Antonia's Line

I've been utilizing Netflix lately to catch up on all those foreign films I've always wanted to see but could never convince my husband to rent with me. Since I have MY VERY OWN QUEUE, I can fill it with subtitled movies without bitching and moaning from him.

Last night I watched Antonia's Line, a Dutch film that won the 1996 Oscar for best Foreign Language film. And it was wonderful. I loved it. I laughed, I cried... It moved me.

In a nutshell, it's a movie about a woman who moves with her daughter back to her hometown following WWII. Her mother has passed away so she returns home to take over the family's farm. It is really a celebration of life and love and the passing of years and seasons and the cycle of birth and death. It encompasses five generations of women and their relationships, both with each other and the myriad of other people that come and go in their lives.

There are certainly some difficult parts to watch and some parts were terribly sad, but then other parts were so beautiful, and other parts were so funny - Just like life. The film ends with Antonia's death (don't worry, I didn't give away a surprise ending - you know it's coming because it starts at the same moment), with her lover and her daugher and her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter and her friends at her side. And I cried right along with them.

I don't blog often about movies I've seen, but I had never heard of this film before (Netflix recommended it to me because of my recent run of foreign movies) and I wanted to pass the recommendation on!!