I Think the Filmmakers of Our Time Are Trying to Tell Us Something. Are We Listening?

Spoiler warning: This essay contains mild spoilers for The Odyssey and Ikkis.

A screenwriting professor once told our class, "Every story has already been told. Don't worry about telling a new one. Just tell yours." I remember pushing back against that idea. It felt oddly defeatist. As film students, we're taught to chase originality, to find a voice that nobody else has.

But maybe originality has never been about inventing a new story.

Maybe it's about recognising an old one at exactly the right moment.

I watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and rewatched Sriram Raghavan's Ikkis within days of each other. They couldn't be more different. One is based on a Greek epic that's survived for thousands of years. The other tells the story of Arun Khetarpal, a twenty-one-year-old soldier who never came home from the 1971 war.

And yet, somewhere halfway through The Odyssey, I caught myself thinking about Ikkis.

Not because the plots are similar.

Because the feeling was.

Earlier this year, I attended two conversations around Ikkis with Sriram Raghavan and cinematographer Anil Mehta. I walked in with the kind of questions film students always have. How did they move the tanks? How did they stage those battle sequences? What lens was that? How many shooting days?

Those questions were answered.

But that's not what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was how often both of them came back to intent.

Not how they made the film.

Why they felt they had to.

I've been thinking about that ever since.

Because we're living in a time where cinema seems increasingly interested in making hero stories. Bigger heroes. Bigger battles. Bigger victories.

And somewhere along the way, I wonder if we've become a little afraid of telling human stories.

Stories where nobody really wins.

Stories where the war doesn't end when the guns fall silent.

The Odyssey most of us know is about a legendary king returning home after the Trojan War.

Nolan's film didn't feel like that to me.

It felt like watching a man trying to remember how to be a husband again.

A father wondering whether his son would even know him.

A king discovering that coming home and belonging are two very different things.

Similarly, Ikkis could have been a straightforward celebration of military heroism.

Instead, what stayed with me was a father, decades later, still trying to understand the loss of his twenty-one-year-old son. One man is trying to return home.

The other is trying to understand why his son never could.

Somehow, they're both homecoming stories.

I made a documentary about grief last year.

In a few months, I'll probably leave the city I've called home for most of my adult life.

So maybe home has been on my mind more than I realised.

Maybe that's why these films found me.

Because beneath all the spectacle, the armies, the uniforms, the mythology, the tanks, they're quietly asking a much smaller question.

What happens to the people who have to keep living after history moves on?

I don't think I would have noticed that a year ago.

There's a moment in The Odyssey that I haven't been able to shake. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it's something about how history remembers songs of bravery far more easily than it remembers the mistakes that demanded those songs in the first place.

Whether that's the exact wording almost doesn't matter.

The feeling does.

Every morning I open Instagram which, strangely enough, has become where I learn about wars in real time and it's another family running, another child pulled out of rubble, another explanation for why this violence was necessary.

Honestly, I'm tired.

We were taught history for a reason.

And yet it often feels like we're rehearsing it instead of learning from it.

Maybe that's why filmmakers keep returning to these stories.

Not because war makes for great cinema... but because war keeps asking the same questions.

And we keep pretending they're new.

Cinema won't stop the next war.

I don't believe that.

But maybe that's never been its job.

Maybe its job is simply to remember the people history forgets.

War creates heroes.

But heroes leave behind parents who spend decades looking for answers.

They leave behind children who grow up without fathers.

They leave behind homes that never quite feel like home again.

And maybe that's the story filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Sriram Raghavan are trying to tell us.

The question is:

Who's still listening?