To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we asked Film Streams staff and board members to pick their top ten from the more than 1,600 films that illuminated the screens of the Ruth Sokolof Theater during its first decade. What emerged was a series that champions some of the finest independent and foreign films released in the last ten years.
AMOUR is guaranteed to have an effect on the viewer. Michael Haneke’s deft direction takes a difficult topic and translates it to the screen, making a moving and complex film about death and loss.
Haneke spoke to Collider about the inspiration for the film and his approach to storytelling, “Like so many of us, in my personal life, I was confronted with a situation in my family where someone I loved very deeply was ill, and I had to look on helplessly at their suffering. It was a very moving experience. It’s one of the worst experiences you can go through. That was the catalyst then for me to make the film. But, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I’d like to point out that my personal story has nothing to do with what’s actually presented on screen.
[…] When making a film, I’m never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it’s been done before in cinema or not. I’m led to make films if there’s a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with. I never think about whether there are ten other films that have dealt with a similar subject or not. It’s the theme that interests me and motivates my desire to explore it.”
