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If cinema and television serve—at least in part—as The Necessary Dream (Civatarese, 2014) of our collective, the following film reviews challenge us to reflect upon the complexity and horrors of war through their unique explorations of the themes, contradictions, and questions they reveal about ourselves; about what, as a culture, we are trying to dream. Through the mind of three analysts reviewing such films as The Zone of Interest, Border Guards and Oppenheimer, we are guided from the pull to split off from our individual and collective pain into the “thinkability” of war and our human response to its suffering.
Monica Luci, in her sensitive and insightful review, considers director Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest, “one of the most viscerally unsettling representations of the Holocaust and the question of complicity.” She describes how the film portrays the banality of evil and explores the theme of “knowing and not knowing” through the image of a wall enclosing a German family's house and garden from the genocide happening just beyond it. Luci explores the film's brilliant use of sensory elements to engage the viewer's emotional world without the spectre of disturbing images, “as if to convey the idea that to safeguard us from ourselves (or better, from our own collective shadow), we should rely on our senses more.” Traversing the psychological terrain of this demanding film through her own senses, Luci makes this link, forming thoughtful observations and perceptions through her own example.
Iryna Semkiv's review of the Ukrainian TV series Border Guards, directed by Oleskii Yasakov, highlights the prospective elements of a nation's collective dream through the film's depiction of the evolution of the Ukrainian war and the revival of Ukrainian identity. She describes how the film “dares to intertwine national trauma with personal transformation” through the exploration of a soldier's mythic journey. As rich symbolic themes unfold through his life story,