The innocents, by not conceiving evil, have the capacity to marvel at the world as a mirror of the purity of their spirit. They have no judgments or pre-established concepts so they experience life through their instincts. This is why innocence is often related to childhood.

But once the evils of society are known in a rational and conscious way, innocents will have to involuntarily abandon their state of grace to face the misfortune of a corrupted world.

1. Pretty Baby (1978, Louis Malle)

A girl who must abruptly lose her childhood as she grows up among adults is a recurring theme in Louis Malle’s films.

Violet (Brooke Shields) is born and raised in a brothel in New Orleans having no idea about the outside world. She can’t read or write; she only has to moan when she loses her virginity. Violet is waiting for that day, to become a prostitute like her mother and the others.

It will be a mysterious and demure photographer who will show Violet that men don’t just think about sex and will be the only one who treats her as the child she is. But since the world is sordidly evil, he hides in his obsession with photography, a repressed sexual desire.

It’s interesting how Malle never feeds any obvious moral judgment by letting us contemplate the perversion without fuss. As the plot is seen from Violet’s point of view and she accepts this decadent world without suffering, it becomes a tragicomedy where pedophilia is treated in a light way.

The film is a cross between two real life stories; Violet’s plot was inspired by Al Rose’s “Storyville, New Orleans,” and the photographer’s was based on E.J. Bellocq’s life.

2. Midori, The Camellia Girl (1992, Hiroshi Harada)

This controversial animation is the only adaptation of a manga written by Suehiro Maruo because nobody has dared to deal with his grotesque nightmares: tongues tasting eyes, crooked bodies, and insects devouring the entrails.

Midori is a young girl who, after being left alone in the world and plunged into poverty, finds her salvation in a stranger. He will invite her to join a travelling circus of freaks where she will lose not only her innocence but also the right to be treated humanely.

Midori’s terrible life, due to its strong amoral content, has been relegated to a minority audience becoming a jewel of the underground cinema. After finding no production company interested in financing this brutal plot, the director devoted himself to drawing frame by frame for five years. Finally the film was censored by the authorities with six minutes of footage that has never been broadcast.

The animation has an amateur style where the fluidity of the movements is scarce. But this technical poverty becomes its charm as it helps to make the atmosphere even gloomier. The surrealist and baroque scenarios make it a visual delight.

In the style of Sade and Ero-guro, “Midori” is a descent into hell full of deformity, contortion, hallucinations, mistreatment and rape.

3. Ms. 45, Angel of Vengeance (1981, Abel Ferrara)

After suffering two rapes, Thana, a mute girl, will take a 45-caliber gun and learn to speak through the shots, killing any man she intercepts. It doesn’t matter whether or not they deserve to be killed because Thana’s revenge is not intended to bring justice; it’s just a consequence of the mental breakdown caused by the trauma.

Zoe Tamerlis’ performance of a mute woman is impeccable. From her gaze she manages to embody the metamorphosis of a character that goes from being innocent and angelic to a cold and implacable femme fatale.

Joe Delia’s dazzling soundtrack compensates for the mute heroine with a saxophone that screams and a post-punk style that adheres very well to the aesthetics of New York in the ‘80s.

Ferrara’s revenge thriller makes visible the misogynist horrors of the time, and today more than ever do they make sense to us.

4. Mondo (1995, Tony Gatlif)

Tony Gatlif has always been interested in outsiders and this case isn’t the exception.

Mondo is a child who comes from another place and wanders through the streets of Nice looking for someone to adopt him. His life is quite pleasant because of the splendor of nature and the kindness of people. Mondo manages to feed on pomegranates he takes from the trees and finds his bed on the beach. Despite being alone, he will find company in a fisherman, an old woman, and a beggar who will teach him about life.

After an unexpected event, Mondo will disappear and with him, love and hope. The bread will be burnt and the seas polluted because Mondo wasn’t just a child; he was the stray dogs, the nameless boats, the oranges brought by the sea, the hot bread, the beggars, and the songs from the balcony. Mondo was the innocence.

Adapted from Jean-Marie Le Clezio’s book and with a cast found in the street, the film is very organic but offers the most surreal scenarios capable of thrilling anyone.

5. Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson)

Mouchette is a girl who lives in an oppressive rural environment, where her home is as overwhelming as the entire village. She is the weirdo and everyone deposits their hatred on her. But Mouchette is never conceived as a martyr because she reacts with savagery. Every time Mouchette feels rejected, she throws handfuls of mud or sings off-key in the school choir to ruin the neatness of a world that seems to be okay but she knows is corrupted by the dynamics of power.

When she finds acceptance in Arsene, the hunter, we will finally understand that Mouchette, as the partridge and the hare, has fallen into the trap by becoming the predator’s prey.

Bresson’s reality is deeply enigmatic and each image contains a mystery. He only gives us clues to achieve a general understanding of the film, but those clues are so imprecise that can be read in many ways.

This film is like when we experience an immediate situation in our life: there is no understanding of it until a moment later, when we can reflect and this will be when the film is over.

In the resistance against a globalized world, it becomes necessary to rescue the authentic vision of an auteur cinema because we can see, through its sensitivity, what we are as society. Films that include its director in the plot in an intimate way or denunciate about a social reality let us understand cinema as a tool to question our passage through this world.

For those who are not just looking to entertain themselves in these times of pandemic, here is a list of arthouse movies ranging from legendary icons like Agnes Varda and Raoul Ruiz to emerging filmmakers as Bertrand Mandico or Alice Rohrwacher.

1. The Wild Boys  (2017, Bertrand Mandico)

After making several experimental short films, Mandico offers us one of the most unique aesthetic proposals of French cinema in recent years. His greatest influence may be Borowczyk’s erotic cinema, but there are several others like Stevenson’s adventure stories, Cocteau’s visual poetry, and Kenneth Anger’s transgressions. “The Wild Boys” is a youth drama that tackles sexual metamorphosis through the prism of an epic adventure.

Five lustful teenagers (like the droogs of “A Clockwork Orange”), dominated by a strange force of perversion, commit a terrible crime and their bourgeois families, for fear of getting a bad reputation, decide to send them away. As punishment, they are delivered into the custody of a strange captain who promises a service of discipline on a ship, where they will be mistreated. But the sudden arrival on an aphrodisiac island will end the nightmare and the boys will experience a magical sexual transformation.

There are also transformations in technical aspects from an expressionist black-and-white to a saturated and sparkling color. But beyond its singular aesthetics, it shows us how the search for a sexual identity is something confusing that in order to be found, it must destroy the established.

Mandico’s debut film is an invitation to experience the intrinsic duality of human nature where masculinity brings violence and femininity is the release of evil.

2. Faces Places (2017, Agnes Varda and JR)

The photographer and street artist JR joins up with Agnes Varda to create this documentary road movie. Motivated by chance and without a rigorous plan, they travel around France looking for people with stories to share. Through a plotter they carry inside the van, they take big photographs to anonymous people in forgotten places. These portraits remain on the walls as recognition of them.

Leaving the trace of their artistic installations, they continue on this journey where Agnes’ wisdom and maturity is combined with JR’s curious and youth spirit. Age becomes a difference but also finds its compatibility through jokes and confidences that reveal the personal life of its filmmakers. Agnes remembers her friends who have already disappeared and shares with us her closeness to death.

This is Agnes’ last trip and farewell where she shows once again her humility, giving rise to other voices and with no need for technical bragging.

Those outdoor portraits can be erased by time, but thanks to this journey, their stories will remain in our memories. Perhaps Agnes is already dead, but her eyes and feet are still travelling imprinted on the train cars in our minds.

3. Heart of a Dog (2015, Laurie Anderson)

Laurie Anderson, recognized as a multifaceted artist, builds this visual poem-essay taking as a starting point the death of her dog Lolabelle.

In an animated scene, following the logic of dreams, Laurie describes her maternal feelings towards Lolabelle. But this is only the beginning of a lot of rambling that seems more like a contemplative reflection on loss and passage of time rather than an homage to her dog.

“Love is always a ghost story,” Laurie says to introduce this combination of nostalgic experiences. The tense relationship with her mother, childhood traumas, and the remorse that death brings blends with world events, building intelligent metaphors.

The visual proposal is composed of many formats ranging from super 8mm, images intervened with patterns and drawings made by herself. But the focus is on her voiceover that leads us to a feeling of sadness without being sad.

4. Wonderstruck (2017, Todd Haynes)

Todd Haynes brings us this ode to childhood through the story of two deaf children living in two different eras. Sharing the feeling of anguish for the absence of their parents, they must start a journey to the past to complete themselves.

Rose, a mute girl living in 1927, wants to find her mother, a famous actress whose life she treasures in a scrapbook. Fifty years later, Ben, who became deaf by accident, discovers a clue to his missing father. Both leave for New York and end up finding a guide to solve their mysteries in the Museum, where the elements that illustrate history are kept. Dioramas and models are not lifeless objects; they store and preserve the collective memory, even personal experiences.

Constantly alternating from one narrative time to another, we move from the silent black-and-white world of Rose in 1927 to Ben’s contemporary world in 1977. Both periods evoke important moments in the history of cinema. While in one, the era of silent film was over; in the other, cinema history was changed forever. So more than a film about childhood, it’s a deep reflection on cinema’s evolution and history, where ‘classical’ (Rose) and ‘modern’ (Ben) must recognize each other to build a seamless conscious history.

5. The Wandering Soap Opera (2017, Raoul Ruiz)

Raoul Ruiz is the most prolific Chilean filmmaker with an immeasurable legacy that continues sprouting even after his death. Is the case of this feature film, which after being literally kept in his closet for 30 years, comes to light as a posthumous work.

After a long exile, Ruiz returned to Chile when the dictatorship was over, to question from a philosophical point of view, the banal way in which Chilean society faced its political conflict. Inviting many actors from the television industry, he developed this improvised project in a single week, trying to capture the idea that Chilean reality doesn’t exist but rather is a set of soap operas.

The film is made from seven independent sequences as micro-stories of each day’s shooting. Using the archetype of soap operas, Ruiz achieves a subliminal parody of Chilean idiosyncrasy, where television is presented as a role model for the society that broadcasts it.

As another film was discovered thanks to this one, we still have time to enjoy this fabulous filmmaker who continues to give life after his death.

We are all in this vast landscape that is life, on a journey toward the discovery of ourselves and others. That’s why a road trip can easily become a metaphor for human life. There is something left behind and a future that is coming. Some know their way, others just wander. The trip has been a prolific theme in the universal narrative because it allows the random, the multiplicity of characters and settings. Not by chance “The Odyssey” is the most influential work in history.

Cinema, by being a succession of moving images, can be compared to an extensive road, where as spectators we travel to a final destination. The origins of road movies came from mythical epics but also as a progression of the western genre, where the horse was replaced by the car. Others consider that it was born with Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Undoubtedly, it became visible as a genre with “Easy Rider” (1969) although it had emerged a long time before films like “It Happened One Night” (1934) or “Wild Strawberries” (1957), but no one considered them examples of a new genre because they fit in with others.

The consecration of road movies was achieved with the ‘60s counterculture where all manifestations pointed to the same objective: breaking with the status quo and old traditions to proclaim freedom of expression. The road became a means of escape, to leave behind the ghosts of war and move toward a new beginning in an improvised experience. Migrations and escapes made by cars, trains, airplanes, buses or ships. We must understand that this genre can easily escape from its common space by adapting to the different socio-economic development of each country. In this way, it’s a legitimate wandering made by foot or a road movie off-road.

This list searches for films that transgress the American road movie archetypes, proposing an avant-garde form with nonlinear narratives, free montages, dissonant sound worlds, and stylization of image. We are in front of a combative cinema facing its worst enemy – conventionalism – and attacking it with experimentation and authenticity.

1. Pierrot Le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)

The tragic and misfit Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), after being fired from his work and disgusted by the frivolity of the world around him, embarks with Marianne (Anna Karina), a childish femme fatale, on a romantic getaway breaking all laws, even those of cinema. Among guns, books, musical scenes and tragedy, this duo will face the impossibility of love.

Based on a crime novel and born in the middle of Godard’s breakup with the main actress, this film becomes a mirror of the love betrayal he had to face and also his own struggle in the research for a unique style.

Godard breaks the narrative logic with a fragmentary mise-en-scene, as a collage, with inserted frames of magazines, paintings, vignettes, and handwriting, using an introspective voice-over and a discontinuous soundtrack to make the viewer aware of the subjective nature of creation. Brecht’s groundbreaking style direction, the combined color palette, the jump of axis and ellipsis, the documentary and theatrical tone, the welter of genres, and infinite references that go from pop art to Velazquez, converge in an authentic experimental work.

Godard in this film (or in his own words, “in this attempt to make a film”) plays his most subversive weapon, rejecting the verisimilitude.

2. Touki Bouki (1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Mory and Anta, an unhappy young couple from post-colonial Senegal, dream of fleeing to Paris on the next ship. They ride the streets of Dakar by motorcycle, plotting a plan to reach the other side of the ocean. After stealing money, they buy the tickets. But when the ship is ready for departure, Mory’s ghosts around his childhood and homeland will appear. Is Paris the Promised Land?

Mambéty laughs at frivolity, showing how the young couple fantasizes about power and recognition, in a key scene where they both parade in a car, adopting an extravagant personality and being praised by the neighborhood that previously used to hate them. “Touki Bouki” exposes the clash of two contradictory cultures that, when merged, cause the division of the members of a society, between those who value their own and those who desire what is foreign.

This film is a hybrid between African traditions and Nouvelle Vague. The free and associative editing incorporates a cyclical vision that breaks with linear narrative. The director claims to be a griot (an old African poet who tells stories) but is also strongly influenced by Godard, in the pictorial of color and sound dissonance. Seagulls and the sea collide with the ironic soundtrack with the song “Paris, Paris.”

Poetic and political, “Touki Bouki” shows us the misfortune of thousands of young Africans who seek luck in Europe, but only find mistreatment and death.

3. The Children of the Stork (1999, Tony Gatlif)

Otto, an unemployed young man who sells newspapers, and Louna, a crazy and exploited hairdresser, both tired of having no hope in future, join to hit the road next to Ali, an intellectual boy who escapes from his family’s attempts to hide their Muslim roots.

Paris is polluted and starved, but this anarchic trio rebels against capitalist society by stealing cars and burning whatever they cross. On the way they will find a stork with an injured wing who will ask them for help to cross the border with Germany. The stork, being a migratory bird, works as a metaphor for the problem of immigration and borders.

Gatlif took a risk with this eccentric road movie where the narrator laughs at the characters, with sharp jump cuts, ellipsis, and sound collages, reminding us of Godard’s innovations in the ‘60s. Far away from his gypsy theme, this journey of mischief is perhaps the strangest thing in Gatlif’s cinema, but his usual characters remain: nomads who have nothing to lose but their chains.

Otto, Louna and Ali are like storks, free birds that will always be foreigners because they don’t care about conventionalist existence. And they have no other home than a nest in the roof.

4. Walkabout (1971, Nicolas Roeg)

From the bricks of a facade to a desert, from citizens locked to fulfill an established role to the messy stones of a vast open ground, we are in front of a clear confrontation between white civilization and barbarism.

Two children are abandoned in the desert. Without water and food, they must survive in the Australian outback. Their null notion of survival doesn’t allow them to find a way out. It’s an aboriginal teenager who, in the middle of a ‘walkabout’, will save them. But they can’t communicate through language nor can they understand themselves by their opposite conceptions of life. Meanwhile, as the aboriginal child hunts to feed them, they insist on clinging to their occidental values.

Making a parallel editing through images of animals free in their wilderness and indiscriminate hunting, there are two cultures that meet. One that is interested in survival and the other only in commerce.

John Barry’s heavenly and exotic soundtrack joined to panoramic and detailed shots converge on this disorienting pilgrimage through the strange fauna of the Australian outback, where the cyclical spirit of nature feeds on death to sprout again and again.

5. Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch)

Sailor and Lula must face the adversities of their love, being stalked by a controlling mother and perverted characters. Although this young couple embodies the archetype of misfits and rebels, Lynch breaks with the tradition of American road movies, adding surrealism. With unconventional editing that breaks linearity through flashbacks, parallels, and narrative ellipsis, Lynch offers us this twisted and modern ode of “The Wizard of Oz,” which looks more like a nightmare playing between the childish and sordid.

The world is coming to its Last Judgment and it’s because of a plague called ‘humanity’, which, by living for their own interests, destroyed nature. The high toxicity of the air, uncontrollable fires, oceans full of plastic, the drought and melted glaciers. This environmental crisis has left a fatal victim: the animal kingdom.

Displaced, without food, and in danger of extinction, animals fight against the destruction of their habitat. Under the power of their survival instincts, they fight against backhoes as in “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; against domestication in “My Dog Tulip”; for the life of the forest in “Princess Mononoke”; with a militarized world in “Isle of Dogs”; against the disgust of the different in “Ratatouille”; against hunters in “The Plague Dogs”; or just against humans as in “Pom Poko.”

These animals free of muzzles, moorings, and chains show us the other side. It’s no longer the landscape of romantic fishermen on their docks; it’s the view from below, from the bottom of the sea, where fish hooks descend to tear the flesh of the animal.

Since animals are universal (birds fly without nationality), it allows spectators to identify with them in an easy way. Through identification, these anthropomorphic animals make us think about our human behaviour in a cathartic way.

Animation takes advantage of the fact that as humans, we don’t understand the way in which animals see reality, and offer us to see it in a fantastic or allegorical way. Dealing with issues such as pain, violence, fear and death, from the eyes of a child or an adult, these films hide deep ecological and loyalty teachings.

Animals have accompanied us since ancient times and were conceived as gods. For those who still see the beauty of creation in animals, this list is for them.

1. Isle of Dogs (2018, Wes Anderson)

Dogs treated as garbage are exiled by the government to an island of industrial waste. A pack of nomadic and homeless dogs will join Atari in the rescue for his dog. Together, they give life to this western Japanese cyberpunk odyssey, where they will face the oppressive government that presumes a possible destruction of the island.

This ode to dogs narrated in a choral way and with stop-motion technique teaches us the eternal relationship of loyalty between a child and his dog and how this is able to beat the callousness of a world ruled by the heartless and corrupt. With a haiku, the movie ends as it begins, in a perfect circular story: “What happened to the dog’s best friend? Who are we?”

Once again we face the unique style of Wes Anderson with an obsessive symmetry, a wonderful plasticity and aesthetic. These pack of furry lived-eyes dogs will make you fall in love.

2. Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki)

Ashitaka goes in search of the Forest Spirit to free him from a lethal infection caused by fighting a demon. But soon he will be caught in the middle of a war between humans and the forest’s mythical creatures.

San, who was raised by wolves and defends nature, goes against Lady Eboshi, who represents modernity and has brought pain to the forest. Ashitaka will join this war as a mediator so that humans and animals can share in harmony.

The development of deeply contradictory characters leave us unable to place them as heroes or villains. Even animals have a dichotomy. According to Japanese folklore and Shintoism, they are gods that live in the forest, but if the forest is threatened, they become demons infecting those who meet them.

This is how different ways of conceiving the world are confronted, and teach us to respect others, no matter how different they are from us. Take care of nature to survive in it.

3. The Plague Dogs (1982, Martin Rosen)

“The Plague Dogs,” despite being based on a children’s novel, remains grim and melancholic.

The film surrounds the escape of two dogs from a laboratory. When they reach freedom, they wander through beautiful meadows, yearning to find a master. But all hope will be destroyed as we discover that they are being chased by hunters and that the outside world is even more hostile. In order to survive, their wild behavior will leave behind many deaths. This situation unleashes a paranoia in habitants of the field, where everyone will see them as a plague that must be destroyed. From the shore to the sky, they are being stalked by the army.

The story is sharp and crude. Without symbolic ornaments, it shows us that it’s impossible to escape the cruel nature of humans. These ones are shown impersonally, without face or feelings, but animals remain loyal and continue seeking love in them.

4. Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird)

Remy, a peculiar rat who feels extreme devotion to taste and smell, is misunderstood among his peers because he doesn’t want to eat from the garbage. Instead, he wants to discover what happens if he mixes mushrooms with cheese and rosemary.

His dream of cooking begins with the slogan of a famous chef called Gusteau: “No matter where you come from, everyone can cook.” A clumsy young man will be the medium where Remy will take his first steps in the kitchen, by pulling his hair, through involuntary movements, turning him into the best chef of Gusteau’s.

Ego, an acclaimed critic, visits Gusteau’s restaurant and is delighted with the taste of the food. Already knowing that it was the rat who cooked, he writes in his critique: “The world is often unkind to new talents and new creations. No anyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

This movie tells us that when there is a revolutionary thinker in this world, many can judge him. Alone and devoid of any company, if he decides to continue on behalf of his dreams, then as many doors as he wishes will be opened. Only with persistence, can resistance be strong enough to consolidate as a victory. The one who don’t take risks don’t cross the river.

5. My Dog Tulip (2009, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger)

This film adapts the literary features of the novel on which it was based and invites us through the protagonist’s voice, to an introspective portrait of his relationship with his dog.

In an elegant and sketch way of drawing, we discover that the owner of this dog with a bad reputation, is fascinated with its antisocial behavior. We witness successive reflections on the dog, ranging from the strange ritual they make when spreading cow dung through their bodies, or, “If a million years ago, the dogs took humans under their protection, tried to tame them and failed.”

Under a tone of devotion, “My Dog ​​Tulip” works as a perfect portrait on the close or distant relationship of humans with dogs, without falling into the humanization of these ones. The old man finds the best company in Tulip and takes refuge in her to avoid dealing with the outside world. Likewise, Tulip barks and bites because she protects her master. Dogs blend in and adopt their master’s character, and that is the responsibility of raising a dog. He becomes like a son who learns from you, but still having the behaviour of a dog. “They read the world by their nose and write their story through urine.”

Far from traditional narrative, there is a cinema which subverts all conventionalism. With a vibrant sense of freedom, defend its own rules.

We are talking about fairytales, romantic dreams and paradises that later get lost on to cold nightmares, full of danger and mystery, where the loss of innocence is portrayed.

These young ladies, wander around, searching for a game to entertain themselves or something for discover: a creepy mansion, a desert landscape, the train tracks of a ruined city or just a way to get lost onto fantasy.

Childhood is the main weapon of these characters to create parallel worlds where they can shelter from adulthood’s decadence. Although they are not out. Sometimes they fall into the trap, to the hole as Alice did, and get exposed to hypocrisy, corruption, abuse, addictions, lies, waste and war emodied by monsters, mud beings, dead who revive, nymphs, witches, vampyres and ghosts.

The feminine becomes a performance, through a deceitful inoccence that hides, in the background, the empowerment of sensitivity in a world ruled by men’s logic. The random and the magical take over this femenine world.

There is no doubt that we are in front of an avant-garde cinema, which confronted its times. These “open” stories are full of hidden symbols in themselves that give us infinite interpretations. Many use surrealism as a mockery of political oppression just to hide themes that later could be banned. Others play with surrealism to fight against the boring reality of everyday life and show us the richness of imagination in a dream world.

Some of these movies were made with scenarios of wars and tyrannies behind or were misunderstood by critics for being too provocative. Daisies was banned 20 years by the communist in Czechoslovakia. Jodorowsky was almost killed at the premiere of Fando and Lis. Hausu pretended to be a Japanese version of Spielberg’s Jaws and ended up being a script based on the ideas of the director’s daughter, Zazie in the Subway was born from a last minute decision of the director and it was a risk because was based in a novel with really complex language.

1. Daisies (1969, Vera Chytilova)

“If the whole world is corrumpted, we will be too”. Under this premise, the film begins. While the two female sunbathe on a roof, war explotions occur in parallel. These two daisies share a symbiotic relationship where they do everyting together. Whimiscal and irreverent, eating pickles and watermelon in a grassy room, they play phone jokes and cut out magazines.They get out with older men to take advantage of their money and eat for free until they are satisfied.

Then just pretend they must take a train and end up sending the man away to repeat the story again and again. They are liars, they change names and invent diseases. Go round taking tubs of milk, wondering the meaning of existence. But, often, as a good child, they feel bored and declare that there is nothing. Finally, they enter a palace where they were not even invited and found a banquet. Putting slowly their fingers in cakes, pretend to be carefull, but then they hang on the big lamps, they dance on the table, step on the food and end up throwing and breaking plates.

Daisies mimic the bad behaviours of the world, playing to be amoral. With an experimental treatment that combines color, black and white and twist monochromes, in a collage technique of edition, with a breaking narrative, we can find slapstick, dadaist style, different speeds and magical ellipsis, that represent a childish spirit.

From the words of its own director, the film is a moral tale about the destruction, showing how evil does not necessarily manifest itself in an orgy of destruction caused by war, that its roots may be hidden in the malicious joke of daily life.

2. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1974, Jaromil Jires)

Valerie, an angelic-looking girl, wanders through a gothic village subject to extreme religion.

In a mythical and poethic tone, she wanders through edenic landscapes with white scenarios that are abruptly interrumped by dark vampires wishing her young blood.

A daisy is stained with blood and we know, symbolically, that Valerie is already a woman, who loses her attention in a beautiful pair of earrings (that represent her virginity), while grandmother forces her to pray. It seems that Valerie is not innocent anymore because of the way she eat fruits and because she has already spied lesbians having orgies and has seen punishment like a sexual delight.

In the midst of her sexual awakening, Valerie will be exposed to taboos, where the dialecthic between guilt and desire, fear and curiosity get harder.

This is a bizarre version of Alice in Wonderland, a perverted fairytale, where innocence and virginity play with its darkest counterpart: obscenity, abuse and incest. An allegory of the end of childhood or maybe, it’s just Valerie’s dream.

3. Fando and Lis (1968, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Jodorowsky’s cinema has always sought to provoke and this is not exception. Fando and Lis walk their love through demolished buildings, cemeteries, chasms, marshes in a random journey through the search of a mythical city called Tar. Lis is paralyzed and carried by Fando, through this violent world where snakes enter the vaginas, where some beg for blood, where they jump and dance on corpses.

This teatrical nightmare, in a dystopic world full of subconsciousness, show us death, abuse, dependence, punishment, sick love, idealization, selfishness, sacrilege and trauma.

All the cities crumbled and the only hope is Tar, a place where “you know wine and water, play with a music box, help harvest, know eternity, become a cat, a child, a swan, and you will be alone and you will get love and you will find extasy”.

“If the city doesn’t exist, we invent it” said Lis. But Tar does not exist in a dehumanized era.

4. Zazie in The Subway (1960, Louis Malle)

Zazie, a capricious and burlesque young woman, insolent but not innocent, spends time disturbing others. She run away from her uncle’s house in search of adventures, wanting to explore Paris by her own, meeting strangers and then escaping through absurd persecutions.

Under the spell of strident violins, fast-speed images, jumpcuts, magical ellipsis, slapstick and a satured photography we know Zazie’s fantasy world. But while she sleeps, the dark and destroyed world of adult is portrayed.

A world who started to industrialize, with traffics everywhere, consumer society, misogyny, false appearances and obssesed love. It hides a strong social criticism of stupid masses, fighting each other, breaking and destroying without reasons, scenarios that fall, the futility of life, dynamites exploding and everyone applaud in midst of chaos. Paris is dressed of modernism and great architecture, but in a post war mood, we can find existentialist crisis.

Zazie has an adult and challenging psychology in this world ruled by clumsy adults. She recounts her childhood’s traumas, as if she didn’t care of it. Her perspective of good and evil is twisted. She is just the result of a world that has lost its values.

5. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)

Dorothy is a Kansas girl who will leave the black and white desert, through a tornado, to inmerse herself in the amazing Technicolor world of Oz. Munchkins and witches will help her to find her way back home with one clue: “Follow the yellow path”. With the help of three eclectic partners (the scarecrow, the tinman and the coward lion), she will go in search for the Wizard to find her way back home. Beyond the rainbow, they will found witches appearing from smog, trees that talks, garden of poppies that make you sleep, flying monkeys and tramps.

But this film is not just fantasy. In the time it was written, fascist dictators dominated Europe. Everyone praises any authority figure just for having carisma, technology is a mechanism used to dominate, a society with deep ignorance can be manipulated, industry doesn’t have a heart, politicans are coward, drugs are the perfect anesthesia for dominate people. But Dorothy was just having a bad dream they say. Nothing exists but on her mind.

Wizard of Oz is a story of marginal beings, of misfits who don’t fit the social stereotypes. And it’s also a girl that had to leave the repressive home and go out into the unknown in a struggle with her maturity. The world begins in the end of your comfort zone.