Way more colors, in more places, than ever appeared in Rafiki.
Piles of e-waste merging with society in the nearby towns…
Inspired by Cemetery of Splendour
The Q&A: “Technology is a reflection of human consciousness… we are the technology.”
Need to watch again with Katy, in a more alert state, but this was an extremely cool movie to be drowsy with, and the excellent director(s) Q&A afterward lasted almost as long as the movie.
Oh no, I shouldn’t have waited so long to write about this… let’s see what I can remember. Rwandan genocide movie, shown from different character perspectives and overlapping timelines. That’s not clear at first, when small stories are set up then abruptly abandoned, but as they start to cross and join towards the end (including at least one Run Lola Run alternate-story), the movie gets much richer and more interesting.
Since there is a movie about a struggle, a young couple from opposite sides of the struggle must fall in love, so that happens. The girl’s parents are murdered, her boyfriend has to decide whether to support her or not, and the killer eventually confesses at one of those forgiveness committees. Also a priest on the run hides with an imam and regains his faith. And an outmanned military group tries to protect the courtyard where the girl and the priest are hiding.
Writer/director Brown’s first feature after a string of shorts, won an audience award at Sundance.
A weird art movie in three parts.
An arty filmmaker with a screenplay called “The Cycle of the Cockroach” can’t seem to get his resources together to shoot: the equipment guy failed to get lights, the actors are restless and the government won’t fund anything that doesn’t carry straightforward public-service messages.
A madman locked in a cell listens to radio broadcasts warning about cockroaches, traps one in a glass, is offered his freedom (by a white hand holding a key).
Postwar siblings, the boy traumatized by images from the war and his murdered parents (invented, since he was studying abroad at the time), refusing to speak or paint, throwing buckets of water on the TV and hiding in the attic from imagined invaders. Older sister is paying for his treatment by sleeping with the psychiatrist. He seems to snap out of it when they attend a mass-grave excavation. But all this has taken a toll on the sister. In the end, she’s in a cell. A roach runs under the door into the cell of the madman next door.
Said to be the first-ever film by a native Rwandan. The director: “It’s a film about the brain and the tricks it can play on people when they go through really traumatizing experiences. . . We are a nation of traumatized people who never got any professional help, because how are you going to get professional help to millions of people?”
C. Bell: “Finally, we have a contemplative film on the disgusting tragedy that took place in the East African country, one that recognizes it as a severely traumatic, complicated, and long-lasting event and not something ripe for Oscar bait.”