8º – The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
A completely disfigured man is found and rescued from a circus by a sensitive physician, showing the world his qualities never shown before. Directed by David Lynch, ‘The Elephant Man’ shows how much elements that escape social knowledge are attacked by its mere conception of strangeness, preventing different individuals from developing and delimiting a pathological pattern of normality.
7º – The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004)
The film explores a small fragment of the life of a man, inserted in a health picture where he is quadriplegic, and his incessant search for the simple right to marshal all the pain of his existence and to carry out euthanasia. ‘The Sea Inside’ is a powerful work on how the moral constructs intrinsic to a society can act as a destructive sphere in the lives of certain individuals.
6º – The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
A party celebrating the 60th birthday of the patriarch of a family ends up taking on chaotic proportions when secrets begin to be revealed by its members. ‘The Celebration’ is a parade of behaviors guided only by instinctive senses, without the slightest modesty about moral constructions. Thomas Vinterberg’s masterpiece and undoubtedly the best Danish film ever made.
5º – Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
We will explore the insensitive and pathological routine of a widow, checking her cold relationship with her child and her lack of empathy for herself. ‘Jeanne Dielman’ is a film that shows how latent machismo in various societies, regardless of their historical period, work to delimit the fields of action of women, either explicitly or implicitly, provoking the psychological illness of several individuals.
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