Film Festival Coverage Hub - Reviews & Recaps

This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection – Sundance 2020

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is not your typical film. It’s pretty slow paced and full of carefully crafted shots, reminiscent of director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s debut, Mother I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. However, unlike his debut documentary feature, This Is Not a Burial, Its a Resurrection is Mosese’s first fictional feature film. But don’t expect an easy to follow narrative, as like a Lav Diaz film (see From What is Before), it requires a lot of interpretation. If you put in the effort, you’ll be rewarded with a beautiful constructed film touching on a wide range of themes covering death, community, progress, and the environment.

This Is Not a Burial, Its a Resurrection starts chaotically with a slow motion shot of a group of horses being attacked by tribesmen. This opening shot doesn’t appear to serve any contextual purpose, as the horses or tribesmen never reappear later in the film, but it does create a sense of uneasiness which prevents us from settling into the film. This feeling continues into the next scene in which a camera slowly pans around a dark empty bar with the eerie sounds of a lesiba instrument playing in the background. The cameras stops on a uniquely dressed man who starts giving us clues about what we are about to see. He doesn’t reveal much, as he uses a lot of legends and proverbs which don’t mean much to us at this point, but his speech indicates that we’ll have to be an active viewer and search for deeper meaning in the rest of the film.

We finally meet our main protagonist Mantoa in the next scene. She’s an eighty-something woman living alone in remote valley in Lesotho, which is a days trip from the nearest town. Her last son has passed away, so she’s now the last one left in her family. As a result, all she craves now is her own death, so she sets about planning her own funeral. Until her time comes, she carries on with the futility of her life, attending local community meetings and covering cracks in her mud floor. However, her patience is disrupted by news that the local government are planning to flood the area with the construction of a big dam. Not only does the dam disrupt the plans for her own burial, but it will also force the relocation of her buried family. As the main figure leading the resistance against the dam, she becomes more and more distanced from her community and religion. Her death isn’t a physical one, but a death from her community and cultural roots as the country ruthlessly pushes forward in the name of progress.

The narrative is sparse, but the look and feel of the film is incredibly rich. One way Mosese adds a unique richness is through his use of a taller 1:33:1 aspect ratio which gives the picture slightly more height. The extra vertical space allows the sky to dominate every image by taking up almost half of the screen for each landscape shot. In contrast, the people in the community are largely confined to the bottom third of each landscape shot. This framing adds power to the sky and nature, and diminishes the significance of the people below. Their lives and the things they do, such as building dams, are impermanent compared to the eternal nature of the sky (and heaven?). The taller aspect ratio therefore enforces the futility of not just Mantoa, but the futility of humanity as a whole.

The futility of humanity is enforced by the feeling generated by the films’ soundtrack. Firstly, listen to the trailer for this film without watching it. It sounds like a horror film. There’s the unique muffled bursts of the lesiba combined with a horror 101 mix of piano notes, scratchy strings, and ascending voices. This soundscape plays throughout the film to viscerally convey the confusion, anger, and sadness that Mantoa feels on her quest to join her dead family. But the sounds used in horror films also signifies the presence of the spiritual realm. Just as the taller aspect ratio gives more power to the sky and nature at the expense of the significance of humanity, the soundtrack bolsters the dominance of the spiritual over the physical human bodies. It reminds us that we’re not in control of our own fate.

The unsettling opening, sparse narrative, and rich look and feel of the film make This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection feel enigmatic. By the end, it feels like you’ve just watched a piece of art. You might have understood a bit of the film and felt its power and beauty, but you will finish it feeling that it’s full meaning is unattainable. It’s mystery is the mystery of life.

Right Near the Beach – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Right Near the Beach, Jeffrey Jacobs, Jamaica’s world record breaking sprinter is beaten to death near his home. His murder sparks a frenzy of media coverage that digs into his friendship with a gay man. Jeffrey’s single father becomes a social pariah because of the reaction to his son’s death, living alone in the hills. It’s only when his youngest son returns that he is given a chance to transcend his isolation and grief.

Right Near the Beach tells its story effectively through the images and sounds it presents. Firstly, the film develops Terrence Malick’s visual style to create a more visceral feeling. Right Near the Beach still has the trademark wandering camera and meditative shots familiar to Malick’s films, but adds a varying shot length to better convey the varying emotions Jeffrey’s dad feels.

For most of the film, the average spot length feels longer than your typical Hollywood film. This gives the audience more time to watch the characters as they wander in rural Jamaica alone, allowing us to feel their search for inner peace. However, for a few key scenes, the emotional toll of the media and neighborhood gossip is too much for them and they release their frustration in sin scenes with frantically fast cutting. The quick shots that rapidly cut around Jeffrey’s dad when he starts axing a tree root creates an urgent feeling of blind rage that contrasts with the otherwise relaxed feelings generated by the longer shots. It’s one example of how the filmmakers brilliantly use shot lengths to change the feelings of each scene.

Secondly, the sound of Right Near the Beach provides the foundation for the visual experimentation. In the first half of the film, the soundtrack is dominated by a constant stream of radio show interviews with people discussing Jeffrey Jacobs’ homosexuality. The real homophobia you hear on air (these interviews were conducted with real Jamaicans) penetrates the silence of the rural area Jeffrey’s father lives. What he hears forces him deeper into isolation just to try and silence the country’s prejudice. This changes in the second half of the film, when the prejudiced voices that plague him start to ease after his youngest son’s arrival. They’re replaced by more natural sounds from the rural environment they live in, marking his successful coming to terms with his eldest son’s death. It’s as if he’s managed to meditate away the hateful media and replace it with a calm peace of mind. Just as the visceral visual style builds emotions, the sounds we hear guide us through Jeffrey’s dad’s grief.

To take the film full circle, the filmmakers end the film with the reunion of the dad and his youngest son. It’s a touching end to an emotional film that shows they have both transcended the deaths of their brother/son and mother/wife.

Right Near the Beach manages to accomplish a lot. Firstly, the editing and cinematography work incredibly well with the soundscape to depict the character’s raw emotion and path to overcoming their grief. Secondly, the full circle script gives the film a spiritual completeness that many films fail to achieve. But, that’s not all. Right Near the Beach also touches on the prejudice in Jamaica and how the country is largely overlooked internationally except for beaches and running (hence the ironic title). I’m excited to see more from these filmmakers.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

Land Of Ashes – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

In Land of Ashes, thirteen year old Selva lives in a small costal town surrounded by sea and dense forest. Her mother has passed away, so she shares the duties of looking after her frail old grandfather with Elena, an older woman who comes and goes as she wishes.

Elena is the only female role model that Selva has, but their relationship is a strange one. Selva obviously needs her for companionship and help navigating her path to adulthood, but she also despises her. She spits in her food and trades vicious insults with her over the dinner table which eventually unravels into laughs thanks to her grandfather. Later, Elena invites her dancing, but disappears soon after hitting the dance floor in order to score a few drugs and never returns. It reinforces Selva’s vulnerability and her inevitable life alone.

To keep herself company, Selva manages to conjure visions of her dead mother. These visions help to guide her through the challenges she faces, such as looking after her grandfather, and they also help her to come to terms with the impermanence of life and her future life alone. Her grandfather’s death is inevitable, but it’s not until Elena’s disappearance that she realizes that she will be living alone. Seeing her mother in the nature around her provides her with the comfort that her family will continue to live in her and her surroundings after her grandfather passes away.

Land of Ashes was one of the best films I saw at SBIFF. It creates a vivid world from just a few images of the natural world they live in – mostly of the night sky and dense jungle, but also of the local fauna. The magic in it adds some mysticism about Selva’s future alone and the life in the wilderness around us.

The Wolves (Los Lobos) – Berlinale 2020

The Wolves is a spiritual sister to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Instead of a boisterous white mum and daughter living in a motel by Disney World, The Wolves features a single mum with two young boys that have just crossed the border into the United States. The kids are happy to follow their mum and spend more and more days passing time in a shabby apartment on the understanding that they’re going to Disneyland.

The two boys are stuck at home everyday making their own entertainment whilst their mum works double shifts to try and create a better future. There’s no school for them to go to and they’re forbidden from leaving the apartment. Any chances of being caught and deported must be avoided.

Despite being stuck in the apartment all day, The Wolves is presented with a lot of warm nostalgia. There’s a slow and lazy guitar soundtrack that generates the same warm melancholic tones of films imbued in Americana like Mud, Bombay Beach, or even parts of Thelma and Louise. There’s also warmth in the games that the two boys play to keep themselves occupied and the drawings that come to life in their imagination. Even though the melancholic soundtrack and bleak surroundings hint that the American dream is out of reach, their playfulness shows it won’t stop them dreaming.

The Wolves is an ode to the faceless people of America. Not just the immigrants that cross the southern border seeking a better life, but the homeless, and anybody scraping together a life living below the poverty line. A few times in the film, Samuel Kishi Leopo (the director) inserts montages of portraits of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds living within the new family’s community. All the portraits feature people staring straight into the camera like you might see in a National Geographic magazine, showing them without anything to hide. It shows them purely, in front of their humble homes. What these people have in common is an absence of the white picket fenced house promised by the American dream. It’s a sign that being American, or simply being in America for those that migrate north, doesn’t automatically grant you a well spring to health and prosperity. The Wolves honestly highlights the people that the country has left behind.

For more films from the Berlin film festival, head to our Berlinale home page.

Black Mexicans – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Black Mexicans, a fisherman splits his time between two women: his wife, Juana, and his lover Magdalena.

Neri, the fisherman, is an old Don Juan. He’s known in the community for his promiscuity, which doesn’t end with Juana and Magdalena. However, the film focuses on his two lovers and their two daughters of a similar age. Whilst Nero’s two families share similarities, they have different problems. Juana has Neri, but she’s dying from a terminal illness, whilst Magdalena lives waiting on Neri and the relationship with his wife to end. Magdalena isn’t hoping for Juana to die – she regularly donates blood and even offers her donating her liver to help her – but she does want clarity from her relationship with Neri so she can move on with her life.

The other difference between the two families is their wealth. Whilst neither family is wealthy, Magdalena at least has her health to continue earning money through her restaurant. She’s able to buy a new fridge, and isn’t too worried about Neri not being able to catch any fish. Her ability to earn money, also gives her daughter the freedom to do what she wants as she doesn’t have to help support the family. In contrast, Juana is too poorly to earn, and Neri can’t support them, so her daughter has to find work to keep them afloat. Juana’s daughter therefore doesn’t have the same freedoms as her step sister and resents her absent father more for it.

Black Mexicans is set along the picturesque Oaxaca coast within the Afro-Mexican community in Costa Chica. The remote and empty setting reflects the Afro-Mexican experience in Mexico. Just like Afro-Mexicans in Mexico, the setting is hidden away from the rest of Mexico. No one makes the effort to take the boat trip there, except for the rare pair of backpackers. There’s also no sign of any non-black Mexicans here, just as the Afro-Mexicans here are hidden away from the rest of Mexico. The empty beach chairs and beach restaurants show that people just don’t care about the Afro-Mexican community. It’s isolated enough to pretend it doesn’t exist and empty enough that it doesn’t attract any attention.

It’s no surprise then that the Juana’s daughters efforts to make a life for herself appear hopeless. Her father will always be promiscuous and forget about her, her mother is terminally ill, she’s in inescapable debt, and there’s no support from the government (as indicated when a highway policeman says she’s not Mexican on a rare trip outside the community). Without her mother she’s alone. Her hopelessness is expressed through her stoic expressions. She never smiles or frowns, and never appears disappointed or angry. She’s aware of the hopelessness of her situation and her inevitable prostitution to pay off her debts.

Black Mexicans is the first feature film that tries to depict the Afro-Mexican experience with an all Afro-Mexican cast. It does have its problems: some Afro-Mexicans have called out the stereotypical depictions and the ignorantly prejudiced comments of the director. However, separating the director from the film, Black Mexicans deserves credit for depicting a community invisible to the rest of Mexico. Well constructed images and storyline might remind you of Costa Rica’s Land of Ashes or Eve’s Bayou. It’s use of setting and the stoic character of Juana’s daughter highlight the lack of opportunity and support for the black community in Mexico and their exclusion from their Mexican identity.