There is a scene in this film where nothing happens, and everything happens. That is cinema at its most honest — the willingness to sit with ordinary time and let it accumulate into something unbearable.
I have always believed that the camera is a hand reaching toward things before they disappear. This film reaches. It holds. It lets go with enormous grace.
I chose it because it reminds me why I ever picked up a camera in the first place. Not to tell stories, but to keep watch.
In my allegory, the prisoners mistake shadows for reality. This film does something more disturbing — it asks whether the prisoners might be right.
The lovers here move in the dark, separated by walls, by time, by propriety. They reach toward each other with the same desperate longing with which the philosopher reaches toward the Form of the Good: knowing the real thing exists, unable to grasp it fully.
I would not have permitted this film in my Republic. Which is precisely why you should watch it.