Claire Simon’s Notre corps—which captures the visitations and procedures in the gynecological ward of Paris’s Tenon hospital, a public institution located a few blocks from Père Lachaise—understands this compromise, but offers a rebuttal as well: it honours the body’s possibilities and delicate particularities by expanding that gaze to encompass the lives beyond the bodies, the unique frictions engendered by supposedly objective methods.

What was until very recently relegated to the safe and spectacular distance of the big screen is now getting uncomfortably closer to the comfortable lives of those who would have never thought to endure, in their lifetimes at least, pandemics, war, and misery. Solnicki’s film is not so much an antidote to this new, creeping reality, but to the loss of sensitivity upon which it is premised.

Screening in this year’s Berlinale Forum, Éric Baudelaire's unique take on Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 short play The Man with the Flower in His Mouth assumes the form of  a diptych: the first part is an observational documentary of Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, the world’s largest flower market in the Netherlands; the second, a fictional, more explicit adaptation of Pirandello’s text, a conversation taking place over an evening in a Paris bar.