‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Exploring #21: Roy Andersson
Author / Eternality Tan
Devi (1960)
A family patriarch is convinced after a night’s dream that his daughter-in-law is the incarnation of the Goddess Kali, in Ray’s quietly devastating attack on religious dogma, with 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore’s haunting gaze at the center of a tug-of-war between blind faith and rationalism.
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It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
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Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)
Oshima’s WWII anti-war melodrama feels more like theatre than cinema, as the quartet of compelling actors (Bowie, Sakamoto, Conti, and Kitano), queer undercurrents, and a highly emotional epilogue elevate it into something unexpectedly sublime.
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Oscars 2026 Prediction
As per tradition, here are my predictions for the Oscars 2026!
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 20/24 (22/24 if including dark horses)
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Beaches of Agnes, The (2008)
A fervent, playful self-portrait that sees a bubbly yet wistful Varda at her most inventive, crafting a near-formless cinematic salute that reimagines what personal documentary filmmaking can be.
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Secret Agent, The (2025)
An oddly-paced yet riveting plunge into covert histories, Filho’s Cannes award-winning work plays like a spectral puzzle—pulpy, sly, and quietly haunting, turning Brazilian political trauma into a carnivalesque memory piece.
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Trial, The (1962)
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
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Exploring #20: Joachim Trier
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Silence de la mer, Le (1949)
A quietly defiant and unconventional anti-war film, Melville turns passivity into resistance, using repetition, silence, and minute gestures to probe the human soul, as a highly-cultured Nazi officer installs himself in the home of an old Frenchman and his niece.
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