What is love?

What is love?

One of the ways love often manifests itself is through pain. It seems that when we love someone, we hurt them and they hurt us in return. As if the more we care about someone, the more compromises we make just to be with them, and love can paradoxically grow in proportion to that pain. Sometimes, however, pain signals the end of love, and sometimes that is a good thing. Because ending something where love still exists is not easy. Especially when love is confused with toxicity.

Beautiful scars are left on our faces by tears after the second breakup with our other half. Fifi Fatale shows how it is possible to become intoxicated by someone for one night, knowing you will never see that person again. In the award-winning film by Diana Cam Van Nguyen, we read letters from an absent, yet deeply present, father writing from prison, and we experience the pain of his daughter from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.

Lovesome feels like a sigh we need after an argument with our partner. What some call love may mean exploitation for others. In a relationship, and especially in one that involves more people, whether family or polyamory, it is very important to define boundaries, so that on the last day on earth we have someone to give our plants to, and do not end up like in Tom Has a Plant.

When talking about love, romance is often the first thing that comes to mind. However, love is essential in friendships as well. Award-winning director Nienke Deutz shows us, through her unique animation technique, how we might betray a friend for a boyfriend, and why this, too, can feel painfully normal.

“Every person is an individual whose spirit and soul cannot be bound.” This is the premise of another film in the collection, Sewing Love. How tightly are we stitched together? The answer may lie in a woman’s mythological journey into a dystopian world, excavating her own personal underworld in Love Soldiers.