Three recent films strike me as urgent now:

At a time when we keep our distance to take care of each other, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is an unflinching vision of the emotional desert we create when we allow distraction, greed and unhealed wounds to separate us. Photographed with heart-stopping precision by Mikhail Krichman, Loveless is the profoundest reminder of why we must commit to loving one another, unconditionally and with all our hearts.

If there is a single work of art that opened my heart and allowed me to imagine war as an emotional reality, it is Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts’s documentary For Sama, a miraculous diary of an activist and mother locked down in the siege of Aleppo. It’s lessons for our current crisis are uncountable, and it left me devastated, hopeful and humbled with admiration.

Finally, how can I not mention Happy As Lazzaro? This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in years. I am not just talking about films: mountains, books, snowdrifts, acts of kindness. Like us in this time of quarantine, the human souls in Lazzaro live cut off from the rest of the world. Sometimes they take care of each other – in delicate gestures that acquire the significance of cosmic events. Sometimes they betray each other – and the whole universe is scarred.

Our days can feel frozen, identical, like we exist out of time, even as our world is being refashioned – and history forged – with the ballooning force of exponential growth. Such is the experience of time in Alice Rohrwacher’s masterpiece: it thickens and pools, then suddenly rushes, bearing secrets about what it means to be human, about how we might live.