A metaphysical masterpiece, Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique casts Irène Jacob as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. The pair don’t know each other, yet their lives exist in a shimmering, uncertain and mystical parallel, a doubling induced by Kieślowski’s cinegraphic resonance and Zbigniew Preisner’s symphonic score. 

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated debut, Mustang, fizzes with the restlessness of childhood, as we follow five orphaned sisters growing up in rural Turkey. Set among a conservatve community where marriageability is king, the girls’ dreams of independence and freedom are soon curtailed for a rigorous domestic education and a queue of potential suitors. Narrated by the youngest, Lale, who rebels against her pre-determined fate, Mustang is an unforgettable depiction of female struggle.

Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia immerses us in a distinctly Tarkovskian world of dreamlike waterlogged landscapes, alienated artists and apocalyptic dread, as we follow poet Andrei Gorchakov travelling through Italy researching the life of 18th-century composer, Pavel Sosnovsky. Released in 1983, towards the end of Tarkovsky’s industrious career, Nostalghia is filled with reflections on exile, time and memory, beautifully rendered through his protracted, oneiric sequences, each of which feel like their own exquisite artwork.

Ozon’s restrained feature follows Mousse (Isabelle Carré), a drug addict who discovers she’s pregnant after her lover Louis (Melvil Poupaud) dies of an overdose. Grieving and alone, she decides to keep the baby, and flees from Louis’ disapproving mother to a house by the sea. Le Refuge is about the safety we seek in other people, and the unpredictable places we find it. As Ozon stated: “What I wanted to do here was to start with darkness, violence, cruelty, and go towards light.”

How far will a parent go to secure the best for their children? This is the moral question at the heart of Cristian Mungiu’s parabolic work Graduation, set in modern-day Transylvania in Romania. Graduation follows the increasingly convoluted methods that Romeo, a middle-aged doctor, undergoes to fix the exam results of his daughter Magda, who has a scholarship to Cambridge University. Inspired by Mungiu’s problematizing of his own role as a father, Graduation is a moving meditation on the whisker-thin line between virtue and corruption.

Egoyan’s Calendar is a slowly unfolding story about diasporic fracture. A photographer (Egoyan himself) and his wife, both second-generation Armenian-Canadians, travel to Armenia to take pictures for a commercial calendar. While his wife becomes increasingly immersed in the culture, landscape and people of their shared homeland, the photographer hides himself ever-further behind his viewfinder. Egoyan’s deeply personal film traces the growing alienation between the couple, while the landscapes and historical sites of Armenia bloom before the lens.

Made only weeks before Vigo’s death, aged 29, from tuberculosis, L’Atalante follows Jean, a barge captain, and Juliette, his young wife, aboard Jean’s boat L’Atalante in the water-sluiced and murky weeks of their early marriage. The waterways and damp environment of the canals between Paris and Le Havre form a muddy framework for their volatile and sometimes surreally-inflected romance, whose partings and passions are as changeable as water.

Michael Haneke’s Amour follows the relationship of retired musicians and music teachers Anne and Georges, after a stroke severs the everyday serenity of their long life together. The film’s uncompromising and disarming account of the toll of ageing and illness is inflected by love and the act of caretaking, which appears in uncommon but recognisable forms. As Haneke himself said of the film: “People always fight to maintain their dignity, and the more difficult the situation you’re in, the bigger the battle. That’s our fate as humans.”

A psychological shapeshifter of a film, Louis Malle’s Black Moon is a flickeringly Freudian slink through the aftermath of some unspecified apocalyptic event. The beautiful young Lily navigates a dark and dank countryside in which a mysterious war is being fought, taking refuge in a farmhouse where she becomes entangled in the strange workings of a family.