Mem­o­ry and grief are at the heart of this year’s best cinema

One of the many ben­e­fits film­mak­ing offers is the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pre­serve the mem­o­ry or idea of a loved one and their life, immor­tal­iz­ing them through images which then live on in the minds of oth­ers. Anoth­er ben­e­fit is – as with any artis­tic prac­tice – the oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore dif­fi­cult feel­ings such as grief. Three 2022 films stand out in their explo­ration of the death of a par­ent: Char­lotte Wells’ debut fea­ture After­sun, Joan­na Hogg’s haunt­ing dra­ma The Eter­nal Daugh­ter, and Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morn­ing.

All have a degree of auto­bi­og­ra­phy specif­i­cal­ly relat­ing to the main character’s rela­tion­ship with a par­ent, and all three direc­tors made the film in some effort to process or artic­u­late their feel­ings about the loss of that per­son. Togeth­er these films cre­ate a dia­logue with each oth­er about how death and mem­o­ries are han­dled in film, as well as how audi­ences might par­tic­i­pate in the heal­ing process.

After­sun is an inti­mate and per­son­al debut fea­ture from writer and direc­tor Char­lotte Wells that chron­i­cles the mem­o­ries that Sophie (played by Frankie Corio as a child and Celia Rowl­son-Hall as an adult), has of a hol­i­day she took with her young father Calum (Paul Mescal) in the 90s as an 11-year-old. When she watch­es the DV footage they both cap­tured of the trip, she rec­on­ciles with the dis­par­i­ties between what she saw as a kid and what she knows now that she is old­er. The film wash­es over you like a wave – mun­dane fam­i­ly vaca­tion activ­i­ties pass while the feel­ings of the sun and salty water, along with the ten­sion in the father and daughter’s rela­tion­ship, remain.

The idea for the film occurred when Wells saw pic­tures of her and her father on vaca­tion, and was struck by how young he looked. The sto­ry of the film was built out with mem­o­ries of that vaca­tion, but also of her child­hood as a whole. Though Calum doesn’t explic­it­ly die in the film, Wells has men­tioned that the film is main­ly based on (though not an exact recre­ation of) a vaca­tion that her and her dad took togeth­er short­ly before he died, and that it’s sort of her expres­sion of the grief she still feels as well as a record­ing of the mem­o­ries they shared togeth­er. As an audi­ence, we are invit­ed to recall our own mem­o­ries of our child­hood and our fam­i­ly, and the film excels in cre­at­ing emo­tion through that.

Joan­na Hogg’s The Eter­nal Daugh­ter also deals with the mem­o­ries of a par­ent. Film­mak­er Julie (Til­da Swin­ton, play­ing an old­er ver­sion of Hon­or Swin­ton Byrne’s char­ac­ter from The Sou­venir) takes her moth­er (also played by Til­da Swin­ton) to a for­mer fam­i­ly home, now a hotel, to cel­e­brate the mother’s birth­day while she is work­ing on her next screen­play. As the only two guests of the eerie hotel, the pair have lit­tle to inter­act with aside from each oth­er. Julie is haunt­ed by her mother’s mem­o­ries as well as her own.

On the gen­e­sis of the film, Hogg expressed: ​“The sto­ry com­plete­ly came about because of my rela­tion­ship with my moth­er, and because of a fear of my moth­er one day dis­ap­pear­ing… it’s some­thing that has haunt­ed me since I was a child”. She was also explor­ing her feel­ings of how her iden­ti­ty is inter­twined with her moth­er, and how she might sur­vive once her moth­er passes.

Despite already cre­at­ing two extreme­ly per­son­al and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal films in The Sou­venir Parts I and II, The Eter­nal Daugh­ter may be the most inti­mate film Hogg has made yet. The whim­si­cal­i­ty of it allows her to por­tray more abstract ideas and cre­ate an atmos­phere where the audi­ence is able to feel what she feels with­out her hav­ing to describe it.

One Fine Morn­ing, direct­ed by Mia Hansen-Løve, has less to do with mem­o­ry and more to do with the present moment, and all the heart­break and hap­pi­ness it can hold simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. The film fol­lows San­dra (Léa Sey­doux) as she takes care of her daugh­ter, vis­its her father Georg (Pas­cal Greg­gory) who is suf­fer­ing from a neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease, and begins a love affair with her old friend Clé­ment (Melvil Poupaud), who is married.

The film is a whirl­wind of emo­tions – one moment, San­dra is laugh­ing and kiss­ing Clé­ment when they have a moment away from her daugh­ter, and the next moment she’s speak­ing with her father in the hos­pi­tal, try­ing to remind him who she is. No mat­ter what hap­pens, her life keeps mov­ing for­ward as she grows and dis­cov­ers what she needs out of these relationships.

Hansen-Løve is known for mak­ing films that are inspired by events in her life, but this one is par­tic­u­lar­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. Like Georg, Hansen-Løve’s own father suf­fered from a neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease, and she was preg­nant while she was deal­ing with that change and with his death from COVID-19 soon after. The film was also a way of pre­serv­ing the mem­o­ry of her father – she want­ed the char­ac­ter of Georg to speak and behave as her father did, and she used her father’s actu­al books in the film to dec­o­rate his apart­ment. The books are of great impor­tance in the film and in real life – in a scene where San­dra is stor­ing her father’s books at the apart­ment of his for­mer stu­dent, they dis­cuss how the books are what’s left of the father she used to know.

Hansen-Løve feels the same – that objects can act as a place for one’s soul to pass through or stay. Films can act in a sim­i­lar way. As she said in an inter­view with A Good Movie to Watch, ​“films are a lot about keep­ing track of my mem­o­ries because peo­ple will van­ish and dis­ap­pear, and we want oth­er peo­ple to remem­ber them, who they were, and why they were loved. Mak­ing this film was a way of keep­ing the mem­o­ry of my father before it was too late”. Hansen-Love is always hap­py to remind us that, although we may expe­ri­ence grief and loss, life will go on and there will be new beginnings.

Joan­na Hogg brought up in her NYFF inter­view about The Eter­nal Daugh­ter that dur­ing the pan­dem­ic we have all been faced with our own mor­tal­i­ty and the mor­tal­i­ty of par­ents, maybe in a more sig­nif­i­cant way than we pre­vi­ous­ly felt. In The Eter­nal Daugh­ter, After­sun, and One Fine Morn­ing, we might find pain and grief, but we also find cathar­sis in see­ing this deeply per­son­al expe­ri­ence as some­thing universal.