The Eighth Day

A sales trainer whose wife and children have left him picks up a man with Down syndrome on the road. The man wants to find his mother and refuses to leave. The film does not set the two up as opposites; the narrative follows one needing the other and coming to accept it. The fantastical scenes turn the character's inner world directly into image. Jaco Van Dormael wrote and directed, with Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne, who shared the best actor award at Cannes; Duquenne has Down syndrome himself. A real warning: there is a suicide theme and a death. Some viewers have also found the way disability is used within the narrative contested.