Claude Lanzmann spent twelve years making Shoah, his documentary on the Holocaust, and for much of that time he felt he was filming nothingness. “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness,” he wrote in his journals, now the backbone of a new documentary, All I Had Was Nothingness, by Guillaume Ribot. “The subject of Shoah is death itself… I always forced myself to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah.” The film, which drew no American funding because it refused any note of uplift, has been widely screened and awarded for over four decades. Ribot’s companion piece, using Lanzmann’s own words and unseen outtakes, traces that long battle to give form to the unrepresentable.

That same refusal to look away from private devastation has found an unlikely home in the kitchen. The Bear, the American series that concluded its run in June, turned a Chicago sandwich shop into a pressure cooker of grief and perfectionism. Its protagonist, Carmy, a chef haunted by his brother’s suicide, navigates a world where the shouted “Yes, chef!” is both discipline and trauma response. The Danish chef René Redzepi, who appears in the series, called it “The Wire of our time.” In Argentina, chef Dante Liporace notes that diners now sit at his counter and watch him cook in silence, as if the kitchen had become a live series. The show’s manic rhythm, captured by handheld cameras, stripped away the vacuous glamour of culinary television and replaced it with something closer to an emergency room.

In a different register, the Texan pitmaster Evan LeRoy found his own way back to meaning through smoke and fire. After studying English philology with plans to become a food journalist, he missed the barbecue of his home state so acutely that he returned, trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and launched a food truck that reinterpreted 19th-century German and Czech smoking traditions. Now at his Austin restaurant, he butchers whole animals, serves beef cheeks smoked like brisket, and treats a whole cauliflower on the grill as if it were a cut of meat, cutting it tableside. His approach earned a Michelin star just eight months after opening, a recognition of how tradition, when stared at long enough, yields new forms.

In Bangladesh, a similar excavation of the past is underway in letters. A newly published collection of short stories by the late filmmaker and writer Zahir Raihan, Koyekti Nodi O Ekti Somudro (A Few Rivers and a Sea), brings together works from 1955 to 1970 that had been scattered in periodicals. The stories dwell on urban middle-class fragility, moneylender exploitation, and the precarious position of women. In the title story, the suicide of a fifteen-year-old girl unravels into a police investigation that finds her diary and her elder sister’s autobiography, pulling the reader into a labyrinth of truth and illusion. A contemporary novella, Ishwarkol (2021) by Sadia Sultana, follows a woman named Deepa, sexually abused in childhood by a close relative, as she struggles with the desire for motherhood. Her eventual whisper to her husband—“I want a baby”—is, in the reading of local critics, not just a longing for a child but a declaration of renewed trust in life.

The Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, who lost his parents, sister, and grandparents before he was ten, wrote that “human life is as fragile as morning dew.” His own suicide in 1972 left no note, only a body of work that held beauty and death in a single, evaporating breath. In Argentina, the 2005 film Un buda, directed by a practitioner of Zen, follows a young man who, after witnessing his girlfriend’s betrayal and his grandmother’s death, retreats to a Buddhist temple. The director, Diego Rafecas, said the film is not about Buddhism but about how “good teachings at the beginning are bitter.” Across these works, from the black sun of Shoah to the steam of a Texas smoker, the dew of a Bengali morning, the gaze remains fixed on what is most fragile, not to redeem it, but to insist that it be seen.