The road to feeling better and mindful self-care might seem filled with bumps, but not impossible to travel. Here are ten ways to take of yourself, as seen in heart-warming films that also provide a fresh perspective. Apply these films as recommended, doubling or tripling your dose as needed. Side effects – sleepless nights and cinephilia attacks.
1. Wander around a forest
like Janina Duszejko in Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor
A spirited and very eccentric teacher living in Kłodzko Valley in south-western Poland with two dogs and windows overlooking the mountains makes several rather controversial decisions. But it is surely worth following her footsteps deep into the old forest. Without a phone or earphones, with your eyes and mind open. To breathe in the smell of wet litter, admire millipedes and frogs, or listen to a woodpecker hitting against a tree trunk with his beak. Olga Tokarczuk, the author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead on which Spoor (2017) is based, reverses the simple human-inhuman dichotomy and negates the seemingly anthropocentric truisms. Not everyone will be given the chance to feel this pantheistic commune with nature that the protagonist is experiencing. Still, it is truly liberating to look at the world through her eyes.
2. Have a heartfelt conversation in a sauna
like the protagonists of Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Estonian smoke sauna tradition is part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, and it is not difficult to see why as we watch Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023). It is also easy to believe in the therapeutic function of both Anna Hints’s documentary and the rituals presented in it. Why is the reaction to women’s get-togethers in a smoky, stuffy room so deeply emotional? Most of all, we are invited to an intimately safe space where one can expose oneself completely, baring one’s soul and body. There is no judgment here – but also no advice. Rather, it is a space to listen and be oneself. Space for deep belly laughs, naughty jokes and unabashed gossip. For natural and tender caresses. Anna Hint observes her protagonists by taking a closer look at a perfectly close-knit yet short-lived community and inviting the audience to the inner circle as a chance to experience a cathartic cleansing with the sauna sisters.
3. Learn to speed on your bike
Maryšča-style as in Jiří Menzel’s Cutting it Short
There is nothing more comforting and self-therapy-like, especially for those who grew up in a post-communist country, than Czech films. Especially if it is an adaptation of one of Bohumil Hrabal’s short stories, like Jiří Menzel’s Cutting it Short (1981) about one of the most beautiful fictional characters ever created by Central European culture – Maryšča, a charming yet quite wacky small-town brewery manager’s wife. What can we learn from her? Maryšča never stops halfway. She chugs her beer and rides her bike as if she was galloping in a royal procession. When she wants to be closer to the sky, she simply climbs the factory stack. She practised mindfulness before anyone even knew what it was – all it takes is to lie down in the tall grass. This is the way you should live your life.
4. Have a great meal
like the heroes of Jiří Menzel’s I Served the King of England
The story on which another Jiří Menzel’s film is based – of a Nazi-collaborating waiter moving up the career ladder, starting from beer service in an inn to receptions attending to the Ethiopian emperor – is an exceptional tribute to Czech cuisine. Although a witness to defining times in history, the protagonist is not responsible for its course. It is enough for him to cater for his guests’ demands though. A feast of veal legs, beef steaks, brawn with mustard and horseradish, liver sausage, and, of course, plum dumplings. Both Hrabal’s story and Menzel’s I Served the King of England (2006) serve a culinary delight and a perfect escape from narratives full of grand heroes with a capital “H”.
5. Find your partners in crime
(or to pursue your passion) just like in Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
There is a special kind of pleasure in allowing yourself to be a bit non-conformist. Jan Švankmajer’s cinema and everything in it can be described exactly like that. His films, both the unique puppet animations and features, are exercises on unrestrained imagination. Perhaps it is not about copying the protagonists’ ideas just as they are, as not everybody likes sniffing in bread or dressing as a bat (and these are only some of the least extreme activities in the films). Švankmajer, with his characteristic perverse charm, endorses everyone who wants to come out of their shell and find companions to their eccentric “passions”. It is worth abandoning your shame once in a while.
6. Go on a spur-of-the-moment journey
like the heroes of Jan Svěrák’s The Ride
The Ride (1994) has everything an iconic small-budget film with a love for cinema art and curiosity about the world should have. Road films can have a profoundly unique charm when transferred to a reality that is similar to ours. Forget common sense and the need to be in control of our lives – be tempted to embark on a meeting with nature. The Ride reminds us what a summer sunset feels like on our skin, how sweetly the freshly mowed grass smells, how bitterly the yarrow, and how intriguingly yet disturbingly the perfume of a hitchhiker just picked up from the roadside. A perfect remedy for shorter days and colder nights.
7. Jump into an ice hole
like Hana in Bohdan Sláma’s Ice Mother
Of course, it is enjoyable to admire celebrities relaxing in swimming pools next to villas in Tuscany, but the image of Hana, the main hero of Ice Mother (2017), doing a polar plunge is much more rewarding. All the more as Bohdan Sláma decided to fight for all mature women in his film – for women who have been stuck (we would be inclined to say – frozen) in their roles of widows focused on their children and grandchildren. Although the motif of a female protagonist who discovers her femininity later in life can be found both in recent productions (outstanding Emma Thompson as a widow using sex worker’s services in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, 2022) and in classic ones (about a widow romancing with a gardener in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, 1955), Czech cinema explores it sensitively and discreetly, without unrealistic clichés attached to the genre. If you are seeking motivation to desert your sofa on a winter Saturday morning or simply to do something with your life, Ice Mother hits the right spot.
8. Allow yourself a remarkable touch
like the protagonists of Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not
Nudity is not depicted here to arouse or shock the viewers but serves as humanity stripped of unnecessary layers. The uncompromising Touch Me Not (2018) is a multilevel and multi-sided story about touch. If it is possible to assume that cinema might get closer to psychotherapy, it is difficult to imagine anyone who would do this better than Pintille did in her feature debut. She takes a close look at three bodies: the physicality of a mature woman who is afraid of touch and two men – one who lost all his hair on his body due to illness, and the other suffering from muscular atrophy. By showing their unadorned physicality and listening to their stories, the director is bringing the viewers to the point in which they experience both shock and catharsis. It is not a warm hug but, rather, a hefty dose of herbal tincture. No sugar whatsoever. I showed Touch Me Not to a group of seniors I meet regularly to discuss films. After the screening, one of the women asked me if we could talk on a side. Fully expecting a reprimand, or at least politely expressed reservations, she whispered to me instead, “I only wanted to say that the heroes of the film are very close to me because I also dance naked in front of the mirror when I’m alone”.
9. Smell fruit trees
like little Eugenia in Jan Jakub Kolski’s Jasminum
Jan Jakub Kolski can tell fairy tales to grown-ups like no other Polish director. And Jasminum (2006), a story about a provincial monastery visited by a young painting conservator and her extraordinary five-year-old daughter, is no exception here. Kolski has a special ability to help his viewers appreciate soothing pleasures like flavours, warmth, touch, and most of all – scents, as three friars in his film smell like bird cherry, cherry, and plum trees. But the fairy tale of a story in Jasminum smells not only like blooming fruit trees but also like yellow Antonovka apples and a hot country road on a summer day. Old books, varnish, and humid plaster on historic walls. Flower water for boarding school girls and scents mixed using alchemical methods. But most of all – love that has a jasmine aroma, smelling like dreams that have not been described out loud. Take a sniff and feel delight.
10. Make love like there’s no tomorrow
like Michalina Wisłocka in Maria Sadowska’s The Art of Loving
The biography of the most famous sexologist of communist Poland deserves attention for many reasons but mainly due to an enchanting romance plot. If you want to feel the smell of a lake, the warm wind coming from the meadow, the tickling of grass leaves stroking sun-tanned skin, and the thrill of real excitement related to the romance being born on the screen, this is a must-see film. On top of that, you will get a handful of free (mostly) up-to-date advice on how to improve your sex life, provided with charm and zest. After you watch The Art of Loving: Story of Michalina Wisłocka (2017), you will want to hug your partner straight away, and this is the most important thing you can expect from a film about love. Right after pleasant thrills.
