My Life In Films: Natasha Matsaert

The films I have chosen here are a few of my ‘holy movies.’ These are the ones that stay locked up for years so that watching them will always be a bit like the first time.

Behind them are countless others (including a long list of old animated Disney classics), but these particular five stand out because of the ways that they have marked my discovery and rediscovery of magic over time.

The Last Unicorn (1982) dir. Arthur Rankin Jr. & Jules Bass

My early childhood was imbued with the 1982 animated fantasy The Last Unicorn. This was the movie I devoted myself to. I watched it on repeat until I could practically recite the whole thing back, and my sketchbooks were for years filled exclusively with drawings of unicorns. Today I still randomly find myself reciting lines from the film like a song in my head. One that often resurfaces is “you can find the others if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the red bull ran behind them and covered their footsteps. Listen! Listen! Listen quickly!”

The Last Unicorn is the perfect combination of eerie and other-worldly, with delicate, slightly disjointed animation, dialogue that carries a musical cadence, and a haunting soundtrack which ties the whole thing together. There are no clear happy endings – but that also feels okay. This is one of the movies that has influenced who I am the most, giving shape to my fantasies and dreams from the very start.

Before Sunrise (1995) dir. Richard Linklater

I can’t remember exactly how I discovered Before Sunrise, but I do know that I was a keenly romantic and very sad teenager and that it was a source of goodness for me. I haven’t been able to find many movies that make me feel what this one does. It manages to crystalise something rare and outside of time; the thrilling feeling of first love, where everything else disappears. Jesse awkwardly catches Céline’s eye in a music booth, and she smiles at him when she thinks he’s not looking. The tension and raw vulnerability is so palpable that it hurts.

At first, I was actually surprised by how much I loved this film, as it is different from most movies I’d watched in having no great drama or antagonist or clearly defined plot. It unfurls subtly and slowly. I expected to be bored by the mundane manner of two people simply talking, exploring each other and a city. However, it turns out that this—the little space in between two people—is the sacred. The movie says it best; “if there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something.”

The Little Prince (2015) dir. Mark Osborne

For a relatively well-known book, I would say that this is a relatively unknown movie. Although the book is inevitably better, this film nevertheless managed to capture the vague bits and pieces of the story in my memory and bring them brightly back to life. The stop-motion animation scenes are particularly magical and exactly how I imagined the book would move if it ever came to life.

This film is a reminder of what matters through the eyes of a child. As I’ve gotten older, once boring unimportant things like deadlines and schedules have also grown bigger. I now live in a classically ‘grown up’ state of perpetual stress (stress to the point of my hair literally falling out). However, at the heart of The Little Prince are clear, innocent truths that create space for you to come up for breath; the simplicity of a boy loving a single rose, a tamed fox that cries, and a sky full of stars that laugh.

I know this is one of my big movies because I cry every time I watch it. It’s a poignant, much-needed reminder that my everyday sources of worry and stress aren’t what are essential.

My Octopus Teacher (2020) dir. Pippa Ehrlich & James Reed

The brilliance of My Octopus Teacher is no secret, and like so many others my world shifted under the shape and weight of it. The genre of nature documentary for the most part draws to my mind the likes of Planet Earth, which carefully dole out ‘objective’ scientific facts while giving you the sense of being a kind of spy to a nature beyond your reach. In contrast, My Octopus Teacher is a deeply empathetic story about a friendship between a human and an octopus, which challenges everything we think we know about nonhuman life.

This film does not hide the human filmmaker (Craig Foster) behind the camera and pretend at an untouched nature, but instead brings him directly into frame to communicate what it means to live well with the rest of the world. There is something unbelievably profound about watching him patiently build a friendship with the octopus, and with it comes a sincere understanding of the importance of her life. Her subjectivity and sentience are undeniable, and I felt like I almost knew her personally by the time the credits rolled.

Predictably, this film also brought on the waterworks, and I remember thinking ‘yes! This is it! This is what it means to recognise that we are not the only ones worth something!’ My Octopus Teacher is one of the most powerful films I have every watched, and this comes down to its capacity to make real change for our relationships with nonhuman others.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) dir. Wes Anderson

I feel like I can’t not put a Wes Anderson movie on this list, as his work is what made me start to genuinely appreciate film as an art form. The first of his films that I watched was Moonrise Kingdom and I’d never experienced storytelling like it. I was captivated by the sharp texture and mood of the world he’d created; by the way it lifts onto the screen like a picturebook come to life. Fanciful, nostalgic, and melancholy. Indeed, this colorful, symmetrical world is one that stretches across all of Anderson’s movies, giving you the sense that you could walk easily from one film into another.

Moonrise Kingdom, like all his work, is fiercely intentional when it comes to what it wants you to know, see, and feel and this directness and attention to detail is inspiring to me. This film is on my list because it showed me what film is capable of in a way I’d never seen before.

Honourable mentions: The Secret Garden (1993), La La Land (2017), Flipped (2010), A Knight’s Tale (2001), The Princess Bride (1987)

Words by Natasha Matsaert

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