A boy raises his hands in a dark room. A projector behind him casts a moving image onto his palms: a model train plowing along on a circular track, then crashing into a toy car that’s blocking the way. It’s a pivotal moment in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama, The Fabelmans, in which his young onscreen avatar—Sammy Fabelman, played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-Deford in this scene—makes his first-ever film. From here on, Sammy becomes captivated by filmmaking and makes it his life’s work, in spite of the conflicts it may cause with the ones he loves most.

Spielberg’s latest is one of many new films that find celebrated directors pointing the camera squarely at their pasts. From The Fabelmans and James Gray’s Armageddon Time to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, 2022 has seen a host of filmmakers using actors as stand-ins to go exploring. The themes they grapple with end up answering the kinds of questions we’ve all had about who makes movies and why. How did Spielberg sneak his own family’s breakdown into blockbusters that seemed to be about all of us, like E.T.? What happened to Gray when he was growing up in Queens, and how did it shape the films he’s set in the city? How did Iñárritu’s split view of home—the one he was born into, and the one he made for himself—affect his work? How did losing her mother enable Hogg to finally make a film about her? These directors aren’t after cozy nostalgia. They’re heading into trickier territory to really question who they were and who they’ve become.

The Fabelmans is the story of a young boy who uses movies to escape the shock of his mother and father’s separation. “I can’t think of a single film I’ve directed that hasn’t had some personal element,” Spielberg has told Vanity Fair, acknowledging that he smuggled some of his own story—a lonely boy, a distant father—into movies as different as E.T. and Catch Me If You Can. “It makes me feel good to pretend that I’ve got the whip and the fedora hat, although I know that’s just wish fulfillment. But on something like this, the decision to make the movie was maybe one of the scariest lines I’ve had to cross.”

To watch The Fabelmans is to see how Spielberg thinks of his youth and what about it continues to gnaw at him. For him, the past is shot on 35 mm, and drenched in color. His mother (or at least the stand-in played so vividly by Michelle Williams) is both the true hero and the accidental antagonist, a woman whose pursuit of her own happiness—which she reaches for in her own desperate, secretive ways—has a lasting impact on her sensitive son. The Fabelmans moves with the sweetness and ebbing/flowing melodrama of a musical, without ever breaking into song. The landscapes of Southern California and Arizona, where Spielberg grew up and later set films like E.T., are revisited. But this time they’re backdrops for the amateur war films and Westerns that young Sammy makes with his friends. 

James Gray shot Armageddon Time on film as well, thrusting its characters into shadowy chiaroscuro to create a complex, haunting portrait of the 1980s. The film is naturalistic and quietly devastating. It tells the story of a young Jewish boy who slowly realizes how different his privileged experience is from that of his best friend, a similarly free-spirited young Black boy. It’s Gray’s most explicitly autobiographical work, and a return to the smaller scale, New York–set films he made early in his career (Little Odessa, Two Lovers) before scaling up into the jungle adventure The Lost City of Z, and the space drama Ad Astra, with Brad Pitt. Armageddon Time is frank and starkly told, the director examining his youth at the dawn of the Reagan era and the quiet injustices that flowered all around him. Gray doesn’t exempt his onscreen self, Paul (played by Banks Repeta), from blame. “I was trying to express myself frankly, brutally,” the director told VF. “I’m a bit of a jerk in the movie. An obnoxious little kid.”

The film lingers on Gray’s childhood home and his school. The director replicates family dinners, where everyone—including his benevolent grandfather (Anthony Hopkins in warm, generous mode)—sits and laughs and argues, giving Paul a real sense of pride in his Jewish heritage. But the home can just as quickly transform into a battleground, as in a scene where Paul’s furious father (Jeremy Strong) charges at his son after finding out he’s gotten in trouble at school. Paul escapes into the bathroom and is briefly safe, until his father busts down the door.

School, though, is the place of true awakening, as Paul whiles away the hours by drawing and acting out with his friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb). Gray is so devoted to capturing his memories that he shot the film in as many real locations as possible, including his former school. He even took his own children to see his childhood home. “They were so unimpressed with the space,” Gray told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know what they thought my house would look like. But what I started to think about when I was there was a kind of ghost story of all these people who had inhabited this house…. There was something beautiful and sad about the ephemerality of our lives.”

Where Gray’s movie feels like a ghost story, Joanna Hogg’s film literally is one. In her last two films, Hogg drew directly from her life, with a two-part series, The Souvenir, about her experiences as a film student. The films star Honor Swinton-Byrne, with her real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, playing her onscreen mother. It’s tender, familiar casting: Swinton starred in Hogg’s first major film-school short. Now, in The Eternal Daughter, Hogg takes things one step further, casting Swinton again to play an artist going on a haunted trip with her mother, Rosalind. To make the casting even more meta, Swinton plays both the artist and the ghostly mother. (Rosalind is also the name of Tilda’s maternal character in The Souvenir, a thread holding all three films together.) 

Though it’s a genre film—a “dreamscape of mist and gargoyles,” as Swinton has put it—the narrative is personal. Swinton’s character, Julie, is weighed down by loss and guilt, particularly over the fact that she picked her artistic career over becoming a mother herself. Hogg, who does not have children, wanted to make the film over a decade ago, but felt too guilty to make it while her real mother was still alive. Spielberg and Gray also finished their respective films after their parents had passed, but for differing reasons. Spielberg says his parents would have embraced this “very, very much,” but died before he began production. Gray’s elderly father was alive when production began on Armageddon Time, but died before it was finished. “I feel, almost, a sense of relief that he never saw it,” Gray said. 

The Eternal Daughter is preoccupied with the decision not to have children. Hogg has discussed the subject in the past. “I would be unlikely to be making the films I have been making if I had had children,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I see my films as a way of creating something.” It’s worth noting that Spielberg has seven children, Gray has three, and Iñárritu has two—which may say something about female directors and their male counterparts.

Iñárritu’s Bardo dives directly into his experience as a parent. Like Hogg, he uses a grown-up stand-in and confronts questions that have plagued him his whole adulthood. Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a Mexican journalist and documentarian living in the US, who wins a landmark award in his home country, codifying his status as a celebrated artist. When he returns to Mexico, he confronts the spiral of existential guilt and accusations of betrayal waiting for him on the other side. Silverio is, of course, a “squint your eyes and there he is” avatar for Iñárritu himself. The Mexican filmmaker began his career in his native country, then moved to Los Angeles with his family, later finding enormous success with ambitious hits like The Revenant and Birdman, which earned him back-to-back best-directing Oscars. About five years ago, he began dreaming up Bardo, inspired in part by watching his kids grow up far away from the place he called home. “It’s like a branch in a tree,” he tells VF. “When it starts growing, the branch needs the roots, but the roots are far away.”

What spilled out of that exploration is a surrealistic, epic and personal, study in the vein of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½—Fellini, of course, being the godfather of spiritually tortured artist autofiction. (Bardo opens with Silverio flying over a desert, a nod to the scene where Guido flies through clouds in 8 ½.) But for all its strange, mesmerizing images, Bardo draws upon Iñárritu’s life in literal, and intimate, ways, including a thread about losing a child, which is something he and his wife, Maria Eladia Hagerman, suffered in real life. Portraying it onscreen was healing, he says. The whole film was, in a way, an exploration of his insecurities about fatherhood, immigration, and artistry: “It’s always delicate and you feel vulnerable about it. But at the same time, it’s liberating.”

Liberation seems to be on the mind for all these filmmakers, who have spent their lives sifting through the complicated truths that sit beneath the surface of memory. Sam Mendes drew on his childhood in 1980s Britain—and his mother’s experience with mental illness—to make Empire of Light. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, a tender portrait of a father and daughter on vacation in Turkey, was inspired by two childhood photos of herself and her father. Though Aftersun is “unmistakably fiction,” she’s written, it contains “a truth that is mine; a love that is mine.” It’s one of the year’s most heralded stories about memory and loss, and she’s never made a feature before.

Elegance Bratton’s drama The Inspection is based on the director’s time in basic training for the Marines, and explores how much more difficult it becomes for the protagonist, Ellis French, when the other recruits discover he’s gay. The film, Bratton’s debut feature, is bookended with appearances by the character’s mother, played by Gabrielle Union. Bratton’s real mother died shortly before the film went into production, and the director found himself guiding Union while actively mourning. “It was quite haunting at times,” he told Them. “She made space for my grief and my rage over everything. She helped to bring my mother back to life. All of the jewelry she wore, the way that her hair was styled, and the clothes that she wore are all modeled after the woman that raised me…. I’m directing the ghost of my mother.”

All these films follow an age-old artistic tradition, of course: reinterpreting the past and building new visions from its raw materials. Movies can give memories new shapes, both for directors and those of us watching the screen. They can give long-gone ghosts words to say, clothes to wear, and light to stand in so they can be seen clearly at last. You can see it in that scene of a boy raising his hands in a dark room and watching a train flutter across his palms. It’s as though he’s stumbled onto magic powers—which, of course, he has.