I planned to watch this earlier film by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan long before our trip to Turkey, but actually visiting it seemed to give me a much better appreciation of the place and its people. This one was made before even Winter Sleep and so we were somewhat surprised to note that it has much less dialogue than we expected. Also, while we were both disappointed by The Wild Pear Tree, this one is simply excellent.

Though I quite like Queen, I ultimately skipped out on watching Bohemian Rhapsody because I read that it’s a very straightforward and conventional biopic. I have much less affection for Elton John but I heard that this is very stylistic musical and so here I am. Ironically though the directorial credit for Bohemian Rhapsody goes to Bryan Singer, it seems that he left before finishing the film and it was completed by Dexter Fletcher who is the director of Rocketman.

It occurs to me that even though Kevin Bacon is well known for the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, I’ve actually watched very few films starring him. This one is that not that well known a film but I was intrigued by it being one of the very rare ones that takes a sympathetic view of pedophiles. It seems to me that it took a remarkable amount of courage from every involved to participate in this project at all.

Faces Places turned out to be Agnès Varda’s last film but she herself thought that this one, made ten years earlier, would have been it. This is a documentary as well and despite being highly stylistic, serves as a sort of autobiography of her own life. She recreates scenes from out of her memories and intersperses it with scenes from her own films and those of her husband Jacques Demy.

So this just won the Oscar for Best Documentary but got somewhat lost amidst the fuss over Parasite. Yet it’s quite remarkable in its own right. Taking its subject as the opening of a factory in the US owned by a Chinese company, it tries to present itself as equal parts an American and a Chinese film. American directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert were assisted in this by Chinese filmmakers Yiqian Zhang and Mijie Li, resulting in extraordinary access to the Chinese side of the story.