Carnival – what’s the point in being given four days to rest (or to go around restless) when on returning to work you have piles of paperwork to be dealt with? (That’s my way of saying I know I should have updated the Portal a couple of days ago, but there simply was no time. Awfully sorry, yet can’t promise it won’t happen again.)

Carnival flew right by me, but I guess this was partly because I was having a lot of fun and spent a lot of time going to the cinema trying to catch up on the new flicks.

For those who cannot live without the big screen, the movie season has blessed us with superb releases. I managed to see four films over Carnival, all above average and, at least one of them, a true masterpiece. Strangely enough, or maybe this is just the way I “read” these films, all of them seemed to deal with the same issue: the nature of truth.

Hitting upon the truth (or a slice of it) may be deeply upsetting, but there’s a certain liberating quality that makes it worth the effort. This is true of a man (check THE WOLFMAN) who experiences an unsettling transformation after he returns to his home village and gets bitten by a werewolf. It’s never easy for a grown up to go home. A child’s vision of his family life is often distorted by his emotional bias – distorted by magic. An adult is more likely to delve into the past and confront the truth behind this magic. Provided they have the guts.

Childhood is not always a realm of innocence and joy and director Michael Haneke of THE WHITE RIBBON knows that only too well. In his film, a schoolteacher attempts to unveil the truth behind some strange happenings in a quiet protestant German village in the years prior to World War I. There’s nothing more disturbing than a story in which mysterious things happen and it’s no one’s fault. The truth is hidden behind a white shroud of lies and there’s simply no one to blame.

Of course, childhood can be extremely bitter and a child may have no choice but be to hide the truth from the world with a hope that it may go away in time. In a contemporary tale it never does. And the baby-girl-turned-woman-turned-mother is forced to face the challenges of dealing with a life of invasion and sheer lack of parental support. The story behind PRECIOUS is so utterly devastating, that it deserves to be told – ugliness for truth’s sake. A winter’s tale behind a palette of summer colours: no matter how bright these colours might be, you know only too well they won’t last.

But in none of the films I watched is the truth more beautifully portrayed than in the Argentinean THE SECRET OF THEIR EYES.

This is truth in all its nuances – not black and white, not my truth versus yours, but the kind of truth that defies easy understanding and ready-made answers. A truth that likes to play hide and seek. It takes an obsessive investigator to go after that kind of truth. Benjamin Esposito in the film knows: It may take a life-time effort to get there, but that’s immaterial. That type of authenticity implies never again being able to close your heart - or, for that matter, your eyes.