Lana Wilson’s Top10

After Life was an important inspiration for my new film Look into My Eyes. It’s such a beautiful, rich movie, and I return to it constantly to analyze it and learn from it.

It’s about people at a way station between life on earth and the afterlife. While there, they’re asked to choose one memory to take with them to their next destination, and then a film is made from that memory. It’s such a moving concept and so incredibly realized. Kore-eda began his career making documentaries and then moved into fiction filmmaking, so he chose to shoot the interview scenes with the newly dead people as real interviews with the performers. I love that combination of fiction and nonfiction, and the memories they share feel so real and true. I relate to the idea that the things that have the most powerful meaning are often not the grand moments, but things like the particular red of a dress that someone wore one day or the feeling of an evening breeze while you’re sitting on a bench.

I also love that you’re not aware who the protagonist is until about half an hour into the film. It’s a surprising way for a narrative to unfold. And as the film progresses, you realize that it’s ultimately about the people who work at this way station and how many of them are very lost themselves. These workers come to understand that there’s just as much meaning in working this odd job as there was in their previous lives on earth, and this knowledge is what saves and redeems everyone.

My background is in dance, so I’m always drawn to films that evoke the language of that art form—and Beau travail certainly does.

It’s an incredibly visceral film about a group of French Foreign Legionnaires in a small East African country. These men have no one to fight and nothing to do aside from their training exercises and partying to blow off steam. One of my favorite moments in the film is when these men, led by the extraordinary Denis Lavant, are doing a drill on the beach. The exercise involves them aggressively hugging each other. This movement is somewhere between a hug and a chest bump in which they repeatedly, violently come together and then quickly separate. Lavant’s character notices that one soldier, whom he despises for no reason, has a tiny bit of gentleness about him as he moves out of the hug. This subtle gesture becomes key to the trajectory of Lavant’s character. He recognizes a glimmer of this man’s humanity and becomes intent on destroying it.

All of Claire Denis’s films are made up of these subtle but impactful moments, which is one of the things I love most about her work. Beau travail is also just filled with images unlike anything you’ve seen before; it has the most unforgettable faces and landscapes, and the colors are just extraordinary. On top of that, the score and sound design are meticulously crafted and enthralling.

I love Kiarostami because he makes such amazing films at the intersection of documentary and fiction, and he is always interrogating the relationship between the two.

Certified Copy is set in Tuscany and centers on a man (William Shimell) and a woman (Juliette Binoche) who at first seem like strangers getting to know each other. They go on a drive, and then around halfway through the film, a barely perceptible shift happens, and we realize the entire premise has changed—now they’re actually a couple. They’ve been married for a long time, and their relationship is filled with a great deal of anger and toxicity, so the second half of the film is in that register. You’re watching this couple at a time when there is so much extraordinary pain between them. At one point, an old man tells Shimell’s character to “just put your hand on her shoulder for a second.” He says that this one simple gesture will change the man’s entire life and everything will be different if he just does this one small thing. So he does it—but nothing changes.

I don’t think there’s another film like it, and it’s crazy and extraordinary that it works the way it does. It’s an intellectually and psychologically challenging film, but at the same time it’s saying something very beautiful about the nature of love and human relationships. Shimell’s character is a writer, and there’s a lot of art-historical conversation about the difference between an authentic work of art and an absolutely perfect reproduction. Kiarostami uses this metaphor to explore how our obsession with finding a perfect romantic connection, as well as our inability to accept one another’s flaws, causes us to destroy relationships.

When I was in my twenties, I’d often go to the movie theater with the goal of crying. There’s one movie that will always make me cry tears of happiness, and it’s Love & Basketball. I don’t even know how it achieves that! It’s a fun movie, but it also feels epic and so incredibly moving.

One important aspect of the movie is its critique of sexism in professional sports and the ways in which that can affect a young person’s dreams and ideas about what she can do and who she can be. It also touches on the expectation that women should provide emotional support and that this role matters more than anything else, including their own ambition. But what’s at the center of the film is a love story between two people who meet when they are children and grow up together. You get to know them through their family dynamics, which are complicated and sad but also very funny at times.

A lot of great coming-of-age movies focus on one moment in time, but Love & Basketball covers a decade of these characters’ lives, and that’s why the emotion and weight of it builds up so naturally without you even realizing it. There’s such depth to the characters, and you care so much for them that by the end of the film it feels like you’ve really gotten to experience something profound.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Aki Kaurismäki, so I’ve been obsessed with him for a long time. You can look at a single frame from any of his films and immediately identify it as his work. He has this really unusual combination of social realism and dreamy visual stylization. His films are filled with gorgeous primary-color-based sets and lighting, and he’s a master of minimalism.

He makes working-class melodramas that are funny in a deadpan way, and the characters’ lives are usually both miserable and hilarious. They’re always hardworking people, trying to live with dignity in an undignified world, which relates to Kaurismäki’s critique of capitalism throughout his movies. Their lives are bleak, but he always has such empathy for them. You grow to love them so deeply because they are the most heartbreakingly earnest, innocent people imaginable.

The Match Factory Girl is one of his bleakest films, and yet I find it to be his funniest. His later films are a bit sweeter and more humanistic, but this one—like much of his early work—is drier, harsher, making fun of the seriousness of art cinema. There’s a lot of stasis and silence, and that’s where the humor lies.

I’ve loved The Red Shoes since I first saw it in high school. It’s such a beautiful film about the relationship between art and life and the impossibility of finding balance between the two. It captures what it’s like to feel that art is a calling. As a former ballet dancer, I can immediately recognize when I’m working with another former dancer, because they’re very disciplined and have a bit of a disturbing, self-lacerating thing going on. I remember seeing Black Swan and thinking it felt like a documentary—and this is also how it feels to watch The Red Shoes. Part of me is always watching and loving it as a ballet fan.

Another thing that I find so real about the film is this feeling that everyone in the ballet company is there because the experience of being a part of this world feels more real than their actual lives. It’s a transcendent experience they’re participating in, and they feel more alive here than they do in the “real world.” I connect to that so deeply, and that’s actually one of the themes of Look into My Eyes.

The Red Shoes is also just one of the most gorgeous Technicolor movies ever made. The color design is stunning, and that’s part of the pleasure and joy of watching it over and over again. There’s so much visual detail that you can never tire of it.

I love Mike Leigh. He’s such a great writer of working-class life and characters. The way he mixes hilarity and tragedy gives his work a larger-than-life quality. His characters are so specific and incredibly conceived. They’re very real and grounded, but at the same time they can be a bit like caricatures—but I find that’s how many people really are! Take Brenda Blethyn’s character, Cynthia, in Secrets & Lies. She could be so insane and histrionic, but Blethyn makes her come across as incredibly fragile. Yes, she’s a bit unhinged, but that’s how life is. Not everyone is a grounded, nuanced individual.

All of the art direction in Leigh’s films is incredible. Sometimes I find myself fixated on a choice of wallpaper or a window curtain or a faucet. It’s all so expressive of the characters and their identities and struggles in such a fascinating way.

His use of long takes is always amazing, but there are a couple instances in Secrets & Lies that are particularly effective. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a successful Black doctor who was adopted and later learns that her birth mother was a lower-class white woman (Blethyn). When they meet for the first time, there’s a long take of the two of them sitting in a diner booth that’s just excruciating (in the best way). There’s another long take when Cynthia invites Hortense to a barbeque with her family. We watch as the entire family is talking without acknowledging what’s really going on. It’s amazingly choreographed; the staging of the actors within the frame and the way people are looking at one another is so elaborate and brilliant.

Tokyo Story is one of those films that feels different every time you revisit it. Recently, my parents retired and I had a kid, so when I watched the film again not long ago it was a particularly moving experience.

The film is about aging parents who are forced to realize that their adult children are too preoccupied with their own lives and responsibilities to have time for them. But it never feels judgmental of anyone. It lives in the understanding that children do grow apart from their parents, and parents can also feel like a burden to their children. At the same time it gently asks us to consider how mundane details can distract us from fully seeing the most important relationships in our lives. It’s a devastating examination of the regrets and disappointments we all have in our lives and how, in the end, life is never what any of us thinks it’s going to be.

I look forward to watching it fifty more times.

I saw this on the big screen for the first time a couple years ago, and it was an astonishing experience. It’s a very long, intimate movie that follows one year in the life of a group of peasants working on a farm and living in poverty. Ermanno Olmi takes you through all of the rituals and traditions of daily farm life in a way that’s enthralling.

It’s incredibly immersive and experimental, and at first, that’s what you think the film is—being absorbed in the details of everyday life and the web of relationships on the farm. But as the film goes on, you discover there’s a very gripping narrative that’s taken hold without you realizing it, and these small moments you’ve been observing are building toward an epic climax and a devastating ending. It’s so unique to be seized by a story in this way.

Yi Yi is another film that I return to constantly for inspiration. It’s an epic film about one family living in Taipei. I love it so much because it portrays people of all ages trying to make sense of their lives and relationships even if they don’t arrive at an answer. One of the characters is a little boy who goes around taking photographs as a way of trying to understand the world, and though he’s young, he sees how little sense it all makes and is able to articulate his confusion with an honesty that the adults don’t have.

The film takes place over an extended period, and we see them go through so much: heartbreak and rekindled romance, humiliation and frustration, struggles at work and with their kids. You’re watching their lives unfold and how they cope with the way reality impedes their dreams and ambitions. It’s a very philosophical film, but it is also so open and allows the viewer the space to find themselves within it. It can almost act as a mirror of your own life each time you watch it.

Edward Yang captures a sense of urban loneliness in a visually rich way. There are a lot of wide shots of people framed in doorways and corridors and views of the city and its reflections. We’re following these specific lives, but we also get the sense that there are millions of other people in the city feeling the same things.