#maternal-themes

#maternal-themes

The Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak began exploring female breasts in her work shortly after the birth of her son in 1994, when she began breastfeeding. Reflecting on her experience as a mother, the breast became a metaphor for herself as well as a broader celebration of womanhood. In 2001 Sanpitak began to draw parallels between the breast and Buddhist stupas-dome-shaped sites of veneration, and began her Breast Stupa series, combining the sacred with the sensuous.

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on traditions of realism in European cinema. The Belgian brothers, now in their seventies, have been making compassionate, uncompromising dramas about the social and economic conditions of modern life for nearly 40 years, approaching each with a direct, unvarnished style that's been imitated far and wide across the international arthouse circuit, if seldom rivaled in its emotional impact.