During the early 1990s Thomas Vinterberg was on a roll. His graduation short film for The National Film School of Denmark was praised across the country. Perhaps most significant was his friendship with fellow budding director Lars von Trier, whose early work also showed promise.

In 1995 they founded an organisation that officially eschewed personal film-making tastes for collective ones. DOGMA95 was announced with a grandly tongue-in-cheek manifesto and ten-point ‘Vow of Chastity’. These demanded a sparse directorial style free of ‘bourgeois romanticism‘. Two years later Vinterberg created (anonymously. Rule ten: the director must be un-credited) the first DOGMA film.

Festen may be the most effective expression of DOGMA’s rules. It was certainly their most successful film internationally. Here Vinterberg stays true both to his own commandments and their ideology.

In it a family gathers to celebrate its patriarch’s 60th birthday at a hotel he owns. During a luncheon speech the man’s eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) quietly states that he and two siblings were repeatedly raped by their father as children.

DOGMA rules one and seven (shooting must occur on location and with temporal fidelity to the story) are well-applied in supporting the build-up to this revelation and its consequences. The film opens with Christian walking alone along an open country road, incongruously wearing a suit. It immediately gives a sense of separation and detachment to this character that is developed throughout the film.

Events darken with the day. Settings constrict to small rooms, narrow spaces and a thickly wooded area at dusk. The family become trapped both physically and psychologically in a nightmare situation.

Place and time of day are two of the means by which Vinterburg fulfils his stated aim ’to force the truth out of my characters and settings’. As Christian falls victim to abuse and denial by his family, sound – rule two: sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa – adds to the violent and repressive atmosphere. Footsteps and voices thud against floorboards and walls, chill silences are pierced by clinking cutlery and dripping taps. Organic as they are, their effect is exaggerated by enclosure.

Camerawork also plays a significant part in confining the characters and disorienting the audience. Every camera had to be hand-held so cast-members often doubled as camera operators during scenes. This results in frequent close-ups of faces and significant objects. Perspective is turned into a prying eye amongst uncomfortably close people.

The images though are slightly fuzzy, a product of using early digital video. Their colours are almost uniformly muted. These two features metaphorically reflect the character’s moral ambiguity. Most of them are in a void and behave inconsistently. The audience may see more than each individual but it is equally in the dark about what will happen next. What is clear by the end, however, is that the illusion of respectable family cohesion has been thoroughly dismantled.

Vinterburg’s international debut shows individuals both conforming to and defying their social group. The members of DOGMA eventually outgrew their own organisation. In 2002 it was disbanded for becoming a generic style in itself. Its legacy was helping to make experimental, low-budget short productions part of film culture again.

As for Vinterburg and von Trier, their career paths diverged. The latter became an established if unpredictable presence in Hollywood, before retiring into care in 2025 with Parkinson’s disease. Vinterburg’s profile has been lower, with his output since Festen considered hit-and-miss. His breakthrough however put both him and Danish film-making on the map.

In 2011 the ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem erupted in protest. A Gay Pride procession was met with huge crowds both for and against them.

Two years earlier this area played partial host to the debut film of a young secular Israeli director, Haim Tabakman. During filming the crew had stones thrown at them and passers-by told them to leave. Their film split ultra-Orthodox opinion as neatly as the Gay Pride march would.

Eyes Wide Open explores with quiet strength a homosexual relationship within an anonymous ultra-Orthodox community. Its uncompromising portrayal of the subject earned it an Un Certain Regard nomination at Cannes.

The film’s opening is highly symbolic as Aaron Fleischman (Zahar Strauss) smashes the lock of the butchers shop recently inherited from his father. Soon after a young stranger arrives seeking shelter and work. Aaron is an established member of the neighbourhood, with a young wife and children. Edzi (Ran Danker) though, an outsider in every way, awakens something dormant in him.

Tabakman’s cinematic tastes are broad but the sparse realism of French New Wave is most obvious here. The simplicity of the settings (a yeshiva, shop and family homes representing the points around which community life revolves) are seemingly matched by the script. Within both however are many complexities.

Through Aaron writer Marev Doster skilfully personalises the fluid and uneasy borders of personal identity and religious faith. Aaron begins as a model ascetic, ‘loving the hardship’ of ‘being a slave to God’. The attraction between him and Edzi becomes the archetypal sin to overcome. Aaron’s eventual acknowledgement of his failure at this (‘I was dead. Now I’m alive.’) characterises the film’s lack of melodrama.

The visual symbolism Tabakman uses throughout is most overt during two scenes at a lake outside the city. This is a place for mikvah, the solitary ritual of cleansing vital in ultra-Orthodox culture. Aaron’s and Edzi’s mutual bathing there early in the film breaks not just ice but a fundamental rule.

Just as significantly, the lake is also the only light and open space in the film. All other scenes occur within dim rooms, narrow streets and on congested roads. Filming was often at night and during downpours. The effect is of a series of boxes, heightening the character’s personal confinement and the social oppression within their hemmed-in culture.

Like walls, cameras are always close to the characters. This creates intimacy as well as claustrophobia. One of the film’s key features is the amount suggested by subtle expressions on actor’s faces. The fact that many scenes were improvised adds to its naturalistic feel.

Much of the film’s power comes from its two leads. There are similarities between the characters and the actors. For Zahar Strauss Aaron’s dilemmas were an acting challenge. Ran Danker meanwhile was keen to be more than a teen heart-throb and singer.

Eyes Wide Open was made on a small budget and short time-scale. However, it made a mark beyond the ultra-Orthodox world. Recently it was re-screened by popular vote at Wesleyan University’s Israeli Film Festival. The film remains Haim Tabakmans’s most widely-known and daring work.

Tabakman has continued making poetic dramas about people’s reactions to outside forces shaping their lives, whether religious or national. Both still affect everyday life in his Israeli home.

As a naturalist, I know that brambles are not only one of nature’s great survivors but also a helpful part of ecosystems - providing food and shelter for insects, small mammals and birds, spring bulb plants and young trees.

The prickly branches that are so painful for unprotected skin to come into contact with both protect a bramble and help it claw over every surface it encounters, to get the light and nutrients it needs.

As a gardener, I know that these attributes make it necessary for me to heave and cut its cable-like ‘arms’ and roots out of the earth as much as possible during the growing season to enable a greater diversity of plant-life in the longer-term. For all the effort and observation this takes, it is liberating to know that I can only ever do so much to contain this toughest of plants and that I won’t be damaging its long-term survival as a species or that of the other wildlife it supports.

As a coach, I’ve come to realise that there are certain thought-patterns that become as entrenched in the mind as a bramble root in a flower bed. Like a smothered border, the effect of these can limit our capacity to grow and create new pathways through life.

The thoughts that can grow into brambles around our feet are often signalled by words like:

‘always’, ‘never’, ‘realistic’, ‘only’, ‘have to’, ‘need’, ‘not enough’, ‘should’, ‘supposed to’, ‘too much’ and ‘failure’.

Thoughts about our circumstances that include such words are there for a reason and can have their roots in hard experiences, their prickliness a survival strategy to reduce danger and the cost of trying something we fear may or may not work.

Related to this, and particularly fertile ground for mind brambles, can be the word ‘how’?

It’s one that often slows me down, including during the writing of this article.

The brain knows what it wants, has created many ideas it wants to act on and is eager - perhaps anxious - to achieve it NOW in order to grow. Then comes a crux point where it looks for direction and resources - maybe what has worked for other people or not worked for us in the past.

Whatever path we choose to create in responding to being part of the world, the brain will provide supportive tools for it in the form of evidence. What can make mind brambles especially pernicious is the 80% Negativity Bias, that survivalist majority of our nervous systems that is primed to react rather than grow.

Creating safety for expansive thoughts can feel grim when capacity and resources are limited, but they don’t necessarily need much of either. A few snips can bring light and air to thoughts that were there all along amid thickets of overthink - decisions that be made in a second and be enough for now, experiences that bring joy in the moment, creative actions that can build resilience through diversity.

Brambles of the garden and mind are a continuous presence in our lives and have every right to be. However, the more awareness and snipping-back we give them the more life we are able to give to the other things that we want to see grow.

The ‘hidden’ nature of Port Sunlight isn’t a result of it being remote or otherwise hard to reach - it is a simple two train-rides from me on the other side of the Mersey. Nor is it an obscure place - at the time my partner and I arrived there (a very wet Sunday lunchtime in September) the area around its station was busy with visitors. When I heard a man at the station call the village ‘a hidden gem’ I instinctively agreed without knowing specifically why.

I think I do now know what gives it this feel for me - it is a quietly cared-about place. My first sense of this came from the case of donated books in the station foyer, flanked by plant pots spilling over with growth.

As well as reading material, the immediate vicinity of the station is unusually well-provided with a post office and inviting cafe The Tudor Rose (though not with still-functioning red phone boxes).

We arrived at lunchtime when other visitors were heading out of the rain and into the cafe, but our walk was just starting. We were mostly unfamiliar with the village but it was made to be walked through so took us easily down into its central greenspace, The Dell. This was the village’s own hidden gem, a lush and secluded breathing space below the surrounding streets.

What gave it seclusion were the many and varied trees filling the spaces between paths and growing through the low brownstone walls - some of a mighty size suggesting greater age than the village itself, others slender and planted this century as memorials.

Returning to street level, we passed along avenues of Grade-II-listed buildings continuing to be used for their original purpose - as homes. Outside many were individual touches of everyday occupation - wellies, kids’ bikes, mini glasshouses full of greenery, clothes-horses.

At one of these we asked directions to the hotel we’d be staying at; by then The Tudor Rose was closed, the rain getting through our early-autumn clothes and we were hungry for lunch. The hotel lay at the far end of a dual-carriageway just past the village, made easy to get over by several pedestrian crossings along its length.

Our stay was enabled by taking up a very helpful partnership-offer from carers’ charity Carefree, the local council and participating hotel of an overnight stay with breakfast. Once there we were able to check in early and received a free upgrade. Next door, an Aldi provided foraging-ground for lunch and dinner.

Later that afternoon we made the most of a break in the rain to explore other parts of Port Sunlight’s 130 acres of parkland. There was a more modern feel to the place we came to; as secluded as The Dell among stands of mature trees (many living in symbiosis with colonies of fungi near their bases), with the difference of a few small disused historic buildings and a sensory garden in the centre of a play area.

Being a bigger, more open space there was more footfall here than in the central Dell, especially at the sunny end of a rain-filled day. Dogs and their humans criss-crossed at their own paces, interspersed with people to-ing and fro-ing from the surrounding estates at faster rates. On one path I exchanged silent-touch greetings with an elderly retriever before we continued on our ways.

We stayed out until sundown. Next day was glowing, no sign of yesterday’s rain on the village’s brownstone paving. This time we left the hotel and explored separately; after breakfast for me, after a lie-in for my partner though we ended up doing the same things - walking without purpose or direction, then having a farewell sit in The Dell.

We didn’t feel like a cafe lunch that day. The Tudor Rose will be for next time.

Last month my partner and I went on an overnight trip to the Lancashire town of Rawtenstall, meeting up there with three Lancashire-based friends who had rented a nearby bungalow. For him this wasn’t a birthday trip, but as it fell across his threshold to 40 this it what I considered it.

For us the journey to this unknown place began with the familiar -the 10:10 train into Liverpool, from there crossing the subway system to Lime Street station for a train to Manchester. We had been warned that engineering works around Manchester may add another link to the transport chain, in the form of a rail-replacement bus, but at Lime Street the ticket guard told us we would be clear to go straight to Piccadilly on the hours’ train ride.

The hour passed smoothly and comfortably, a happy breathing space for us to rest between connections. Our fellow passengers were mostly students returning to uni near the end of half-term. We approached Manchester Piccadilly through a thicket of newly-built tower blocks and the scaffolding of more going up.

Very little of the city’s streets - well sign-posted in the parts we walked - needed to be navigated before we reached its famous tram system, crossing the centre as its equally-famous rain began to fall. The tram journey - my first - lived up to its reputation as simple and efficient, my partner surprised by how far beyond the city it extended.

We got off at Bury during a pause in the rain, I increasingly regretting leaving my beanie hat out of my satchel for the first time this year as we reached East Lancashire Railway station. As my partner eagerly sprinted to the other side of the track, I stiffly power-walked.

As we slotted in behind a desk in the steamer’s compact cabin, warm from the coal-fired engine, my partner instinctively opened the overhead window. The error of this was immediately obvious as the loco began moving, a cascade of coal-flecked rainwater tipping off the roof and over our desk (side-sprinkling our heads)!

Over the 40-minute journey from Bury to Rawtenstall we ate dark chocolate and tangerines, gazing past wiped-away condensation at dark green fields and hills darkened further by heavy rain. Around us families enjoyed the ride, to a discreet and slightly incongruous soundtrack of pan-pipe music from the overhead sound system.

After we climbed down from the loco at journey’s end the smartly uniformed porter gave us helpful and straightforward directions to the main street, which were obscured a little for us in practice by junctions of weekend traffic. Eventually we arrived, dripping, at our destination - Mr Fitzpatrick’s, billed as Britain’s Last Temperance Bar.

Many other customers had got out of the rain ahead of us and plenty more would follow, but we were given a two-seater table set back from the window next to shelves of spices and other dried flavourings used in the bar’s cordials. I enjoyed my first raspberry tea, refreshing and savoury, my partner a punchy hot blackcurrant and liquorice.

Despite the bar’s busyness the atmosphere was relaxed and accommodating, space being found over two compact floors for families and solo visitors alike. A ceramic dish of counter sweets, fumbled and broken by gloved hands, was benignly swept away in a moment. In honour of half-term, closing time came an hour earlier than usual, the one thing I regretted about the visit.

Back out in the rain, we found little to focus on at that time of year and in those conditions - Rawtenstall would be a great base for walking during longer stays, but not when ground is waterlogged and time limited to less than half a day. Before the rain got through our winter layers, we found another tea shop open. The atmosphere here was quiet and laid-back, a family-run place with a shelf of books by the counter and a Remembrance theme covering the walls. Other visitors came and went solo, some continuing a rolling conversation with the staff, others enjoying quiet time.

It was dark by the time we met up with my partner’s friends, all of us glad to find the rented bungalow after a short bus-ride and street search. The last to join us came by car, so was delegated to chauffeur the others to a chippy for dinner. While they went hunter-gathering, I settled indoors with Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (bought second-hand for a donation in the Rawtenstall Tesco).

As well as my partner’s 40th, other celebrations were revealed over fish and chips (made semi-healthy with salad leaves and tenderstem broccoli) - one friend’s partner was expecting a baby and the other two were engaged. My own was being present on this trip as a respite break while caring for my mum full-time.

The next morning four of us got on a packed single-decker bus to Bury for its Saturday market. The weather was beautiful for walking - calm, dry and softly lit. This made the cramped and stuffy bus ride along congested roads particularly uncomfortable for me and a weekly frustration for the locals around us.

What we all appreciated most about Bury market was the variety of its fresh produce, from a world’s-worth of fruit and veg unfamiliar to me taste-wise (mooli, prickly pear) to the most local of meats (rabbit, large coils of black pudding). After a few hours the fair sky dissolved into heavy rain, which was my and my partner’s cue to begin the journey back to Merseyside.

The first leg - tram from Bury to Manchester - proved the most laborious. Protests in the centre of Manchester put the trams on go-slow, connection changes increasing the weekend crowds at each stop. Once at Piccadilly station a wry Scouse voice reassured over the tannoy that we were on the right train (the automated announcements being down).

As we walked home that evening, the rain had passed and the air was mild again. We agreed that Rawtenstall would be worth travelling back to, for a longer time and in our golden months for exploring - May-June.

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