HUMAN BEINGS HAVE an ugly propensity to be cruel to one another. To throw children to the proverbial wolves out there. To lack basic empathy. The Namibian film Lukas, puts a human face on all of these horrors. Compiled from the true stories of 23 homeless Namibian children, […]
WHEN THE TRADITIONAL lines of documentary are allowed to blend into the messy whimsy of what fictional tales are about, real magic happens. A kind of universal sacred magic that speaks to what all of us are, as human beings. This is what you can anticipate in Maite […]
FILM REVIEW: FOR SAMA. SAY THE WORDS ‘Aleppo’ and ‘2016’ and if you have had a quarter of an ear on the news during that period, you will shiver with the memory of appalling atrocities perpetrated against Syrian civilians. In her intimate, multi-award-winning documentary, journalist Waad al-Kateab offers […]
FILM REVIEW: DAYS OF CANNIBALISM. IF YOU OFFER a man the right price, you can get him to give you his land to rape and pillage. It is this horrible reflection that is implicit in Teboho Edkins’s astonishing documentary on the Chinese migrants of Lesotho. Entitled Days of […]
IT TAKES A very special blend of confidence in your own narrative talents and knowledge of the medium to be able to take on one of the greatest classics that the country in which you were raised cherishes like the bible, and to win at it. Ladj Ly’s […]
CHILDREN ARE FASCINATING entities on stage or screen. Rogue in their sense of instinct, they can be either fundamentally defining for a work, or they can simply reduce it to a morass of precocity, doing damage to the artistic product and probably to their own self-esteem, by blowing […]
VERY RARELY DO you find a film that is effectively a piece of advocacy work, so searingly well made and intensely carefully constructed that it surpasses the threshold of actuality and turns into great art. Nadine Labaki’s essay in Amharic (with subtitles) on poverty and disenfranchisement in contemporary […]
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