Presence (2018)

Shortly after season two of Fleabag dropped on Amazon Prime in 2019, Barack Obama put it on his list as one of his favorite television series of the year.

This coming-of-age movie is about a group of girl trying to find their missing friend after a wild night none of them can remember.

By depicting 4 different stories, Director Sergio Tovar Velarde keeps the focus on the shared humanity and search for love (both self and romantic) of various gay Mexican men.

What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.

A refreshing twist is that all the kids’ powers are…kind of useless. There’s a kid who can only move in slow motion, a kid who has every power in the world but can only use them randomly, and our main character Missy who has no powers at all. The thesis of the film seems to be that it doesn’t matter what kind of powers you have, its the way you use them, which is good for the warm and fuzzies.