One of the most undervalued aspects of attending a film festival is the ability to witness the collective pulse of the art form. Filmmakers year-to-year often unconsciously share contemporary trends, storytelling patterns, and ideological motifs that repeat in quick and close succession when you’re in the bubble of a festival environment. To put it simply, beyond taking in each individual film, I enjoy finding out what is on the wider forefront of filmmakers’ minds. 

Shared subjects, similar premises, and related questions from different angles can easily be written off as unplanned coincidences, so maybe arguing for the capability of a global art form to have some kind of cosmically linked subconscious is a fool’s errand. But filmmakers are people, and as storytellers, people respond to the shared conditions of themselves and other people. We are not blind to what’s going on in the world, and storytellers have a unique ability to transpose that into their art.

Inevitably, across an eight-to-ten-day window spent watching 30+ films at The Philadelphia Film Festival, my brain starts to unconsciously identify these trends. What ideas am I seeing repeated? What do the filmmakers of today think is worth examining in the painstaking and multi-year endeavor of making a movie? How are they confronting social issues, political questions, or human struggles? What do they think is important to share?

This year, one of the clearest trends was end-of-life care. Filmmakers have tackled what it’s like to look after someone you love as they decline, and the grief that accumulates throughout the process. Grief and caregiving are not new territory necessarily. Hundreds of films throughout history have tackled how people cope with loss, but when major festivals program several films with overlapping premises, it’s worth asking what they’re saying, and why now.

The first two films I encountered focus on spending real time in the early stages of physical decline, establishing relationships before the signals of life-altering illnesses like dementia are clear or any diagnosis is confirmed. Tangles, Leah Nelson’s animated adaptation of Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, opens on a young woman’s San Francisco life as an edgy magazine illustrator who falls for a local woman named Donimo (voiced by Samira Wiley). In visiting her family across the country in Maine, she starts to notice small changes in her mother’s behavior that her father and sisters are easily willing to explain away. 

Eventually, these small signals become erratic and dangerous. From there, the film follows Sarah coming to terms with her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and learning to care for the person who had always been the one to support her. The animation is the film’s differentiator. Drawn in a bold, black-and-white graphic style, it evokes the heightened emotional intensity of this experience. It’s supported by a celebration of their mother-daughter relationship, and the vocal allyship her mother provided to support her lesbian daughter. It’s full of queer love, and bursting at the seams with artistic creativity to portray the many ways we react to a situation like losing a loved one to degenerative illness.

Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care explores a similar timeline. Amy (Kate O’Flynn) is a social worker who spends her days arranging care for strangers and visiting her parents, Birdie and Geoff. Geoff, who we grow to appreciate for his humor, kindness, and liveliness, begins to decline with early signs of dementia, which a doctor’s home visit confirms. The film watches Birdie and Amy come to accept that his lapses aren’t a one-off. In traditional Mike Leigh fashion, he builds this transition out of small domestic conversations, rather than grand, dramatic turns mirroring how this kind of realization usually happens in real life. Amy and her best friend Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson) are well-equipped as social workers to handle the necessary care steps, but it takes on a personal angle when the grief is personal more than professional. 

Queen at Sea (the Narrative Jury Prize winner of this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival) shifts this timeline forward, with the film opening on our protagonist’s mother already in the advanced stages of dementia. At this stage, this question focuses less on the questions asked by Tangles and Tender Loving Care about how to mentally prepare for a loved one’s decline and more on how to care for someone who is physically unable to communicate what they want. Lance Hammer’s first film in 18 years hones in on this question from the opening scene when Amanda (Juliette Binoche) walks in on her mother and stepfather having sex. This is a recurring incident that Amanda has tried to stop in the past, but when Martin is unwilling to listen, she panics and calls the police due to Leslie’s inability to consciously consent. 

From there, the moral wrestlings divide the family in the discomfort of questions that have no easy answers. Families like those of Amanda and Martin have to make real decisions about who is able to care for their family member, when to consider moving a loved one to a third-party care facility, and how to know what those with dementia desire for themselves. 

From ‘Tender Loving Care’ via Studio Canal

All of a Sudden confronts similar questions within a broader, socioeconomic scope. 

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi‘s film follows Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), who runs a care home in Paris and wants to institute Humanitude, a deliberate, personal, and intensive care methodology built on eye contact, touch, and treating patients as whole people with individualized care rather than problems on an assembly line. Marie-Lou’s ideals run into conflict with staff who see her method as impractical and owners who care about financial efficiency. 

Hamaguchi uses that friction to criticize how money shapes care, including a long late-night conversation facilitated via whiteboard about capitalism between Marie-Lou and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese theater director with terminal cancer. The heart of the film is the friendship between those two women, which grows out of Marie-Lou’s professional capacity for care, Mari’s willingness to be cared for, and the pair’s vulnerability in sharing their stories with each other. The film challenges the systems of care that are integrated into larger networks of social and political structures while celebrating the deep bonds that can be formed through care.

All four films approach end-of-life care with their own angles and ideas, but share similar notes that caregiving is exhausting, and it requires the whole devotion of a person’s time, energy, and mental psychology to support those in need. We all react differently to the possibility of losing a loved one, whether that is through the whirlwind of hyperactive care that Sarah offers her mother while exhausting their family and straining personal relationships in Tangles, the legal implications of consent and decision-making in the care process that Queen at Sea interrogates, or the broader implications of care in a capitalist society that All of a Sudden opts to probe. In any case, end-of-life care is a complicated, impossible process that leaves an indelible mark on anyone who is forced to undertake it, and the systems that support caretakers and receivers alike can often fall short.

Another question I’ve heard raised often this year is whether movies can still enact change. It’s true that movies used to be a shared event in a way they no longer are. Audiences are far more selective in the movies they choose to engage with, and a casual audience member is more likely than ever to focus on a select few eventized moments in theaters. On top of that, films take years to finance, write, shoot, and release, so they usually respond to issues reactively instead of proactively.

What’s been reinforced to me through this subset of end-of-life care films, however, is that regardless of how you academically answer the question of “can movies enact change?”, something like Digger will not halt the climate crisis, and Artificial will not stop Sam Altman and OpenAI, but films can allow you inside a perspective you’ve never stood in before. End-of-life care and learning to live with the inevitable grief that you may outlive a loved one is something we don’t often discuss, and have no way of preparing for. It’s not a short or easy process, but it is a reality of life. Movies are a medium that allows us to experience it from another perspective, simulate the intense emotions, and come out the other side at least a little bit more equipped to confront it ourselves. 

Most of us will deal with end-of-life care at some point, as a caregiver, as a patient, as a witness, or all of the above. We may outlive someone we love, and their decline may be long and hard. It’s one of the most common experiences there is, and one we rarely talk about openly. Nothing can fully prepare you for the psychological and physical toll of end-of-life care, but these four films let you live a small piece of that experience. It may not be the type of change at the scale movies once held the power to enact, but it is a smaller kind of change that proves movies still matter. 

Essay Courtesy of Danny Jarabek

Feature Image from ‘Queen at Sea’ via The Bureau Film Company