Never Look Away
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Films about the nature of artistic truth tend to be either heavy-handed or else banal in the way they make something mysterious very literal. Never Look Away, written and directed by the lavishly named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, features two “eureka” moments in the life of the painter Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling, inset). The first comes in his youth when he’s up a tree and feels the wind rustling the leaves, from which he infers that “everything is connected” and that we are one in the universe. No, I didn’t get it either, no more than I got why Kurt’s beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) asks a line of local bus drivers to shine their headlights and honk their horns simultaneously. 

And yet the film exerts a powerful pull. It opens in Dresden, 1937, as the Nazis strive to outlaw “decadent” practitioners of modern art. Elisabeth, a devotee of those very artists, gives her young nephew a lesson in truth-telling: “Never look away”.