CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, 2010

I’ve thought about prehistoric humans pretty much every day since I first watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams a few years ago – in that sense, it’s literally changed my life. In the 2010 documentary, Werner Herzog takes us deep inside the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains some of the earliest known cave paintings. They include early human handprints, plus anatomically accurate depictions of wild horses, woolly rhinos, cave lions, bison and bears. How did these long-forgotten artists hold these perfect images in their mind before recreating them in the depths of the cavern, by torchlight? What did it feel like to witness the birth of a new symbolic universe? The film regularly has me questioning what it means to be alive today, as those artists’ very distant offspring: what have Homo sapiens gained, and what have we lost, in the 30,000 years that have since gone by? Over rare, grainy footage of the cave and its surroundings, the filmmaker says that this might be the birthplace of the “modern human soul”, and I’m inclined to agree (then again, I’m inclined to agree with any statement delivered in Werner Herzog’s Bavarian monotone). My one regret? I never got to watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams the way it was meant to be watched: in janky, early-2010s 3-D. Maybe one day x (TW)

THE CONFORMIST, 1970

Presented with this question, I didn’t just want to choose a film that I liked a lot when I was a teenager. If that was the criteria, I’d go for Donnie Darko or The Virgin Suicides, which “changed my life” in the sense of making me slightly more annoying, or Trainspotting, which taught me the important lesson: “being addicted to drugs is really fun”. In terms of immediate and dramatic impact, watching Call Me By Your Name – a film I didn’t even like that much – inspired me to break up with an ex-boyfriend not long after the credits rolled. But I have chosen The Conformist, a 1970 political thriller directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, which I happened to catch late at night on Channel 4 when I was 15. It was one of the first foreign-language films I ever saw and also one of the first times I remember watching something and being blown away by the visual language – the cinematography, set design and lighting etc – as much as the characters and the story. I’m not going to pretend The Conformist radically changed the course of my life (I’ve never assassinated anyone, for a start) or turned me into a cinephile with exclusively high-brow tastes, but I do think it made me more curious about and receptive to different kinds of films. In that sense, it’s had a more enduring influence on who I am today than most of the stuff I liked back then, now I no longer think it would be cool to try heroin, take my own life or disrupt a school assembly with an epic speech. (JG)

THE LAW OF LOVE: THE STORY OF JACKIE PULLINGER, 1989

This is a documentary about an English woman called Jackie Pullinger who, in the mid-60s, when she was just 20 years old, moved to Hong Kong and began caring for the inhabitants of the Walled City – a lawless enclave in Kowloon, which was ruled by the ferocious local triad gangs, and was then the most densely populated place on Earth. Over the course of the film, you see Jackie demonstrate the love of Jesus – in word and in action – to the poor and marginalised people who lived there, many of whom were in desperate situations, addicted to heroin or forced into sex work. I watched this documentary when I was 16 and wrote Jackie a letter, asking if I could come and work for the charity she subsequently set up, which helped people (largely from those triads) break free from their heroin addictions through prayer. I moved out there a month after I turned 18 and spent the next year learning Cantonese and hanging out with recovering addicts, triad members and young people caught up in the criminal justice system – several of whom I’m still friends with to this day. That year has had an enduring impact on my life, teaching me more about God and people than there is space to write about here. And Hong Kong still holds a huge place in my heart – I’ve gone back every couple of years since and feel this immense sense of joy every time I touch down and am greeted by that familiar wall of tropical heat and sight of skyscrapers in the distance. (TS)

RUSHMORE, 1998

Wes Anderson is out of favour with most people I know. They think he’s twee and blame him for inspiring a wave of insipid millennial-coded indie films that glibly recreate his aesthetic without any of his wit, poignancy or depth of cinematic references. While I loathe what he’s inadvertently spawned, I love Rushmore, his semi-autobiographical film about Max Fischer – an eccentric 15-year-old scholarship student at a prestigious private school. While he may be academically average, Max (played by Jason Schwartzman) is an extravagant and enthusiastic participant in any and all extracurricular activities, from beekeeping to kung fu. A liar, a fantastist and a precocious writer, director and producer of school plays, Max is ambitious, grandiose and romantic. The film follows his unlikely friendship with Herman Blume (a morose, wealthy industrialist played by Bill Murray), which sours wildly when they both fall in love with the same woman and become arch-rivals.

There are so many categories of life-changing film… films that make you feel it’s okay to be weird, sexual awakening films, films that profoundly influence your sense of style or your view of the world, films that expand your horizons… I think what felt life-changing for me about Rushmore was not only that it totally enchanted me and I wanted to live in the world it depicted, but it felt like a clarion call for teenagers with delusions of grandeur and precocious literary tastes. Anderson always handles the heartbreaks and worries of children and adolescents with total solemnity. I was 15 when I watched Rushmore – the same age as Max – and, while he’s a deeply flawed hero, watching this movie dignified my own eccentricities and aspirations – the books I read, the music I listened to, and my inner world that often felt at odds with the reality I was presented with. (ED)

NEWS FROM HOME, 1977

If you were to ask any of the people I spend the most time with the top five topics I hyper-fixate on, I’m almost certain one of them would be moving to New York City. For that very reason, Chantel Akerman’s avant-garde documentary film News From Home has been one of the films that has had one of the most profound impacts on me. I first watched it after writing a piece on Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay for a film module in my first year. With hindsight, there was something quite magical about being a somewhat hopeful teenager cooped up in a tiny room in Leeds, watching a film from a woman in her mid-20s moving across the world to find herself – and imagining doing that for myself.

Despite being one of my favourite films, it is not one I tend to recommend often. There is no conventional ‘plot’ and as someone I know once said, “nothing really happens”. For 88 minutes, we see cinematic, stoic shots of New York with a consistent voiceover reading concerned yet compassionate letters from her mother. But to me, those shots of 70s New York helped birth this idea that there is something beautiful and romantic found in the mundane moments of city life, which forces you to be present. 

I’ll also admit that hearing the words Akerman’s mother wrote to her as a young woman changed how I want to communicate in my long-distance relationships. Goodbye texts: I want dramatic, passionate letters I can keep stashed away in a box forever. I’m yet to move to New York, but I imagine if I ever do, I will live with the constant push and pull of needing to experience more, but at the cost of lost time with the people I love and will miss the most. (HD)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, 2004

I’m well aware that Eternal Sunshine is one of the most softboi-coded films ever, but it has undoubtedly had a big impact on my life. If you’re unfamiliar, it opens with protagonist Joel (Jim Carrey) learning that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone a procedure to erase all her memories of their relationship. Bewildered and hurt, Joel retaliates by erasing all his memories of Clem too – only to regret his decision halfway through the procedure.

I first discovered the film when I was a teenager going through her first ever break-up. I made a point to watch it on Valentine’s Day – not only because that’s when the film is set, but also because I wanted to really max out on suffering. I watched it in a kind of heartbreak-induced fugue state, wishing I lived in a world where I could also scrub all traces of my ex from my brain. A year later, I gave it a rewatch; on second viewing, it seemed a much more hopeful film than I initially remembered. Since then, I’ve revisited the film countless times, often to remind myself of the valuable lesson at its core: that you need lows to appreciate highs; that experiencing love is a prerequisite for experiencing heartbreak. I even showed it to my last partner as a sort of litmus test for our compatibility (thankfully, he really liked it). That relationship didn’t work out in the end either, but I’ll always cherish my memories of it. (SS)