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Between 1961 and 1963 Ingmar Bergman made three films which are some times referred to as his Faith Trilogy. This films form an odd collection for the simple reason that they were not originally intended as a trilogy by the director. They have come to be grouped together over time because of their thematic similarities and as a definitive resolution of Bergman's own battles with belief. Bergman's struggle to believe seems largely due to the experience of his austere pastor father and the paradoxical message of love that he preached. Throughout his early films, belief was held onto tenuously with the harsh realities of the world seeming to be a contradiction to a doctrine of love and forgiveness. Often this contradiction was externalised in his characters through which the director had an ongoing dialogue about belief and unbelief, this discourse became resolved with the three films included in this collection.

Each film begins with a prototypically existential situation: Karin (Harriet Andersson) suffers from schizophrenia in Through a Glass Darkly; Tomas (Gunner Bjornstrand) is absorbed by self-hatred and lack of faith in Winter Light; and Ester (Ingrid Thulin) endures illness and a love-hate relationship with her sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblum) in The Silence.

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Winner of four Cesar awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring story about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a port-side restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s fish couscous, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode in riveting drama, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.

"The Secret of the Grain" (the French title actually translates to "The Seed and the Mullet") isn't a film that fits into an easy compartment. It's part extensive family yarn, shot in fly on the wall fashion. It's also about a man in between two women and two lives. It could be described as a North African "Big Night." And yet, the last act, where Kechiche slows down the action so that it feels like real time (in order that the audience feel the long, long wait of the characters), it becomes a tragicomedy. It's as messy as life and it's glorious.

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