Elephant

The film follows a handful of students through the corridors of a suburban American high school on a day that looks like any other, its long tracking shots trailing them through classes, conversations, and small routines. Interwoven with these wanderings is the preparation of two boys who arrive at the school armed and begin a shooting modelled on Columbine.

By withholding explanation and lingering on affectless surfaces, the film conveys adolescent alienation and the quiet approach of catastrophe without offering a tidy cause. For a clinician it is a meditation on numbness, disconnection, and the limits of after-the-fact understanding. It won the Palme d'Or and the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003.