Incendies (2010)

I watched this about a week and a half ago and I haven't stopped thinking about it. Even with basically days of watching 2 movies for the past week and a half, this movie has nestled in the back of my mind and left an imprint. So, since I'm not able to write the gut-reaction, immediately after watching the movie review, I figured I'd write a little bit about why movies are important, but more specifically, why difficult movies like this are important.
A few nights before watching this, I got into a conversation with someone who had just watched Silence of the Lambs and was distraught about why they had allowed their friends to show them a movie that troubling and, for lack of a better term, "f-ed up". They were confused why anyone would want to subject themselves to watching something like that. To watch serial killers and cannibalists and psychopaths for an extended, or even any, time at all. I explained that there genuinely are people like that out there in the world, and rather than shy away from it, it's more honest to expose ourselves to it.
Aside from Silence of the Lambs being an absolute masterpiece, I started explaining what I believe to be the value of cinema, the value of exposing yourself to troublesome topics and vicariously experiencing things that, although they do happen in the world, in our mostly sheltered lives, we would never experience. (Ebert's quote about movies being the "greatest empathy machine" rolled through my mind.
That argument, and that belief, were corroborated a hundred-fold after watching Incendies. Yes it's a movie and yes parts were probably given the Hollywood treatment. But I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions of people who live in fraught, militarized, undeveloped regions of the world who undergo extremely f-ed up experiences. The story is absolutely devastating and yet, felt extremely real and possible. Story is king, and it's the story that drives everything forward here. The desire to know what happens next, how it all comes together. It was a feeling, maybe more than most movies I've seen, of an empathy for the characters. Of wanting their situation to be resolved, wanting them to be ok, deeply caring for them. For 2 hours, we inhabit the life of a mother who's undergone absolutely horrible experiences and children who go on a journey of self-discovery and understand ther lives that much more. It's deeply troubling, but it's real. We become more empathetic because of it. We see parts of the world we'd never see and situations we pray to god we never experience. We understand the ways other cultures work, how they treat unwanted pregnancies, live under civil war, etc. We broaden ourselves up to a larger human experience than the one we have in our small part of the world.
That is the power and responsibility of movies.