After the success of his scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman would go on to take the director's chair of his masterpiece Synecdoche, New York (si-nek-duh-kee), a sprawling encapsulation of the human experience in all its absurdity, pain and beauty. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (in one of his most heartbreakingly brilliant roles) is Caden Cotard, a hypochondriac theatre director plagued by odd ailments whose artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) paints on a micro scale, dreaming of another life as they raise their daughter Olive. Alongside his loves and losses, Caden receives a MacArthur Fellowship for an ambitious new play and gradually constructs a life-sized replica of New York City to rehearse the struggles of everyday life.

Praised by Roger Ebert as the best film of the ‘00s, favourited by many as a deep, complex ode to all of human life, disregarded as pretentious, weird and confusing by others and sometimes even compared to Fellini’s 8½, Synecdoche, New York is everything and everyone – for I am everyone and everyone is me. What began as a Spike Jonze / Charlie Kaufman ’horror’ project soon developed into this heady epic that flopped on release so hard Kaufman had to resort to crowdfunding his following film Anomalisa. For us, it truly is an all time favourite – Kaufman's vision is so uniquely and complexly cinematic, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and his cast-mates cut right to the soul with grim humour and an aching heart, Jon Brion’s doldrum score is a masterpiece of its own, and it all ultimately rings true – to whoever you are, because we are all each other.