Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou does not look for inspiration; inspiration finds her. In her artistic practice, vague ideas slowly develop into something more comprehensible, more tactile. In The End of Suffering (A Proposal), she renders the mere act of “understanding” palpable. 

Sofia Kokkali plays a young girl in distress whom we meet rushing out of a metro station. She runs as far as outer space, where an unknown entity tries to wake her up and advises her to simply stop trying to make sense of what’s happening on our planet. Lentzou packs the minimalistic story in just a few scenes and shots. In some parts, the viewer could close their eyes and just listen. At other times, a text is shown but can’t be heard. 

Lentzou’s films are philosophy in practice: a desire to know, learn, and feel turns into an inquiry—image per image. Her filmmaking is deeply intuitive: starting from within herself, then moving outwards—consciously and sometimes unconsciously, working through layers (of being, meaning, understanding). “Everything is already inside somehow,” the filmmaker writes. 

As a title, The End of Suffering is a proposal, hoping to activate its viewers to move around in life and to discover one thing at a time—just like the young woman in the film, whose meanderings lead to the appearance of stars and soft sounding otherworldly voices. 

This starry night was filmed by Lentzou and her long-time partner in cinematography, Konstantinos Koukoulios, at the Planetarium of Athens. How does she know which images will tell the story, one wonders? “The images come to mind whenever they want to, and my work is to be alert and pay attention to them. I write them almost instantly, trying to contain into words what comes through.” Lentzou says she’s grateful to words, that it is through text that her ideas and images take shape first since painting and drawing were never her biggest talents.

Not only Koukoulios is a returning collaborator, but lead actress Sofia Kokkali also worked with Lentzou before in Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (2018). Since The End of Suffering, Kokkali also played the main character in Lentzou’s debut feature film, Moon, 66 Questions (2021), and most recently in the music video Lentzou shot for The Callas, titled Marble is Cut with Water (or the Crying Game) (2022). She re-invites collaborators, just like ideas and questions are also re-invited in her different film projects. 

Lentzou’s love for outer space, for example, so clear in The End of Suffering,  is just as evident in Moon, 66 Questions, or her 2018 short film Hiwa. “My primal scene could be any skyscape scene, I guess. I love observing and shooting the sky. It gives me so much energy. And what’s essential in cinema to me is courage. Courage is a word that tends to be overlooked while it is so powerful, especially remembering that etymologically it stems from ‘heart’.”

Each of the works mentioned relates outer space as a twin to our “inner space”, and it is through poetry (in both image and text) that Lentzou researches their relation. The filmmaker works her pen in and around “ideas”. It is a “brave quest”, Lentzou writes, opposite of what is now often devalued as a mere form of intellectualisation, of refuge. Ideas are a serious matter, hidden in every bit of life, inside or outside our bodies and minds. Lentzou holds on to Romantic tendencies, claiming her camera captures life itself: “observing it, capturing it, experiencing it, contemplating it, … moment per moment.” 

Lentzou tries to be fascinated without trying to understand. Maintaining an open and honest gaze, she captures what crosses her path. Perhaps this is also why The End of Suffering came together so easily. “It was a completely intuitive, fast process, fun, small, full of heart,” she says. Any obstacle at all in making the film? “Maybe, when something is indeed full of heart—all parts, all players, all days—there cannot be any obstacle.” 

Her birthday companion Chantal Akerman believed in this intuitive heart-pouring too, and speaking of her own work and way of working, mentioned things being already there, waiting for you to uncover them: “If you want to make a film, you have to write even if you don’t know anything about the film you want to make, while actually, you know everything about the film you will make, but you don’t know that you know that already (thankfully)—the film ‘emerges’ while you make it, trying, hesitating, stumbling, half-blind, half-limping in the dark, sometimes in a flash of self-evidence and little by little, you start to realise it is always the same, like a primal scene in all of your work, …” Lentzou agrees fully: “Chantal describes it much better, yet what is so moving to me is how she also believes that everything is already known/existing, regardless of its realisation or the lack thereof.” 

If The End of Suffering doesn’t offer a final conclusion or a ‘home’ to land upon, perhaps the stars were overlooked. It is hard to understand or name all of them. But becoming aware of how tiny each of our existences are, is a liberating feeling—a coming home to our inner and outer selves.