Humans are social animals. We are born into communities and live our whole lives as members of communities. The goal of the learning processes after our birth is to fit into the communities we were born into, and to get the tools needed for learning the norm systems of the communities we will have to fit into later on. The most important tool of human communication is language. One of the most important motivations for a child while learning their mother tongue is to become able to express their needs, feelings and thoughts as accurately as possible so that they can build more secure relationships. However, communicating with our fellow humans is often highly frustrating. We have all experienced the difficulties of trying to verbalize our thoughts – and the disappointment of being misunderstood when at last we have done it. One of the appeals of arts is their promise to help us in managing these difficulties – which are so inseparable from the human condition – by offering alternative ways of conveying our feelings and thoughts. Admittedly, the difficulties don’t go away at this point, but the question becomes how personal experiences can be made accessible for others using the tools of the given art form.

Still from On Body and Soul (2017)

Film as an extremely stimulus-rich art form, which can rely on language, gestures, facial expressions, composition and the organisation of space, all of these unfolding in time, seems to be a highly appealing medium to grasp the complexity of human experience. How is this possible and is there a point beyond which it is not? Does it help reflect the functioning of the human brain and memory, based on associations and non-logical connections, if filmmakers do away with coherent story-telling, a traditional organising principle, and put images next to each other along the mysterious links that might only exist for one particular individual – much like the way memories tend to pop up in our mind? Sinbad by Zoltán Huszárik is a film based precisely on this experiment. Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Virgin is its parallel in that its disregard for traditional spatial and anatomical relationships conveys the idea that the image we see is not a portrayal of reality but a reflection of the overlapping and intertwined memories in the mind of a subject.

On Body and Soul, a film by Ildikó Enyedi, exposes the basic tension between our inner cosmos and the outside world already in its title. The two main characters have to overcome a set of obstacles created by the outside world but partly already internalised by them if they want to experience the strange spiritual tie binding their fate together, which first manifests itself in the miraculous fact that they have the same dream from time to time.

Still from On Body and Soul (2017)

A similarly ancient dilemma of being part of a community is the inevitable tension between the world view and needs of the individual and the norms and expectations of the group. Where is the boundary between sensibly complying with whatever the group expects in exchange for welcoming you into the fold and spinelessly giving up your principles, whether it’s about an individual or a smaller group within a larger community? Those demarcating themselves or getting excluded because of their otherness always have a special perspective, a unique vantage point from which they can look at the group as a whole, and also represent a set of alternative norms and values that can serve as a point of reference for the majority. The Brazilians is a film presenting such a situation, depicting it with both extraordinary empathy and humour and, for all its fairytale-like ending, a scathingly sarcastic criticism of contemporary Hungarian society.