Wood and Water (2021)
Directed by Jonas Bak

2021 was about regaining control. So I travelled, frequently by myself, around the world. The breeze from the Atlantic Ocean, from either sides in Miami or Lisbon, left me with the hopeful assumption that the archive of my despair will be swept away, erased, and recalibrated. That’s not how it panned out, obviously, but I can pretend. Lately I’ve been thinking about how my memory of someone is not the same memory that they share of me. Fondness is not always reciprocated.

Jonas Bak’s beautiful debut feature, Wood and Water, details a woman’s life following her husband’s death. She leads a quiet, solitary life. I hesitate to call her lonely, because the fine line between solitude and loneliness is tested to its limit here.  Bak’s actual mother plays the nameless “Mother”, where the film follows her from rural Germany to Hong Kong as she hopes to see her son after years apart. This is a gentle film reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day and Chantel Akerman’s News From Home. Their power comes from their observational acuity, wherein the melancholy of wandering a bustling foreign land offers moments of profound clarity and painful reminders of our own smallness. Wood and Water conveys both senses with a tenderness that I felt in my marrow. The cacophony of city life can be anxiety-producing, to the point that opening a window can feel like getting inhaled into an abyss. This is a film that advocates for mindfulness, to take solace in the present. Fondness may not always be reciprocated, but there’s solace in knowing that.