2nd Place Winner Laila Meurez answered, ‘Sentimental Value’ (2025).

–

In January, I watched Sentimental Value at a cinema that I hadn’t been to since I was a child, and that has since, permanently closed. My experience of seeing the film was simple and pleasant. I felt nostalgic revisiting a cinema I had not been to in over a decade, the New Year’s Eve gratitude for friendship was still lingering, and the film made me weep. When I arrived home, my father was sitting on the sofa. Now my performance, like Nora’s, was about to begin. Instead of just saying that I had been at the cinema with my friends, I specified to him that I had watched a Norwegian film. We are not Norwegian but I have a habit of trying to intellectualise my leisure to him, and I thought mentioning the film being subtitled would in some way impress him. I think it worked, as the conversation steered away from details of my friends or what the film was about, two topics I didn’t want to address, and instead shifted to the idea that he didn’t know I was interested in films in other languages. I think my father speaks five languages, but I’m not certain, and I only speak one. 

As I was explaining how most of my favourite films are in languages other than English, Danish in particular, my eyes passed to the TV where he was watching a film without subtitles in a language that I could not understand. At this point I realised that, past Disney cartoons, I have watched very few films with my father. I have watched so few that I was stupidly surprised to process the idea that when he watches films, he would not naturally watch any in English, or supported by English subtitles. I read later that in Sentimental Value, Skarsgard speaks in Swedish, whilst the remaining majority of the cast speak Norwegian. I consider that Trier’s intention was to use language to make a poignant point about familial miscommunication, but it made me deeply jealous to read about how despite these language barriers, Nora and Gustav were able to find more cohesion than my father and I speaking the same language. The next weekend, when I returned home after visiting one of my friends, I found out that my father had moved out of the house. He never actually explained his action, but I got home and my mother told me that he had moved out, though she was also relatively in the dark about the exact logistics. When I opened the wardrobe upstairs and saw the empty hangers- the majority of which had already always been empty- I didn’t really think about what this new stage of my life would feel like, but I thought about the conversation from after I had watched Sentimental Value. It took a few days for me to process that we would no longer be living in the same house, because I already saw him sparsely and we have moved a few times throughout my life so no member of my family feels a deep tether to our current house. It is always a current house, as opposed to a home.

 I didn’t really accept his departure, until I noticed that his prayer mat was gone. He’s very religious, whilst I am staunchly atheist, but I understood that the removal of his prayer mat meant that our current house was no longer a holy place for him, and that he could no longer find God within its walls. It all made me feel cold, and in my melodramatic way, I sat on the floor pretending to feel the absence of his mat that I had never set foot on, or perhaps subconsciously copying Nora in Sentimental Value, ‘to throw yourself on the ground because that’s all you can do’. Nora says ‘Someone said praying isn’t really talking to God, it’s acknowledging despair’. After years of living with a man that prayed five times a day, it wasn’t until after he left that I think I ever related to or experienced prayer, and I know that if I explained this experience to him, it would be completely blasphemous. In her version of prayer, Nora says ‘I can’t do it alone. I want a home’ and I think about all of the rage that has been born and killed in all of the houses I have lived in and I think of all of the apathy that the walls have shown my fear. Every time I leave a house, I feel that I am leaving behind a bystander. I think that the idea of a house being a home, frightens me slightly. I think having control and possession over a house, if that is what makes a house into a home, is something that I don’t want. If I paint my daughter’s walls white, will she grow up afraid of intimacy? If I place a lamb in her cot, will she grow up timid and tense, losing sleep over the meaning of virginity? When I think like this, I reject Nora’s prayer and I think that I shall never have a home, only current houses. After watching Sentimental Value, I became committed to the idea that I would travel to Norway. Not entirely because of the film, I had been wanting to go on a solo trip to somewhere in Scandinavia for a long time, and I thought that Oslo seemed like a fitting destination. However, when I started planning, I was swept up by the appeal of Denmark as a Hamlet enthusiast and Sweden as the place where one of my father’s relatives lives, and with limited time off from my below the minimum wage hospitality job, I made it to Denmark and Sweden, but never managed Norway. I think it was for the best though. Much like Nora and her father, I think admiration from a slight distance will play out to deliver some good.

September 2026

A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, Follower of Rembrandt, about 1628-30.