Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

This is a film that I bought and it was on my shelf for maybe three or four years before I plucked up the courage to watch it. When I saw it, I couldn't believe it. It felt to me that it was a movie that was… it was fiercely avant garde and difficult and confrontational in its form, yet felt totally realistic …

I get this feeling from watching movies sometimes that to get to the deeper emotional sense you need not to be realistic and quote technique. So documentary itself is really just another style. That maybe to open up the parts of the brain that deal with empathy and understanding the eye needs to be fed imagery that has been constructed and compressed rather than just raw; just people talking in rooms as in documentary filmmaking. So yeah, Come and See is incredible, and I’ll probably never watch it again because it was too much.