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 Film Difficulty 3.
Film Difficulty Ranking 3: More of a challenge for those familiar with foreign films. Level 3 is like a mix between an intriguing European mime artist and your most interesting and demanding school teacher.
If you’ve mastered these films, move onto Film Difficulty Ranking 4.
From: Guinea Bissau, Africa Watch: Trailer, Kanopy, Buy Next: Flame, Sambizanga, LuciaContinue reading “Mortu Nega – Guinea Bissau’s Fight for Independence”
Brooks, Meadows, and Lovely Faces Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
“We forgot your aunt!” *Two men appear carrying her in a bathtub complaining*
“You’re not carrying the pyramid”
“No! But at least that was one stone at a time!”
You’ll experience plenty of drama in Brooks, Meadows, and Lovely Faces. But you’ll be transfixed throughout because of the quick-witted banter, flirting, and taunting.
Brooks, Meadows, and Lovely Faces starts at a big celebration. The wealthiest man in town has hired the best chefs and has a big time governor as his guest of honor. But it’s obvious that none of the villagers like him. He picks problems with their cooking (even though they’re the experts) and takes offence at them calling him by his nickname. One thing is already clear from this opening – there’s going to be drama!
The film flashes back maybe a year earlier and follows the chefs from the opening scene. They’re getting ready for a big wedding. During the preparations one of the top chefs sees one of his old crushes return to the neighborhood from abroad. There’s also a secret marriage and plenty of extra-marital flirting. You just know there’s going to be trouble! If you like this kind of trouble this film might just be for you!
Just like in After the Battle Yousry Nasrallah’s Brooks, Meadows, and Lovely Faces has plenty of juicy drama. There’s plenty of controversy, comebacks, and tension. If that’s your thing, you better find this film and watch it now!
From: Comoros, Africa Watch: YouTube, AlJazeera Next: Batuque, In Search of Voodoo, Flesh Out
How can you tell that The Grand Marriage is a made for TV documentary? Well, besides from the obvious signs: that it’s made by a TV news network (Al Jazeera), and fits into an hour long TV segment with room for a small commercial break in the middle, you can also tell in the way that it’s made. For example, it starts with an opening introductory montage of shots from scenes to come later in the film. It’s there to try and grab the attention of any TV viewers currently watching the network in an attempt to get them to stay to watch the whole show. The content is also aimed at the armchair traveler. Just as the opening montage gives viewers a flavor of the documentary to come, the informative content is designed to appeal to viewers interested in world news and culture: those likely to be on the Al Jazeera channel. The level of detail and specificity is not necessarily something that viewers would otherwise directly seek out at the cinema or on streaming services.
One thing that makes The Grand Marriage standout versus other TV documentaries, is that it’s told completely by the locals. There’s no narrator, and therefore no one serving as a mediator to translate the locals words into something more palatable to our own customs. It allows the Comoran people to present their customs and culture from their own point of view, unchallenged by a foreign perspective. We’re the only one who can judge and interpret them. That being said, that does not mean that the documentary is completely free of bias. It could be that the people speaking are all from a particular class or background that gives us a less rounded view of Comoran culture. The groom, for example is a former government minister. But it does give the locals the power to represent themselves.
The Grand Marriage is worth a watch because it gives viewers an insight into Comoran culture through one of it’s biggest cultural customs. The grand marriages are the status builders of Comoran society. Plus they involve a lost of Comoran society – as you can see from the incredible number of attendees. The documentary doesn’t just show the main event, but all the preparatory ceremonies that go with it. It also gathers a range of voices to comment on the ceremony, from the bride and groom to be themselves, to the whole community involved to give a balanced perspective. So if you’re interested in learning a bit about Comoran culture, this is a good film to start with.
If you want to watch more cultural documentaries from Africa, check out Batuque, a look at music from the Cape Verde islands. You could also check out In Search of Voodoo from Benin, which looks at the west African voodoo culture.
Or if you’d like to see some more films centered around marriage, check out Saudi Runaway, featuring a Saudi girl trying to escape from an arranged marriage, or Flesh Out, featuring a Mauritanian woman bulking up for her groom.
Have you read Mia Couto’s brilliant post-colonial novel Sleepwalking Land? If you haven’t and you love reading, you should check it out now. If you haven’t got time to read, you can watch the film which does a great job at translating the novel onto the big screen. Check out the film here (Amazon).
Sleepwalking Land starts with an old man (Tuahir) and a young boy (Muidinga) walking down a desolate dirt track. We are not told who they are or where they are going, but we can tell they are in danger. Not because, they are being targeted, but because they are roaming a war-torn country. They hide in the bushes as a gang of men bragging about killing people walk past and then reemerge to find a burned-out bus full of dead bodies. They decide to remove the bodies and call it their temporary home.
If you’re ever read or seen Cormac McCarthy’s The Road you might recognise this environment. In both The Road and Sleepwalking Land there’s an old man and a young boy roaming a desolate land trying to survive. But contrary to The Road where we know the two protagonists are father and son, the connection between the protagonists in Sleepwalking Land is never made clear.
However, we get a clue to their past lives from a journal that Muidinga finds by the burned-out bus belonging to a man named Kindzu. Each day, they read an extra chapter of the journal and immerse themselves in Kindzu’s story. For Tuahir, Kindzu’s life probably reminds him of his past life, which he has blocked from his memory. For Muidinga, Kindzu’s life gives him a possible explanation to his past which amnesia has prevented him from remembering.
Teresa Prata’s adaptation of Mia Couto’s film is a worthy of your time. The main problem it faces is cutting the novel into 90mins, so if you’ve read the book you might think that the film crams in too much in too little time.
If you want to watch more films like this with characters wandering through desolate landscapes check out the post-apocalyptic The Road, which is good but bleak. You should also check out the art-house film Mimosas following wanderers from different centuries through the Moroccan mountains and deserts.
Or if it’s great African films you’re after, check out Abouna from Chad, a story about two sons searching for their lost Dad. There’s also Timbuktu, an Academy Award nominee from Mali where you’ll see the effect of the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism on the Malian town.
The Silence of the Forest is a modern take of the white savior trope in Africa. However, instead of featuring a white European, there’s a Central African black man, Gonaba, who returns home from Paris to help modernize his country. The problem is, just like the Africans didn’t need the Europeans, the Pygmy people that he tries to civilize, don’t need him.
From: Central African Republic, Africa Watch: Kanopy, IMDb Next: Dances with Wolves, Cry Freedom, N!ai
Gonaba returns home dressed in a suit, signifying his connection to the western word. He’s called a white man by the boat’s captain, because compared to the rest of the locals on the boat, he’s overdressed. Whilst he obviously isn’t white, it’s the first sign that he’s lost his connection to the people of the Central African Republic and will never be able to truly see life from the African perspective again.
A few years later, Gonaba is one of the country’s leading ministers. Problem is, he still feels like he hasn’t achieved what he set out to do; help the country he returned to. The country is still keeping the population distracted from poverty with Independence Day parades and bike races and not trying to implement positive change. His disillusion with the direction of his country is marked by his dull khaki dress. His attempts to westernize the country have failed, so why should he wear a suit like the rest of the ministers, a symbol of Western success.
So, to restart his mission, Gonaba chooses to fight for the rights of the Pygmy people. They’re looked down upon by everyone else, who treat them like animals. The President even tells Gonaba that they’re just a ‘tourist attraction for the country to exploit’. Gonaba, having studied Jean Jacques Roussea in France wants them to be seen as equal. However, instead of changing the minds of the people he knows, he goes on a white savior mission into the jungle to educate and civilize them.
Like Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, and Avatar, Gonaba heads into the wilderness and becomes a honorary member of the indigenous Pygmy society. Trouble is, like previous white savior films, he never sees the indigenous people as equal to himself. He never accepts them and their culture for what it is, seeking instead to civilize them up to his standards of modern society. He still views their way of life as backward and something he can change to create modern pygmy men and women that can integrate into African and Global society. Ironically, the way he treats them is just a repeat of the good-intentioned European colonists’ treatment of African people a few decades before.
Unfortunately, The Silence of the Forest is as heavy handed as it’s American predecessors. It’s interesting to see the white savior narrative used in a purely African film, but because it hits all the same tropes as previous films, it doesn’t feel new or unique. It also fetishes the lives of the indigenous pygmy people. Their lives are portrayed as idyllic and at one with nature, as you would have seen in Dances with Wolves and Avatar. They’re never portrayed from their own perspective. Instead of immersing ourselves in their way of life, The Silence of the Forest gives us a voyeuristic glimpse of a world through the eyes of a do-good African. It creates a world that feels separate from our society, a world that we dangerously can’t imagine existing or disappearing from the modern world we live in.
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