Film Difficulty 1

To help you ease your way into our world, we have devised a the film difficulty ranking system to rate the difficulty of each film reviewed on our site. The easiest to watch films (the Rom-Coms and Superhero flicks that you watch anyway) will have a rating of 1. Foreign language films automatically add one point, as do black and white films, and films with strange and hard to follow plots. Welcome to the first level – Film Difficulty 1.

Film Difficulty Ranking 1: Everyone watches these films, preferably with a large popcorn and soda. This is your Batman vs. Superman, your Adam Sandler flick, or your family animated film: we all love these ones!

Next time, try Film Difficulty Ranking 2 to start your world film adventure.

11

She Paradise – AFI Fest 2020

She Paradise

Right from the beginning, you can tell that 17 year old Sparkle is lonely. Much like Amy, the lead in Maimouna Doucore’s Cuties, she’s stuck doing house chores for her grandparents. It doesn’t look like she has any friends at school or at work, and she doesn’t talk much. So when she meets a group of older girls dancing in the street, she finds the confidence and expressiveness in them that she wants to have. So she works her way into their clique and transforms from the children’s clothes wearing, shy 17 year old kid from the introduction into a vividly dressed, confident dancer.

Her gateway is Trini culture. In particular Soca music: a mix of calypso, reggae, dancehall unique to Trinidad which permeates She Paradise. Soca is present in the dancing and style, which combines with the music to give Sparkle a brand new modern key to her independence. Embracing the contemporary Trini culture through Soca opens up a new world that is totally unique to her world at home with her grandfather. It’s modern and fresh, instead of from the past. It allows her to forget about her childhood and home poverty, and have an opportunity to become a free independent woman.

She Paradise is a feature length version of the brilliant short film that debuted last year at a few festivals that we reviewed here. Like the short, the feature version has many of the same scenes, which are mostly included in the first part of the film. The feature also contains a few hints at Sparkle’s background, but it’s still not clear what she does before she meets the Soca crew. However, unlike the short, this feature film adds in a few male characters which take the focus away from the female friendship of the short. Instead, the focus switches more to Sparkle and how she navigates a world of patriarchy – represented by her father and Skinny, the male Soca artist. It’s a shame as the friendship between Sparkle and Mica was the highlight of the short.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

12

Shaina (Zimbabwe) – Pan African Film Festival 2021

Shaina

Shaina (Shine) is a teenager who has a knack for making something out of nothing and could have a promising future as an engineer, except for the fact that she doesn’t believe in herself. When she and her best friends are faced with a host of grown-up problems – loss of loved ones, unpaid exam fees and the curse of “blessers” – they come close to giving up. Their story is one of forgiveness and friendship, of creating a new family from the people who love you, and of the very real girl power.

Once you see Shaina you’ll realize that this blurb is sugar coated. Her “grown-up problems” are a list of the very worst things that could happen to a kid: losing your only guardian, being unable to afford education, and stalkers that groom you. Based on what happens, this could be one of the most depressing films of recent times, in the same field as Capernaum, but it chooses not to be. Despite the awful conditions, Shaina is filled with vibrant colors, positive music, and dancing. It’s unrealistic hopefulness is present from the opening scene in which Shine digs for scraps in the local junkyard whilst uplifting music plays in the background. Even though it feels overly optimistic considering the circumstances, the hopeful portrayal of Shine and her friends is needed to prevent this from becoming poverty porn.

However, the credibility of the film isn’t helped by the clichéd characters. One friend resorts to prostitution to help get by, another friend is pregnant, and there’s a dodgy crime lord. It’s also not helped by what feels like an overwritten script which verbalized everything in the dialogue, leaving little to be said by the images.

Another thing that felt too obvious was the film’s love for capitalism. It’s presented as the obvious answer to Shine’s problems despite all the awful things that she has to deal with. It conveys that it’s no big deal that she has to raise money to pay for her school exams now that her family has died and people have stolen what was left for her education, because she can just become an ‘entrepreneur’ and make enough money by selling eggs after school. The movie chooses to use Shine’s inventiveness as a wonderful way out of poverty instead of examining why she has to make money to pay for her education after she’s left an orphan in the first place. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that this is a film made with U.S. Aid. However, the focus on the American dream just feels like a hopeful distraction from Shine’s reality.

Check our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.

13

Nauru: The Forgotten Children – Refugees Imprisoned on Island

Nauru: The Forgotten Children

Nauru: The Forgotten CHildren Film Difficulty Ranking: 1

A made-for-Australian-TV documentary that covers Australia’s refugee crisis that it brought to Nauruan shores. The lack of an indigenous perspective makes Nauru: The Forgotten Children problematic.

From: Nauru, Australasia
Watch: YouTube
Next: Limbo, Sitting in Limbo, Between Fences

Nauru: The Forgotten Children Breakdown

Ultimately, this isn’t really a Nauruan film. It’s a made for TV documentary about the residents of the Nauru Regional Processing Facility, aka the offshore detention facility, that Australia uses on the island. The documentary itself is produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV network and the subjects of the documentary are either refugees from Asia or Australian charity workers. However, we’re using this TV documentary as a proxy as we couldn’t find any films of any length that were made by Nauruans. This could be because they’re not readily available to watch, or perhaps because they don’t exist yet (Nauru is one of the smallest countries in the world, hosting a population of just 12,000 people). Please let us know if you can share any films from Nauru.

Despite being set in Nauru, this documentary does not interview any Nauruans for the film. This is problematic as the documentary emphasizes their ‘violent nature’ without attempting to present their perspective. Instead it chooses to show us second-hand footage of violent fights between Nauruans as evidence to back up the comments on their violent nature made by the non-native refugees and Australian charity workers. Without an indigenous perspective, the documentary encourages us to accept a stereotype that Nauruans are violent and unwelcoming. The lack of a Nauruan perspective also dehumanizes the native people, placing the pseudo-colonizers (in this case the Australian charity workers) and the Asian refugees as more respectable than the natives that have been displaced by both through recent and current history. Perhaps, as this is an Australian documentary made by Australian national television, dehumanizing the Nauruans makes the Australian use of the island as a detention center more palatable.

Unfortunately, the lacking indigenous perspective detracts from what is otherwise an interesting documentary of the refugees detained on the island by the Australian government. It conveys Australia’s disregard for legitimate refugees and their neighbors (in throwing their problems onto other countries to avoid dealing with them), as well as the sad personal experiences of some of the refugees.

What to Watch Next

For more films showcasing how ‘the West’ poorly treats their refugees, check out:

  • Limbo (U.K.) where refugees are sent to remote Scotland instead of Nauru
  • Split at the Root (U.S.) where children are split from their parents when seeking asylum
  • Between Fences (Israel) where African refugees are detained in the Israeli desert

Plus, you don’t even have to be a refugee for the West to treat you badly. Sitting in Limbo dramatizes one man’s experience during the U.K.’s Windrush scandal.

14

Tears of Joy (Saint Kitts & Nevis) – Bullying Isn’t a Game

Tears of Joy

Tears of Joy Film Difficulty Ranking: 1

Tears of Joy is a 15 minute reminder that bullying isn’t a game. It is designed to trigger those who have experienced being bullied and to scare anyone related to the victims. However, its scare tactic methods prioritize melodrama over a real exploration of the subtleties of bullying.

From: Saint Kitts & Nevis, North America
Watch: YouTube, Mubi
Next: Where I Come From, Shaina, Hulhudhaan

Tears of Joy – The Breakdown

Similar to Where I Come From and Shaina, Tears of Joy feels like a throw-back public service announcement. Its message is very clear (bullying is bad) and it uses intense examples to convey it. These examples take up the entire short film and are designed to evoke anger/horror in those who view the bullying, and sympathy and sadness for the victim. However, the intensity of the examples, and obviousness of the bullying, out-shouts what is often subtle and concealed. The bullying is so clear to us that it’s hard to believe that the adults choose to overlook it, especially as it appears to be every student against Joy. There’s no attempts on the school kids to hide it, so it feels unrealistic that they’re not caught and reprimanded. Meanwhile, Tears of Joy also infers that bullying is brutal and obvious, ignoring its more subtle guises.

Joy and the lead bully do get brief scenes with their parents for brief moments of character development, but this isn’t enough to justify the direction each character takes. Almost every scene of this short film is taken up by footage of school kids bullying Joy, or Joy crying alone (which she does very well, kudos to the young actor). This makes the film appear more exploitative – focused on shocking the viewers rather than building on the dialogue around bullying. Less focus on showing traumatic bullying and more focus on the characters and their motivations and feelings would have been helpful to justify the conclusion of the film. Spending more time building the characters would have also helped convey the complexities of bullying and its many forms.

Ultimately, if you’re a sucker for traumatic films designed to trigger emotions with a low budget, here’s Tears of Joy. It manipulates emotion by focusing on shocks and some intense crying scenes, carried out well by Neila Jones.

What to Watch Next

Whilst these exploitative, PSA style ‘message films’ aren’t my cup of tea, there are plenty of them from around the world. For more check out any of the following: