience members praised the film for its supposed political message, he merely thanked them and accepted their reading, even though it clearly was not his own. If there is one thing you can say about Sorrentino, it is that he does not bother to pretend.

After the catastrophe that was Parthenope, it is clear that Sorrentino tried to do something different in La Grazia. There are moments that feel distinctly un-Sorrentino. Yet these elements are few and oddly timid, which is surprising for a filmmaker who is anything but shy. This was the first question I wanted to ask him at the post-screening Q&A: was this a cautious experiment, or something else? Sorrentino replied nonchalantly with a hint of irony that people kept accusing him of making the same film over and over, so he decided to try something different.

However, it spite of Sorrentino’s attempts to do something different, La Grazia is not really a different film. To see why, let’s begin with a short manual on how to make a Sorrentino film and how much it applies to La Grazia.

How to make a Sorrentino film in 10 not-so-easy steps

Step 1: Get Toni Servillo as your main actor

I mean, can we really blame him for it?

Step 2: Frame beautifully, move slowly, ace that cinematography

You can identify a Sorrentino film at a glance, from almost any random scene. Highly aestheticized frames, strict symmetry, figures centered in the image, slow and fluid camera movements, architecture as a strong component that dwarfs the characters, meticulous composition, carefully sculpted lighting. Never handheld. No rushed motion.

La Grazia is marked by the signature Sorrentino cinematography for about 95 percent of its runtime. Yet there are moments that feel new, or at least long absent from his work. In scenes more grounded in reality, such as the prison visits, the camera movement, color palette and framing shift dramatically. There is even a brief use of handheld camera, highly atypical for Sorrentino, but perfectly suited to the scene in which it appears.

Step 3: Hire a bunch of hot young actors

Any Sorrentino film features the young and beautiful, especially women. Plenty of them. So much that some people even, unsurprisingly, blame him with the male gaze. I strongly oppose the reading of male gaze in Sorrentino’s work. His usage of the young and beautiful is not about the objectifying women. It is about his fascination with youth and beauty and his sincere melancholy due to their fleeting nature.

Regardlessly, this time the cast offers almost none of that except for a brief contemporary dance scene, which seems like he couldn’t resist sprinkling a little youthful beauty under an artistic cover. This is La Grazia’s biggest difference from the standard Sorrentino style. However, changing that doesn’t help Paolo in making a different film. We’ll get to the why later.

Step 4: Baroque characters and theatral dialogues

Baroque characters and theatral dialogues that you would unlikely ever experience in real life happen to be another core feature of Sorrentino’s work, along with a rather intolerable direction he seemed to take in Parthenope with lines that aimed to grandeur but couldn’t go beyond ridiculous and artificial.

In La Grazia, apart from the character of Coco and a dinner scene at the beginning, Sorrentino mostly restrains himself from his exaggerated characters and theatral dialogues. However the same cannot be said about the stilted lines. The Pope remarks at some point, completely out of the blue, “the smiles of the women are changing the world.” (I am sorry, but what?) We have a prison scene where De Santis’ daughter is being emotionally smashed by a woman who killed her own husband, but the scene and the lines (“you are not breathing!”) are completely unconvincing.

Step 5: Add a pinch of grotesque

The grotesque is always there, in every film, although mostly in highly aestheticized ways. Sometimes in a contrast to the young and beautiful. La Grazia, apart from a head of a state in very late age, does not include much of that grotesqueness.

Step 6: Add flashbacks of a first love

Flashbacks to some first love from youth are the indispensable element in almost every Sorrentino film, but usually it features a melancholic scene with an unrealistically beautiful almost naked young woman on the seaside staring seductively into a slow-motion camera. Is Sorrentino a romantic? He’ll never say.

In La Grazia, too, De Santis keeps remembering the first time he saw his wife and obsessively talks about how unique she was, how gracefully she used to move. This time, though, it’s as if someone pulled him aside and said, “Paolo, zio, make it Catholic, no naked women, no!”, and he simply complied. Because all we see on screen is a woman in winter clothes hurrying across a misty field. The effect is absurd, carrying little weight apart from a thought like, “Well, here’s an utterly unremarkable figure rushing somewhere with no trace of elegance… but love is blind, right?”

Step 7: Have a never-ending end

Another signature feature of any Sorrentino film is that he just can’t leave things at their peak. He simply cannot end a film cleanly. Scenes keep coming one after another, and you keep thinking, “okay, this must be the last scene, now it can finish”, but no. One more scene follows, and then another. Unfortunately, La Grazia is no different.

Step 8: Prioritize the atmosphere over story

If Sorrentino excels at anything, it’s creating films with an atmosphere so captivating that emotions, ideas, and observations emerge subtly and sublimely, often without relying on a strong narrative. Surely, some might call it self-indulgence at certain points, but achieving this is incredibly difficult and here he proves himself a true master.

La Grazia is a mix from this point of view. It is trying to become a more story-focused film, but essentially, the story remains secondary to the real theme of the film, which we will talk about in the next step.

Step 9: Center your film around life’s vanity, fleeting youth, decay, and a sense of existential ennui, melancholy and nostalgia

Sorrentino’s films are nihilistic meditations. He has a gift for capturing the vanity of life, the emptiness of ambition, the fleeting nature of youth and beauty, the grotesque in the decadence and the decay. Melancholy is maybe the most fundamental sentiment, the most defining signature of Sorrentino’s work.

All this leads to a quarrel with death, which is also typical Sorrentino. In La Grazia, we have a scene where a grotesque head of state, fragile in his old age, gets caught in the rain and wind. The sequences are painfully low and slow and the anxiety in de Santis’s face, who asks “Am I this old?”, leave no doubt on the intended sentiment. Another memento mori moment is a dying horse in agony. Old age and death are the grand monsters in Sorrentino’s universe.

At one point, de Santis is asked: “Do you suffer from loneliness or from the length of life?” . He is a man who has survived his great love and will soon have survived a presidency, a man portrayed somewhat as an anachronism, out of sync with the world, trapped in the past and seemingly without purpose. He does not suffer from loneliness or from the mere length of life, he suffers from emptiness, from lack of meaning and purpose: whether it be a community, a meaningful human connection, or something he still wishes to accomplish. De Santis faces the emptiness that haunts so many of Sorrentino’s characters.

Sorrentino draws a parallel between that emptiness and the concept of lightness, a reference to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (perhaps unconsciously). De Santis exists in a state of lightness, helpless before reality and disconnected from the world. He even explicitly complains of this lightness and confesses that he longs for heaviness. His plight is all too relatable. As Kundera puts it:

“The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”*

The ephemerality and vainness of life seem to lead to an almost uncurable dissatisfaction with reality and truth in Sorrentino’s mind. When we look back in his filmography, in The Consequences of Love, Titta declares that the truth is boring (La verità è noiosa). In The Hand of God, again, the reason to make films is the mediocrity, the inferiority of the reality (“La realtà è scadente.”). And then, there is the unforgettable final monologue of The Great Beauty:

“It always ends like this. With death.
Before that, though, there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. Everything has settled there, under the chatter and the noise.
Silence and feeling. Emotion and fear. The sparse, erratic flashes of beauty.
And then the wretched squalor and the miserable man.
All buried beneath the blanket of embarrassment of being in the world.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Elsewhere, there is elsewhere. I do not concern myself with elsewhere.

So, let this novel begin.
After all, it’s only an illusion.
Yes, it’s only an illusion.”

And here, again, La Grazia is just another iteration of what Sorrentino has already said. His aide tells De Santis that he overvalues the truth. At the end, De Santis comes to the conclusion that “a pardon” (la grazia) is only possible in presence of doubt. That it is impossible to reconstruct the truth, that it is the reason why one needs more than 4000 pages to establish criminal law. And even if you could reconstruct it, truth is so uninteresting, why would you even bother? So yes, maybe the truth, or our search for it, is not only burdensome but also overrated. Maybe the truth is superfluous. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it is uninteresting, disappointing and dissatisfying. Or is it? Sorrentino seems to have picked a side on those questions but he doesn’t impose it on the spectator. The man is not a preacher.

Step 10: Finish with a generous portion of cynicism (Attention spoiler)

The intense engagement (which in Sorrentino’s case feels to have taken the form of ruminations) with the topics discussed in Step 9 can have the side effect of turning a person into a cynic. This is one of the possible reactions to realizing that life does not have any inherent sense and we are only on earth for a brief time. And as if it was not bleak enough, for only a short part of it are we young, beautiful and able. Sooner than you expect, the decay starts. Existentialism might be another reaction to the very same realization, but it doesn’t seem to be Sorrentino’s response.

In La Grazia, I had, for the first time, the sensation that Sorrentino, in what felt like the first time in his career, did not make a cynical movie, though. However, at the end of the movie, a text informed us that the women who killed her husband to be able to be with her lover (who waits in front of the prison for her everyday for years) receives a pardon but breaks up with the lover after 6 months after reuniting with him. Meanwhile, the professor who killed his wife, whose former students petition for a pardon for him but who himself declares that he is not worthy of a pardon and does not want one, ends up filing for a pardon himself after the students’ petition is rejected by de Santis. Well, in the end, Sorrentino cannot escape his cynicism. Although this time, instead of a generous portion, he only adds a pinch of it.

How can Sorrentino make a different film?

As I’ve written about Sorrentino before, every artist who has once created a masterpiece inevitably faces the shadow of that work, a shadow that can grow larger than the artist themselves. For the others, one could argue that they become trapped in the anxiety of failing if they try something different or maybe it comes from a place of simple laziness.

In Sorrentino’s case, La Grazia is a half-hearted attempt to address the critics of self-repetition. However, he attempts to change his style, but style is not what needs changing. Style is his signature, it is his genius. What needs to change is the substance of his work. His films are reiterations of the same perspective: youth, beauty, love and life are fleeting; most ambition is vain; reality is ultimately disappointing. La Grazia is no exception to that rule: it is a film that uses euthanasia and politics as alibi main topics, but essentially, it is a film about existential ennui. And because Sorrentino seems to have run out of things to say about existential ennui, it fails to become a different film. Altering cinematography or surface aesthetics cannot alter this repetitive thematic core.

What Sorrentino truly needs is a new perspective, perhaps even a new notion altogether. Though the latter seems unlikely, given that his reason to make films appears to come from a profound dissatisfaction with life and reality. Like the many unconventional interpretations of euthanasia that he is introducing in La Grazia, we could name his ennui combined with his cynicism a disease in terminal stage. If he is sincere in his intentions to make something different (which I happen to doubt), maybe what he needs is a cinematic euthanasia. Maybe the disillusioned Sorrentino needs to die in order to give birth to a Sorrentino that can use his enormous talent to make different films.

That, of course, is only relevant if he actually wants to make something different. One thing Sorrentino deserves praise for is that he has never been a filmmaker who tries to exploit sentiments or sell his work as something it is not. He simply cannot be bothered to do that. He seems to make the films he feels like making, and that authenticity is something to appreciate. In a way, there is a something of him in the unforgettable Jep Gambardella from The Great Beauty, who declares that he cannot waste his time doing things he does not feel like doing. This is also why it is surprising that he bothered at all to change his style in La Grazia.

The Verdict

So, what is the verdict on La Grazia? The film excels at what Sorrentino does best: it is a meditation. It is a film of atmosphere and sentiment, one that communicates ideas and makes us reflect through images and metaphors rather than through a deeply detailed story. Does it convey a profound message or pose a truly worthwhile question? Absolutely not. It is a pleasant but ultimately empty film. However, just like an existentialist confronted with the meaninglessness of life, you can choose to give it your own meaning, instead of becoming a cynical. Because if you appreciate Sorrentino’s work, you will likely enjoy it. And, of course, you can hardly go wrong spending two hours watching Toni Servillo. No veto from Deryacracy for this one.

(The film will be released in Italy on 15th January, and in France on the 28th. Many other European countries, including Germany, Spain and the UK will wait until March.)

* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, faber and faber, 1999 edition, Page 5.

“When you find out that the U.S. government was willing to spend $6 billion just to bury one truth seeker, it tells you what they think about the truth, the very truth we want to know.”

Eugene Jarecki, Director of “The 6 Billion Dollar Man”

The Documentary

“The Six Billion Dollar Man” by Eugene Jarecki is a documentary about Julian Assange. It won the L’Oeil d’Or Grand Prize at Cannes this year (proof there is still hope for Cannes) and was shown at the closing session of the festival Vrai de Vrai in Paris on 23 November (big thanks to LaScam for making the entry free of charge and thus more accessible to everyone).

Obviously, Julian Assange is not a billionaire (although he probably easily could have become one, if he had chosen a tech career in Silicon Valley instead of becoming a troublemaker to war criminals). The documentary is named after the amount that was given by the US to the Ecuador via IMF to have them deliver Assange: 6 billion US dollars. Yes, 6 billion, which is approximately 5% of Ecuador’s GDP.

Eugene Jarecki had an exclusive access to WikiLeaks archives and to key figures involved in the case, from the journalists initially involved in leaking the Collateral Murder files, to the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer. Initially skeptical of the torture allegations, Melzer admits he was reluctant to get involved, but after further investigation, he recognized their seriousness.

At the opening, it is Edward Snowden who asks us: “When you are being lied to, would you rather not know?” This question is important because it brings us to the core of the smoke screen used to distract the public from the real deal. Historically the most typical weapon to delegitimize the importance of what a dissident does is to manipulate the public into discussing things about the dissident that are essentially irrelevant to the real deal - in this case, it is an extreme focus on Assange’s eccentric character. The only truly relevant thing in this story is though, that war crimes were committed, civilians were knowingly murdered and the public was lied to. That is why posing the right question right at the beginning of the documentary is key: Whoever Julian Assange might be, would you rather prefer lies and secrets about committed war crimes by your government? Message: This is not about Assange, this is about something else, far bigger, and far more important.

Eugene Jarecki declares in an interview: “The truth matters to us more than ever because we’re living in a world that really feels like it’s spinning out of control to most of us. So we want to know what’s going on. And when you find out that the U.S. government was willing to spend $6 billion just to bury one truth seeker, it tells you what they think about the truth, the very truth we want to know. So, there’s more reason than ever to understand the Assange and Wikileaks story because it relates to everything we are all about to face in our own world.”

Accordingly, right after the intro with Snowden, we watch a collage of moments from near history that are setting the scene for what is to come: politicians, tech bros, mass protests, newspaper headlines.

Then the film walks us through the history of Assange and WikiLeaks spanning over a decade in a thriller-like tempo in three chapters. This is the kind of film that effortlessly captivates our full focus and curiosity although we more or less know what will happen. One of the strengths is that the story is told by many people, only not by Assange. We listen to his coworkers, supporters, traitors, opponents as we work out the odyssey. The contributors include Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Pamela Anderson, former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa and former UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer. Little by little, as the pieces of the puzzle come together, the documentary links them to the historical context. When Obama announces that the US troops will be withdrawn from Iraq for example, he frames it as a decision to bring US soldiers home and give Iraqi people their sovereignty. Behind the scenes: Iraq decides not to extend the immunity of US army in Iraq after documents leaked by WikiLeaks showing handcuffing and execution of Iraqi women and children by US soldiers. We see how Trump sends one of his MAGA politicians to the Ecuadorian embassy to cut a deal with Assange: you publicly announce the name of the source that handed you the Clinton emails (which did not only contribute to Clinton losing the election, but also caused Trump some headache by allegations of Russian interference), we give you your freedom. Assange refuses to expose his source.

Although the whole thing is utterly depressing, there are some ironically funny things in the story as well. When Assange moves to the Ecuador’s embassy in London, the embassy literally turns to the closest thing to a salon that you can imagine these days. Even Lady Gaga turns up to visit him at some point and asks if she will get arrested upon her return to the US, adding, I hope they will arrest me, that would be fun.

One of the more interesting things the documentary focuses on is how the whole story takes an unexpected plot twist through an unexpected person. When one of the employees at the security firm that was contracted by the Ecuadorian embassy decides to blow the whistle and leak the connection of the security firm with the US government, unknown truths come to light.

The Real Deal

We are, indeed, living in strange times. Strange times in which we easily get distracted into discussing the eccentric personality of a journalist rather than the war crimes he exposed. Speaking up against genocide is a criminal act. Overt corruption is the new normal. 2024 was the deadliest year for journalists in the last 30 years.

“Looking back to it in 2025, Assange’s case clearly was the canary in the coal mine in exposing hypocrisy and mass manipulation.”

Julian Assange is one of the most important symbols of this strange age of oxymorons. For longer than a decade, we have witnessed him being persecuted, confined and tortured for having exposed U.S. war crimes. And the most perverted thing about the case of Assange was that the perception of him and the discussion around the case became more focused on the man himself than what the man revealed. Looking back to it in 2025, his case clearly was the canary in the coal mine in exposing hypocrisy and mass manipulation. During the last two years, we have seen how the non-stop murder of civilians and journalists can be broadcast in real time, without eliciting any meaningful international action to stop it nor public consensus on the fact that what is happening is an atrocity.

In these strange times of post-truth we are inhabiting, the proof of an atrocity is not sufficient for public condemnation of that atrocity. George Orwell once wrote, “totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” The disbelief in objective truth is today’s reality. This makes the role of a free press more critical than ever. The simple reality is: when journalists are silenced for speaking the truth, we lose access to the very information that enables us to understand the world around us. Without access to truth, how can we defend our rights, hold power to account, or challenge injustice? Stripped of the right to information, we are left powerless to defend ourselves. And when we cannot defend ourselves, we are no longer free. Free speech and a free press are the bedrock of our freedom. Without them, freedom itself is unattainable.

The Effect

Persecuting the truth-teller is never about the truth-teller himself. It is about discouraging everyone else from telling the truth. Therefore, telling a story like Assange’s can lead to a loss of hope, a surrender to nihilism, a surge of cynicism.

Or, you can choose to take a different lesson. You can look at how a small number of people without much money or power stood up for the values they believe in and refused to give up under crushing pressure from all sides. You can recognize how they, against all odds, against villains of immense power, achieved the impossible. And then, instead of succumbing to nihilism and cynicism, you can find hope and the force and the willingness to fight against injustice and for your rights, for our rights, for a better world, for freedom, for liberation. You can feel reassured that there are courageous people on earth who are motivated by more than self-interest. And you can start believing (again), whether you are a journalist, or a lawyer, or a singer, or a simple employee at a security firm, you too can make a difference.

The ending of the film, in a spirit of hope, involves another collage, where we see that history is an eternal struggle, but times change and battles can be won against all odds. So, Jarecki, too, seems to finds more hope in this story than bleakness.

The Verdict: 10/10

“The case of Assange is not about Assange. It is about the freedom of press. It is about our fundamental rights - or, sadly but more accurately, about the erosion of our fundamental rights.”

The documentary is a pure success both from a narrative and a technical point of view (loved the sound design). Its greatest merit is that it excels at showing the most important point about the case of Assange: that the case of Assange is not about Assange. Repeat after me: The case of Assange is not about Assange. It is about the freedom of press. It is about our fundamental rights - or, sadly, but more accurately, about the erosion of our fundamental rights.

10/10 as a work of documentary cinema, 10/10 as a form of public service. I would love to say “Now, go watch it”, but there is no release date yet. So, maybe, go manifest that it is distributed to cinemas soon.

If I were the kind of person who liked calling people or things “the next …,” I’d call Laura Carreira the next Ken Loach, but that would be a little too obvious, given that his production company is behind this film. And if were the jealous type, I would be extremely jealous of Laura Carreira, because this is a exactly the kind of movie I wish I would have made. But me being me, I just want to be her friend and I want ALL of you to watch this film and spread the word about Laura’s work. (And if you are living in Paris, go watch it at Luminor, because 1) Luminor has the best programme in the city, and 2) a good cinephile is a cinephile who supports independent cinemas, especially if they are under the threat of being turned into yet another business complex.)

On Falling is the story of Aurora, an economic migrant from Portugal who is a picker in an Amazon-like warehouse in Scotland. The emphasis is on is: she doesn’t just work as a picker—she is one. The job consumes all her energy and gives nothing back. Aurora rises before sunrise and returns home long after sunset, exhausted from her endless shifts pacing through the warehouse to meet her speed targets. She lives in a small room in a shared flat with strangers, all in their thirties or forties. At work, lunch breaks are timed and sensors monitor their moves through the warehouse. If someone slows down, a supervisor quickly appears to tell them to speed up.

One day, Aurora drops her phone and shatters the screen. Repairing it costs £99, an expense that will set off her downward spiral. With no money left for food or bills, which seem to be her only expenses, Aurora begins to fall.

On Falling could be called a horror film, a horror film of the psychological kind. It crawls under your skin, raises your blood pressure, tightens your muscles. But it doesn’t rely on monsters or extraordinary events. Instead it terrifies by showing something that affects every one of us: alienation. And it does so so brilliantly that you once again see the power of cinema: to make you not just understand, but feel, a complex phenomenon that countless books have tried to explain.

Beyond its mastery in depicting alienation, there are three things that make it a film worth to watch from an artistic point of view. First of all, it is about the life of an ordinary person. The stories of ordinary people are always more interesting and compelling to watch in cinema. Second, the film does not contain any antagonists, nor any climax. It is so good that it doesn’t need those elements to keep you watching and concentrated through the 105 minutes of it. And finally, it is a film that connects us to the struggles of other humans, struggles that we might not be aware of in our bubbles and hyper-selfish, hyper-atomised lives.

Now let’s dive into the film and what it shows us about human condition. You are warned, starting from here, there are plenty of spoilers (which is not that important, as it is not a film that you watch for the action).

To understand what is happening to Aurora, and to the others, and in a way to the most of us, even if we are not stuck in precarious, badly paid jobs, we first need to understand the concept of alienation.

Alienation is a modern phenomenon. In simple terms, to be truly human, we must express ourselves and our creativity through our work. Under capitalism, this essential connection is broken. Instead of working to fulfill our own needs or creative ideas, workers are forced to sell their labor as a mere commodity (wage-labor) just to survive. The work itself becomes external and unfulfilling, as the working conditions are not determined by the worker, but by the capitalist, who owns the means of production. The worker’s own work becomes something foreign and hostile that ultimately makes them miserable rather than fulfilled.

The alienation takes place on four levels: from the product of our labour, from the process of production, from our selves, and from the society. Now, let’s examine them through Aurora in On Falling:

Level 1: Alienation from the product of your own labour

The worker is alienated from the product of their work. The worker doesn’t own the final product (or the profits) they make. It immediately belongs to the capitalist. The more the worker produces, the richer the owner (the capitalist) gets, and the more the hard work of the worker becomes a separate, alien power over them.

Aurora works long shifts day in, day out. Her life consists of physically and psychologically taxing days spent performing the same repetitive, mind-numbing task without speaking to a single person. She and hundreds of others keep the warehouse running, yet her hard work never translates into a decent living. Well into her thirties, Aurora lives in a small room in a shared flat with strangers, with no savings and no expenses beyond basic food and rent, nothing fancy, nothing extra.

One day, the warehouse holds a celebration for breaking new profit records. The workers are told it’s their success, that they’re part of the company’s achievement—yet they’re not even allowed to leave the event before it ends. Their reward? Cupcakes.

Similarly, the record profits, Amazon and co. are making does not benefit the least to the workers that they owe their profits to. In fact, the majority of low-wage employers have CEO-to-worker pay ratios above 100 to 1, with 50 of them paying their CEOs at least 1000 (yes, a thousand) times what they pay their workers without which there would be no profits.

Level 2: Alienation from the act of production, your work itself:

The work is not freely chosen or creative; it’s forced and often repetitive (like an assembly line). The worker is told how to work and when to work, losing control over their own activity.

Like so many others, Aurora has little control over when she works. When she applies for another job and gets an interview scheduled for a Friday afternoon, she tells the shift organizers she needs half a day off for a last-minute doctor’s appointment. They refuse without hesitation, saying they need at least one week’s notice. There is no “what’s wrong,” no “hope you’re okay.” Just no, no room for negotiation. (Because apparently, the job of a picker carries life-or-death urgency. Heaven forbid a package arrives a day late.)

After failing the interview, Aurora feels depressed. In one chilling scene, she removes the barcode from a rope, suggesting she’s considering suicide. Not long after, a supervisor appears and asks why she’s being “slightly slower than usual”, ordering her to speed up. She’s nothing but a cog in the machine, no longer a person with autonomy, but a human robot expected to work at a constant tempo, day in and day out, without meaning, fatigue or emotion. Who she is doesn’t matter, there’s no space for individuality in the work she does.

Later, at the absurd celebration of the company’s record profits, Aurora, who is starving because she doesn’t have money to eat after paying £99 to fix her phone, grabs a few cupcakes and heads to the toilet to eat them, only to be stopped and told, “You can’t leave, you have to stay here.”.

Work owns the worker. And maybe you’re not a picker in a warehouse, but if you sustaining yourself depends on a job, you probably know the feeling of work being your master too.

Level 3: Alienation from yourself as a human being:

Humans are naturally creative and social. They find fulfillment in freely transforming their environment and inventing new things (not necessarily material things, just think of how deeply human creating and telling stories is). Alienated labor reduces the worker to a mere instrument of production, focusing only on the physical need for wages, suppressing their unique human potential.

This might be the part that hurts the most. Aurora is young, pretty, agreeable, docile - and Aurora has no life. She spends her days trapped in a warehouse, deprived of sunlight (not that Scotland offers much, but still) and when she finally gets home late at night, she’s too tired and too broke to do anything. So she collapses onto her bed, scrolling through reels on her phone. The phone is her only form of entertainment, and in a way, her opium. It numbs the pain of a life so bleak it’s almost physically painful to watch.

During their short lunch breaks, the workers at the warehouse only talk about the TV shows they’re watching. Is it because they’re incapable of other pastimes is it or because “having a life” demands time and money they simply don’t have?

It’s especially heartbreaking when, over lunch, someone asks Aurora what she does in her life and she can’t find an answer. The man who asked laughs and says he does the laundry. You either work at work, or work at home, or eat, or sleep, or stare at a screen. This is the life your hard work buys you.

Later, when Aurora heads to a job interview she hopes will free her from the warehouse, she stops at a cosmetics store to try on makeup. Asked which color she wants, she picks blue, then mentions she’s going to an interview. The makeup artist looks worried: “Are you sure you want blue? Maybe something more neutral?” And she’s right, of course. It’s probably not wise to wear blue eyeshadow to an interview. But then you can’t help but ask yourself why. Why is it wrong to wear blue eyeshadow? Is individuality, a simple act of self-expression, a privilege reserved for the few powerful, while everyone else is expected to blend in, to be invisible, to never, god forbid, stand out?

Level 4: Alienation from the human nature, meaning the society, other workers, your fellow humans:

The capitalist system sets workers against each other in competition for jobs and higher wages, destroying the natural human tendency toward cooperation and community.

When one of the warehouse workers commits suicide by hanging himself in his room (in a flatshare, unsurprisingly), another worker remarks, “What inconsiderate behavior! Imagine what it did to the flatmates who found him. If I were to commit suicide, I’d jump off a bridge so I wouldn’t bother anyone with my corpse.” It’s the kind of line that makes your—at least my—blood freeze. Yet this moment captures alienation in its starkest form: other people are no longer those we empathize or stand in solidarity with, but merely beings who might be useful or threatening, depending on how they affect our own interests.

Since we are talking about alienation from human nature, it’s worth clarifying what that means in Marx’s theory. In his theory of alienation, human nature is the ensemble of social relations. So it doesn’t directly refer to our biological makeup, but the web of connections we depend on to live. In a capitalist society, however, this interdependence is distorted. Instead of seeing in each individual the possibility of our liberty (to be achieved through solidarity), we see the limitation of it. Anyone who doesn’t serve our interests, anyone who is not a potential customer, creditor, debtor, employer, or employee, becomes a rival. The system thus feeds our selfishness. We cooperate only when it benefits us. The bitter truth is that capitalism turns us against one another, stripping away the very solidarity needed to escape it. Aurora alone is easily replaced, but if all Auroras refuse the conditions imposed on them, things begin to change. The fight to liberate ourselves from alienation cannot be fought alone. And the more alienated we are, the harder it becomes.

Why should I care about Aurora and the like?

Reading this blog or watching the film, you might think Aurora’s situation is far from your own. You might even feel grateful for your privileges. But while people like Aurora, stuck in low-paying, grueling jobs, are hit the hardest by the system, most of us are still affected by the same forces. Alienation is something many of us know all too well.

Secure jobs with benefits are becoming rare, even for educated “middle class” folks who probably read this blog. The gig economy and one-person businesses dominate. Precarity is about the become a pandemic, if it is not one yet. You might think you’re safe, but in the end, we’re all cogs in the machine. Recognizing this and understanding your alienation and is the first step toward liberation.

The Plot

I’ll keep the plot brief since the film is not necessarily about a plot but trying more to be a character study (and you can find the details elsewhere anyway).

The story revolves around the sisters Nora (an actress struggling with anxiety with a touch of cynicism and a side of attachment issues) and Agnes (a sweet soul leading a safe but dull life with her husband and young son) as well as their father Gustav (a film director who’s been absent in their lives and seems reluctant to accept that he's gotten old and démodé).

We gather that the sisters, especially Nora, haven’t been in touch with their father for a long time, but then he shows up at their mother’s funeral. They had been divorced when the sisters were barely teenagers, after years of quarrels and unrest at home. Gustav insists on talking to Nora, who seems to be the harsher of the two sisters and more reluctant to forgive his absence. The fact that the matter Gustav insisted on discussing was offering her the lead role only fuels her anger towards him.

From there, we watch as Gustav finds an alternative for the role, Rachel, an American rising star. She's quite the American epitome, where prussianism meets capitalism: methodical and hardworking, eager to give everything to be successful, but at the end of the day, her main goal in life is to sell cosmetics, not necessarily to pursue art for art’s own sake. The opposite of Nora, whose artistic excellence and authenticity derives from her inner turmoil.

The Review

Sentimental Value is, as I stated in the headline, a clumsy and deeply confused drama that finds its unexpected strengths in sharp wit while struggling to deliver on its more serious, sentimental ambitions. It's a film that succeeds most when it's not trying to be a drama at all, but rather a dry, observational comedy exposing its characters, which is the kind of thing that Scandinavians excel at.

The amusing anachronisms of Gustav are a good example. He is a man who obviously lost his relevance but unsurprisingly not his feelings of grandeur, that are maybe getting all the more stronger to compensate for his losses. We see this brilliantly when he gifts his grandson DVDs of clearly age-inappropriate films (and we are not sure whether we are laughing at the choice of the films or the fact that they are delivered in DVDs), or when he responds to a journalist's questions about whether his film, that will be a Netflix production, is going to be screened in cinemas (Where else? he answers, while the Netflix dude intervenes to state that the negotiations are still on).

The grandeur of having once been a good-looking, successful filmmaker shows itself everywhere, and creates a certain Fremdscham at the spectator, be it when he flirts with literally each and every women he encounters or when he tells his daughter at the restaurant that the waitress has mistaken them for a couple. You just want to say, "When was the last time you looked in the mirror, Gustav? Everybody sees you are her father". Or take the way that he answers all questions of Rachel with the simple, evasive counter-question: "Why do you think it is this way?" These observational moments are genuinely accomplished and provide the film with its most memorable scenes.

However, when the film attempts to pivot to sincere sentimentality, its narrative becomes clumsy and unfocused. The screenplay is filled with plot points and character details that feel like narrative dead ends. Why does Gustav never go to Nora’s theater shows? I mean, other than him being a snob and not liking theater, we don’t really get an answer, it only makes a point of him being a lousy father and an ass. Do we understand how he knew about Nora’s suicide attempt? Do we even understand why Nora attempted to suicide? Why did Gustav's mother have a history with the resistance? Why was his aunt a lesbian party-goer? What is the purpose of his cinematographer friend, Peter? The film touches on these things with a fleeting gesture, but never explores them. It's as if it reaches for a deeper meaning, only to pull its hand back at the last second. Or maybe, the film just doesn’t care about meaning or coherence.

This lack of connection and cohesion extends to the film's central metaphors. While the house is introduced as something to which Nora relates to as a fascinating, living thing, something that listens to its inhabitants and feels emotionally affected by them, this promising concept is left too shallow to be effective, if not abandoned. And it is a shame, because the intro with Nora giving a personality to the house when she was a child, is an excellent intro and promises a great film.

Good stories should rely on character choices, not coincidences, especially at the end.

And then there's the ending, which is, to be honest, a bit of a mess. Nora only gets the lead in Gustav’s film because of a bunch of lucky coincidences. Rachel just happens to give up the role, Nora just happens to suddenly soften up after reading the script, and Gustav just happens to get hospitalized and the girls realize he is a mortal too, which is the big moment that brings everyone together.

This feels like a huge cop-out. Good stories should rely on character choices, not coincidences, especially at the end. But the biggest issue is that the main character, Gustav, never changes. He doesn’t grow, he doesn't take responsibility, and he doesn't truly assume his place as a father. While it might be realistic that he never evolves, it's not the kind of story that leaves you feeling satisfied.

The Point

While Sentimental Value as a title works as a great marketing tool, it raises empty expectations. With Sentimental Value, what I finally understood is that Joachim Trier is a director whose film titles are fundamentally disconnected from the films themselves.

So, what exactly is the sentimental value in this film? Is it Nora’s love for Agnes, which protects her from the emotional turmoil that Nora herself carries? Is it forgiveness? Or is it Agnes finding out the details of her grandmother’s torture and suicide, a moment I love because she suddenly sees the wounded child in her father? The truth is, while Sentimental Value as a title works as a great marketing tool, it raises empty expectations. A good title, I'm begging you, should accurately reflect at least one of these three things: the topic, the feeling, or the message of the film, and this one fails big time at delivering any of the three.

Trier declared at Cannes that "tenderness is the new punk", but that’s not what this film is about, either. To me, this movie is about a man who cannot grow up or take responsibility and wouldn't get anything without the younger women in his life. It is definitely not about sentimental value. And it made me think about how I still don't understand how the protagonist in his 2021 film, The Worst Person on Earth, qualifies for that title, a point I’ve already made elsewhere. So with Sentimental Value, what I finally understood is that Joachim Trier is a director whose film titles are fundamentally disconnected from the films themselves.

Despite these significant narrative flaws, there is one central sentiment, one core metaphor that the film manages to keep alive throughout: The helplessness against and the melancholy of the passing time. As the story draws to a close, with its essentially meaningless happy ending, this sense of melancholy is what you are left with. The house, an enduring symbol, watches as generations of troubled people live, waste their time, and miss opportunities to be happy. Time passes, and you can’t get it back.

Verdict

Take the material, the same stellar cast and use it for a dark comedy depicting an old man who lost his relevance and the result would be a winner. But like this, it is only an average film, nothing special, really.

What we learn from it is that you should never trust Joachim Trier’s film titles and that maybe Joachim Trier is the new Noma (Scandinavian, overrated, doesn’t quite deliver on its promises). And perhaps the days of Cannes are over too. Because, sincerely, how in the world does this film get the second most important award in Cannes?

Oh, and my official rating is: you can watch it, you won’t hate it, but you won’t really miss a thing if you don’t.

Next time, I’ll be back with the one movie I’ve been most excited for: It Was Just An Accident by Jafar Panahi which was the winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes. You know, the director who makes a film, goes to jail for it, makes another as soon as he’s released, and heads straight back to prison. I know, we all love him and worship his work.

Until then, gros bisous!

Bonus: A Scandinavian Cannes winner that DID deserve the award. Because I will be watching it again very soon, and so can you instead of going to Sentimental Value.

Summer is a terrible season for cinephiles, with few interesting new releases. I've been away for a while, but now deryacracy is back from the summer slump with a stellar film so real it's hard to believe it's fiction. I left the theater with a complicated mix of feelings: “Oh boy, how I miss practicing medicine”, and “Oh boy, how happy I am to not be practicing medicine anymore”. Yes, you read that right: the yearning and the relief of being away, all at once. But more on that later.

The Film

The film's original German title, Die Heldin (The Heroine), is far more fitting than its English title, Late Shift. The story follows a nurse, Floria (Leonie Benesch), on a late shift where most people have called in sick, which is a situation all too common in today's healthcare systems, which are underfunded, overstretched and understaffed. We watch Floria as she single-handedly manages a ward full of severely sick and dying patients. She can do little more than put out fires, again, a situation all too common in today’s healthcare.

The film is a raw and honest depiction of a system under massive strain. It captures even the smallest details of hospital procedures with such incredible authenticity that I couldn't believe that neither the filmmaker nor the lead actress had no prior healthcare experience. From the very first second, I immediately felt back in the hospital, my day starting with a briefing of what happened overnight, what is planned for the new day for each patient and then starting my rounds (the daily routines of physicians and nurses are quite similar, at least in the german-speaking world).

As I said, I was in awe of for the first time in my life, seeing a film that was not a documentary, but fiction, yet SO real and detailed. Okay, it is based on an autobiography by a former nurse, but still? There are many adaptations from literature to cinema, it does not guarantee anything. Then I did some research and found out that the filmmaker and the lead actress spent a long time shadowing health workers. Everything and everyone and all the small details that you’d expect to find on a hospital ward were there: the dying patients, the elderly woman with dementia admitted to a major hospital for constipation (a classic!), the entitled patient with the private health insurance who seems to believe he is in a 5-star hotel, having to push two carts at the same time doing your rounds because you are alone in your shift, the substance addict breaking all rules and putting everyone in danger because they have to smoke even when they are severely lung-sick and need to carry an oxygen tank.

I felt my heart pound with every scene, so much so that my smartwatch even sent a stress-level alert during the film. I obviously initially attributed my intense reaction to the fact that the film reminded me of the zillions of high-pressure moments I experienced during my tenure as a physician and every healthcare professional would instantly relate to: Having to place an IV line while your pager and your phone go off at the same time, while you know a dozen of other urgent tasks await (AND the patient happens to have really bad veins). Having to run to an emergency procedure only to be stopped in the hallway by the relatives of a critically ill patient demanding information immediately. The profound, dark humor of the job, like the patient who decides to commit suicide minutes before you are supposed to leave (and my former boss who would then grimly ask: "If you're not killing yourself before tomorrow, I will go have my dinner now".). However, my friend, who has no connection to the healthcare field, was equally stressed and tearful, proving that the film is powerful whether or not you are a healthcare professional. And interestingly, the only moment in film that allows us to breath a bit, which is when Floria sings an old German song to the old dementia and constipation lady, we cannot really breathe. Because we feel, almost as much as Floria does, that taking a moment to calm down the agitated old grandma is not the best idea - there are dozens of things to do and the clock is ticking. Interestingly, this is not a film that has a climax and a catharsis. The tension is high from the first moment to the last. Just as it often is in real life in a hospital.

The camera work is both beautiful and dynamic, moving smoothly alongside the protagonist. The pacing feels perfectly realistic, building tension with a measured tempo. Nothing in this film feels exaggerated. Every element contributes to an authentic realism.

The only bit that did not fit and felt unrealistic was when Floria throws away the 40.000 Frank watch of the entitled Mr. Private-Insurance and tells him he is an awful person who is dying anyway. The fact that he quickly forgives her when she apologizes a while later is something that would simply never happen in real life.

Some may call this film a drama, but what it really is, is a thriller. Just like the profession itself.

The Problem

One might ask: If this is the reality of healthcare in Switzerland, the happy, rich country with happy, rich cows on its many mountains, what is life like elsewhere? The answer, unfortunately, is not good.

Healthcare systems are under immense pressure everywhere. Medical professions, once considered prestigious, are losing their luster. Why would they not? A nurse is often poorly paid and burdened with a demanding schedule of regular nights and weekends. They perform the most difficult tasks - from serving meals to cleaning up after patients - all while being expected to remain polite and pleasant (which the film makes an excellent job showing not telling). It is, in every sense, a precarious job that no one really wants to do anymore. And as some would put it: “Claps don’t pay the bills”.

And doctors, who once enjoyed a solid middle-class standing, are seeing their pay stagnate as well, if not fall. Their jobs are not getting any easier, either, because (as you might have guessed) staff budgets are being slashed, leaving fewer doctors to care for a growing number of patients.

These developments are neither a coincidence nor a necessity. They are the direct consequence of systemic efforts to financialize healthcare, to make it a profitable, private commodity. The strategy is subtle yet insidious: underfund public health systems to the point of collapse, creating a narrative that they are inefficient and "don't work". Once the public loses faith, they are less likely to protest when these vital services are commercialized and sold off to private interests.

The recent strikes by NHS doctors in the UK are a stark example of this battle. Junior doctors have been on strike, not for an extravagant pay rise, but for pay restoration. They are demanding to be paid what they were paid a decade ago, a plea to reverse years of real-terms pay cuts under austerity measures of the Tories. Doctors in the UK have seen their pay eroded by more than 20% since 2008 when adjusted for inflation. Their current request is modest: an increase from approximately £18 to £22 per hour. £22 an hour! (Which might or might not buy you a cocktail in a London bar.) Yet, the government rejects their demand.

This is a wage they are fighting for after at least six years of rigorous study and in exchange for an unimaginably hard and necessary job that benefits all of society. Yet, there is a perverse and ludicrous perception that surrounds jobs that truly benefit humanity. If your work is good, important, and vital for society, you are expected to do it for the sake of doing good, not for a decent living wage. To ask for fair pay is to be labeled greedy, while someone whose bullshit job is to prepare meaningless PowerPoint presentations that state the obvious is celebrated as ambitious and can charge thousands of pounds a day. The perversity of this situation, that the professionals who truly matter have to demand and fight for a wage that is still below what is dignified and fair, is a truly outrageous betrayal of public service.

This crisis raises a fundamental question that we, as a society, must confront: Who will look after the people who look after us? The very individuals we depend on for our health and well-being are being pushed to their breaking point. Their well-being is directly tied to the health of all of us. If we continue to devalue and underpay them, we risk a future where a skilled, compassionate healthcare workforce no longer exists, and the system fails not just them, but all of us.

This dynamic of underfunding and devaluing public service drives a global healthcare crisis. Doctors and nurses are leaving the profession in droves due to burnout, unsustainable workloads, and a feeling of being undervalued. Data from various countries show that a lack of adequate staffing and resources directly leads to longer wait times, increased medical errors, and poorer patient outcomes. And privatizing healthcare, which is presented as a solution by many these days, is not a solution. For all we know, privatizing healthcare leads to worse health for all. Because private healthcare is a system that thrives on people being ill, not healthy. Because the health of the individual is connected to the health of the community. Because all the evidence we have shows loud and clear that the health outcomes of private healthcare systems are substantially worse.

Making healthcare for-profit is called financialization. Financialization of healthcare transforms health into zones for investment, where the focus shifts from patient care to maximizing shareholder value. This model inevitably prioritizes cost-cutting over quality of care and professional well-being, creating the very system failures that are then used to justify further privatization.

Let me leave you with the following questions: if healthcare becomes a private enterprise, will anyone truly have an interest in you being healthy? If the patient becomes customer and gets defined by illness, what will be the incentive for keeping you healthy?

The Verdict

Late Shift is a much-needed film that should have been made sooner. I wish I had made it myself. If my verdict isn't already clear, let me state it plainly: 10/10.

Oh, and please: stand up for fair pay for public healthcare services (and all public services, really)! Providing a fair pay and humane working conditions to healthcare workers is more about investing in our own health than about improving their living conditions.

Release Dates: the UK, 1 August; Italy, 20 August; France, 25 August.