La Jetee

1962 Director Chris Marker

This film is one of those rare landmark films who's influence will recur for decades. It was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and draws quite heavily from the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The claustrophobic atmosphere brings to mind Orson Well's The Trial. A haunting score by Trevor Duncan completes this little gem.

Simply shot using black and white stills it weaves an hypnotic and disturbing tale of cause and effect in just 28 minutes. Set in a post apocalyptic Paris, its focus is on a man haunted by a childhood memory of a man being shot on the viewing platform at Orly airport. Because of the strong memory scientists use this to project him back in time where he befriends a woman. He is then projected into the future to obtain a power source that will be used to rebuild Paris. Upon return he works out that this knowledge will lead to his execution. Given the option of escape to the future he chooses the past to rejoin the woman with tragic consequences.

The whole film is narrated leaving little for interpretation. However, there is a small tell worth watching for. The whispered conversations between the scientists is in German and adds greatly to the underlying menace of the film. Sadly they are not subtitled. So if you understand German you will enjoy this more. This is a real gem and one that gets better with multiple viewings.

The Edge of Heaven

2007 Director Faith Akin

This film is about the tension between Germany and Turkey, to whom postwar West Germany opened its doors for "guest-worker" labourers, thereby getting an economic boost but creating for itself an unacknowledged quasi-imperial legacy of guilt and cultural division. And it is about the gulf between the first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, conflicted about their identity and their relation with the old country, itself conflicted as it prepares to join the European Union.

At the movie's centre is Nejat , a second-generation Turk who has attained what might be the greatest distinction Germany has to offer: he is a university professor, lecturing on Goethe. His rascally old father, Ali, also in Germany, has offered cohabitation rights to the Turkish prostitute Yeter for whom he is a regular, and who is only too eager to escape the bullying Muslim activists who patrol the red-light district - but doesn't see Ali's yet unrevealed darker side.

Having established this fraught, tense family relationship, Akin spins the narrative thread off sideways to investigate the situation of Yeter's fugitive daughter  and her relationship with an idealist young German who between them are reviving the spirit of Baader-Meinhof for a new generation.

It is a glitteringly confident narrative pattern, gesturing at the globalised, historical forces that govern individual lives; in some ways it is like a very, very much better version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's mediocre film Babel - there is some similar business with a handgun - but not as schematic and superficial. The web of happenstance and dramatic reversals of fortune may teeter on the brink of unbelievability, but it is a measure of Akin's confidence as a storyteller that his world so plausibly enfolds us.