Hamnet<\/a>\u201d explores how the death of the son of William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley) led to the creation of \u201cHamlet.\u201d When Maggie O\u2019Farrell, who wrote the novel \u201cHamnet\u201d and co-wrote the screenplay, read large Shakespeare biographies, she found herself \u201creally angered\u201d at scholars who claimed it was \u201cimpossible\u201d to know whether the revered playwright grieved or not.<\/p>\n\n\t
\u201cI threw the book across the room because you just think, \u2018What are you talking about? Of course he grieved.\u2019 And even if child mortality was high in the 16th century, which of course it was, it doesn\u2019t make it any less devastating when your child dies,\u201d O\u2019Farrell says. \u201cI refuse to believe that anywhere in the world at any point in time, it\u2019s anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. In a way, I wanted to put Hamnet center stage and say to people, \u2018We owe this child so much.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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Zhao and O\u2019Farrell tap into how art can serve as a transcendent, cathartic force, as Shakespeare\u2019s writing ensures Hamnet isn\u2019t forgotten. O\u2019Farrell says: \u201cThat\u2019s why the line \u2018Remember me,\u2019 which the book ends with, has always been very important because I just wonder if that\u2019s why Shakespeare wrote it. But obviously, Agnes and him had no idea for how many hundreds of years Hamnet would [actually] be remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cTrain Dreams,\u201d which follows the life of an ordinary man (Joel Edgerton) in the early 20th century across the Pacific Northwest, serves as a great companion piece to \u201cHamnet\u201d for its meditative exploration of grief. However, Bentley also wrestles with \u201cthe real tragedy\u201d of parents having to spend long periods of time away for work: \u201cYou\u2019re always kind of catching up and just when it feels you\u2019re getting used to being back home, you\u2019re leaving again. A lot of people experience that whether you\u2019re a filmmaker, truck driver or somebody needing to leave their country.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Some directors, including Cherien Dabis, found the process of making their films cathartic and inspirational in their own right. For Dabis, writing, directing and acting in \u201cAll That\u2019s Left of You,\u201d a decades-spanning personal tale of a Palestinian family\u2019s fight for survival, became a way to understand her own intergenerational trauma.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI definitely wanted to draw attention to the struggles of families under occupation, but especially parents who don\u2019t really have the ability to protect their kids anymore,\u201d Dabis says. \u201cOften, what we see in Palestine is kids who, at some point, realize, \u2018Well, my parents can\u2019t protect me, so what use are they?\u2019 It\u2019s like parents lose all authority. I think that\u2019s a problem; that\u2019s something that we need to take a look at.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The film, which is Jordan\u2019s entry for international feature, also deals with the loss of childhood innocence, as the young child Noor watches his father being stripped naked by Israeli soldiers. The father-son relationship quickly deteriorates in the years following the humiliation, and the scene was inspired by Dabis\u2019 own experience \u2014 her first memory of traveling to Palestine.<\/p>\n
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\u201cMy family was held at the border between Jordan and the West Bank for 12 hours; my parents were interrogated multiple times. The soldiers searched through all the contents of our suitcases and then ordered all of us to be strip searched, including myself and my baby sisters, who were ages 3 and 1,\u201d Dabis recalls. \u201cIt was one of the first moments in my life where I really understood, viscerally, what it meant to be Palestinian.\u201d<\/p>\n
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As many of these directors have traveled around the world with their films, they\u2019ve realized how universal these stories can be in their specificity.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019m always so excited when it feels like there\u2019s something in the zeitgeist and filmmakers are capturing it. They\u2019ve come together and made films at a similar moment in time, therefore creating a cultural dialogue \u2014 it\u2019s almost proof that we\u2019re all connected somehow,\u201d Dabis says. \u201cEven prior to this year, there have been trends toward really talking honestly and openly about motherhood in a way that empowers women.\u201d<\/p>\n
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To unpack the unspoken pressures of motherhood, Mary Bronstein\u2019s anxiety-inducing \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You\u201d situates the viewer in the subjective experience of one mother\u2019s (Rose Byrne) life as she struggles to care for her child suffering from a mysterious illness. What\u2019s inventive about the craft is Bronstein choosing to have the child\u2019s face be offscreen for most of the runtime, allowing the sound design to put viewers on edge.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI couldn\u2019t think of another film that really reflected the feelings and experience I was having that got into the existential confusion of identity,\u201d Bronstein says. \u201cMy film can be abstracted out to the feeling of disappearing into a care-taking role and how to hold onto your identity. Can you be an individual and a mother at the same time?\u201d<\/p>\n
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While Bronstein has received positive feedback from mothers, what has pleasantly surprised her is hearing from young people who are finally understanding what their mother went through in raising them.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt can feel like a betrayal to the love of your child, and what I\u2019m expressing in the movie is that it\u2019s not. We should be able to talk about these difficult things and the loss of identity that women feel, and the scary parts of being in charge of another living human,\u201d she says. \u201cFor women, there\u2019s a freedom in seeing somebody finally express that to you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does it mean to bring a child into today\u2019s world? Based on some of this year\u2019s buzziest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,311,61,60,270,11549,45833],"class_list":{"0":"post-202942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-hamnet","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-one-battle-after-another","14":"tag-train-dreams"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}