These last two years will be remembered as a period when filmmakers revisited their childhood and adolescence. Two weeks ago, James Gray released Armageddon Time (2022). In The Night is Ours the author continues the stories and misfortunes of a child, the youngest of a Jewish family in Queens during the 1980s. That boy mirrors Gray as a kid, even if he carries another name. Brighter and more pop, the animated film Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Childhood (2021) draws from the author’s own memories. The arrival of humans on the moon provides the backdrop for this movie. Richard Linklater, known for Childhood: Moments of a Life, recalls a Houston upbringing in the late 1960s, detailing his family ties, his immersion in popular culture, and his fascination with private ambitions.
Another filmmaker who chose this moment to reflect on the past is Paul Thomas Anderson. In Licorice Pizza (2021), he follows a teenager discovering love and stepping into adult life in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, during the early 1970s. The timeline is a touch off since Anderson was born in 1970 while the protagonist’s adventures unfold in 1973. The Invisible Thread’s director appears less autobiographical than the others, yet he continues to draw on childhood and adolescence memories. His producer friend Gary Goetzman, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, was a child actor similar to the lead in Licorice Pizza. A telling detail from the film’s promotion shows how personal the movie is: the plot centers on a family unit, and the co-star is the director’s real-life family, with his mother once serving as his art teacher in college and being part of a past romance.
We must add one of the most anticipated titles among these autobiographical films: Los Fabelman (2022) from Steven Spielberg. It will premiere in Spain on February 10. The producer’s childhood memories, especially family moments, thread through much of his filmography. In The Fabelmans, he directly recreates his own childhood, from his parents’ divorce to the moment he discovers cinema.
These four very different films share a thread of nostalgia, a chronicle of moments from United States history that hover in the background, and a coming-of-age in which life and art of the nation are explored through personal lens. Yet what makes these films especially intriguing is not merely their shared impulse to revisit the past but why each creator chose this moment to turn memory into cinema.
It goes beyond individual careers. The 2022 work of Alejandro G. Iñárritu offers autobiographical depth that traverses identity and immigration, presenting a broader story about childhood and youth. Across the Atlantic, Paolo Sorrentino explores adolescence in It Was the Hand of God, a film that resonates with a simple, deeply human voice.
Pinpointing a cause for this collective, masculine melancholy is difficult. It might be pride, or perhaps a pillar of the era of nostalgia we live in. Even when some titles arrived years earlier, the pandemic era seems to have pushed these filmmakers to measure their lives through art as they faced vulnerability. With one exception, Steven Spielberg, the writers of these projects are between fifty and sixty years old, still far from retirement.
Perhaps there are many other reasons. Creators may have decided to slow down and look back at the past, favoring traditional storytelling over urgent, pressurized projects in a cinema that has changed radically in recent years. Paradoxically, while some projects were built for streaming platforms, a cinema of resistance lingers in these works. They celebrate the directors’ personal authority at a moment when the name on the poster no longer fully represents the presence of the story or the artist behind it.