My father, who since 1997 has been a ghost, knocks on the door of my house and scolds me: «You can’t have left out Renoir, Tati, Ford, Chaplin and Welles.» I reply to the angry man who made me a movie buff: «I left out Vitalina Varela, The Groundhog Day, Accattone and one of Ophûls’s films that no one ever saw.» It is literally a dream, or the superego pointing out undesirable omissions. Now awake, I read my 2022 list and there are so many movies I love that are missing: The Night of the Hunter, Sous le soleil de Satan, Finis terrae, Zama. But choosing one thing means giving up another, and the moment of doing so is an instant of madness, because the rational foundation of any decision nestles in a blind spot that refuses to be named. I would like to know more about the off camera of my decision, and I sense that arbitrariness has nothing to do with any of it.

By alphabetical order: 

Este es el romance del Aniceto y la Francisca, de cómo quedó trunco, comenzó la tristeza y unas pocas cosas más… / (Leonardo Favio)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)

Journal d’un curé de campagne / Diary of a Country Preast (Robert Bresson)

Le livre d’image / The Image Book. (Jean-Luc Godard)

Mat i syn / Mother and Son (Alexander Sokurov)

Mer dare / Our Century (Artavazd Pelechian)

Saikaku ichidai onna / The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)

Trás-os-Montes / (Margarida Cordeiro António Reis)

Zacharovannaya Desna / Enchanted Desna (Yuliya Solntseva)

Zendegi va digar hich / Life and Nothing More… (Abbas Kiarostami)

***

Alternative list

In chronological order:

Not sent but written during the same period and almost official. 

Aelita (Yakov Protazanov)

Limite / Limit (Mario Peixoto)

Xiao cheng zhi chun / Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu)

Si muero antes de despertar / If I Should Die Before I Wake (Carlos Hugo Christensen)

Tini zabutykh predkiv / Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov)

Astenicheskiy sindrom / The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova)

Titas Ekti Nodir Naam / A River Called Titash (Ritwik Ghatak)

They Live! (John Carpenter)

Distant Voices, Still Life (Terence Davies)

Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (Abbas Fahdel)

*The only change I made relates to the only Argentinian film included in this second list. The reason is that I saw Christensen’s film for the first time on a screen and in a 35mm print, and I could see that it was an absolute masterpiece, anticipating even another one: The Night of the Hunter.

Roger Koza / Copyleft 2022