Paradis / The Last Resort

“Today, as our world tips toward fascism and the power-hungry use storytelling to divide humanity into us and them – those worthy of our compassion and those not – cruelty toward the outsider is repeated until we come to see it as normal, then, to our shame, as legitimate – and finally we stop seeing it at all.

One film dared to examine, with unblinking honesty, this most important moral and political problem of our times, and to show how the callousness bred by habitual cruelty diminishes us all, hollowing out our relationships – even with our partners and children.

With pitch-perfect performances, a razor-sharp yet nuanced script, and not a trace of sentimentality, the film is a mirror in which we see ourselves with devastating clarity: if we refuse to confront our own complicity in the cruelty unfolding around us right now, the love we claim to live by cannot save us – because the compassion that underpins it is conditional.”