WATCH THE WORLD

Our goal is to open up the world to everyone through film. Everyone should travel if they can (the world is amazing), but it costs time and money which we don't always have. That's where FilmRoot comes in. We bring the world of films to your couch, so you can travel wherever you want to without the flight fees.

Use our World Map to find the best films from each country, choose a continent below to explore the best films from each continent, or simply scroll down to see our latest posts featuring films from around the world. Or, if you're up for a challenge, work your way up to the top of our Film Difficulty Rankings to become a World Film expert.

Latest Posts

Once Upon a Time in Venezuela – Sundance Film Festival

Once Upon a Time in Venezuela starts with images of the famous Catatumbo lightning silently flashing over Lake Maracaibo. The lightning is an atmospheric phenomenon unique to the region, occurring for 140 to 160 nights per year. It’s what drew filmmaker Anabel Rodriguez Rios to the region, but ultimately became one of the least interesting happenings in an area that serves as a microcosm for the socioeconomic and political crisis in Venezuela.

The once thriving town of Congo Mirador becomes the focus for this observational documentary. It’s a town built upon stilts above Lake Maracaibo, complete with a church, a school, and houses. Everyone gets around on boats, whether they’re commuters, cake sellers, or musicians. The water is the lifeblood of this town. It’s their road that connects everyone, their bath to wash in, and their sewage.

Therefore, it’s not a surprise that sedimentation is brought up first. It’s the most urgent problem for the community, and not the political movements happening in the big cities elsewhere in the country. Sedimentation blocks their transportation paths by making the routes too shallow for boats to move, it blocks the free flow of sewage, and pollutes the towns’ supply of fresh water. Shots of people washing juxtaposed against shots of dead fish, highlight the immediate problems that sedimentation causes. As the film progresses, the director makes sure you can see the physical change in the community. Houses are uprooted and moved on boats, and plants start to take over the once fluid waterways.

It’s not clear where the sedimentation comes from; perhaps it stems from the oil reserves that have started contaminating beaches nearby, or maybe it’s just happening naturally. However, what is clear is that if nothing is done, this town will gradually be consumed by dirt and pollution, thus becoming uninhabitable.

The town community need the help of higher powers to help. However, Once Upon a Time in Venezuela chooses two rivals to center this documentary to represent the division in the community: Mrs. Tamara, a Chavista and town representative, and Natalie, a local teacher. Their rivalry, and the progress it hinders, represent the political division in the country and the slow decline of the town, the sinking state of Venezuela.

Mrs. Tamara: the Hugo Chavez fan girl, with a large spacious house, Hugo Chavez dolls, and a farm along the lake. She’s shown boating around the lake to buy votes and relaxing in her hammock.
Natalie: a humble teacher and single mum that appears apolitical and lives in a small house. She’s shown hand washing clothes and teaching kids.

The class distinction between the two, and way they talk about each other (Natalie rarely mentions Mrs. Tamara by name) help us choose our allegiances in Congo Mirador and Venezuela. Ultimately, their rivalry distracts us from the decline of the town, just like the presidential rivalry between Maduro and Guaido has provided a distraction from resolving the political and social crises in Venezuela.

If you’re looking for more films from Venezuela like Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, check out La Soledad or It’s All Good for two more films set within the crisis You could also watch Hermano for a Venezuelan film featuring gangs and football. Or, head to our Sundance Film Festival hub, if you’re looking for more reviews from the festival.

The Silence of the Forest – An African ‘Black’ Savior Movie

The Silence of the Forest Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

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

The Breakdown

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.

Bacurau – One Fun Brazilian Genre Free For All

WARNING: SPOILERS

Bacurau is one fun genre film with a bunch of memorable cult action film characters on the level of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator or Song Kang-ho in Snowpiercer. Problem is, it builds up the cult vibe a bit too high, which leaves the ending doomed to underwhelm.

However, that’s not to say you shouldn’t watch this film. On the contrary, you should. It’s still exciting. Plus it presents a positive message (in a High Noon esque conflict with a lot of violence that I cannot advocate) of a diverse community in rural Brazil that comes together to stand up to attacks from local politicians and foreign interests. It’s an obvious allegory to a Brazil that has become increasingly polarized due to the rise of the Brazilian far right, led by President Jair Bolsonaro. It is interesting to see that this adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game arrived in the U.S. the same weekend as The Hunt, a U.S. adaptation of the same book, considering both countries are led by right-wing leaders.

Bacurau is the name of the fictional isolated town in the heart of Brazil where the film takes place. The town is a Brazilian copy of the towns you’d expect to see in an American western. It’s surrounded by dusty land and sparse vegetation, with only one road leading into the town. The same road all the town’s buildings are built on. The residents also represent a diverse range of backgrounds, like you’d expect to see on the American frontier (see First Cow), with black, white, and brown people, young and old, from a variety of professions. It’s almost a utopian community of the future, where everyone gets along and respects each other, or maybe it just feels utopian because communities like this are disappearing.

They’re rightly suspicious of and prepared for anything that tries to break their community. A couple stationed a mile outside of their town uses walkie-talkies to inform the DJ in town of any visitors, who then uses his speakers to pass their warnings onto everyone in town. Their lines of communication allow them to avoid interacting with the lying local politician and prepare themselves from the attacks of foreigners. They can survive by embracing outcasts and standing together in the face of danger.

There are even a few clues that the community has done this before. The town’s museum is full of memorabilia from countless rebellions against the government. The town’s residents encourage outsiders to visit the museum to show off their pride in their independence, and also warn them of what might happen if they don’t receive respect. In one of the last scenes, the museum curator asks the clean up crew to leave the mark of a bloodied hand on the wall to serve as another mark of their resistance. Their respect for their local museum indicates a respect for their history. Knowing their past, allows them to be better prepared for the future. In this case, their experience defending their town from the government and foreigners in the past has made them more wary of the same people today. It’s a lesson for everyone living today: know your history or fall victim to a cycle of racism and division that has been reborn in the rise of the prejudiced right-wing governments of the world.

If you liked Bacurau, director Kleber Mendonça Filho and co-director Juliano Dornelles handpicked an assortment of films that map the rich cinematic universe to which their inventive creation belong for the Lincoln Center in New York. Whilst the film series had to be cancelled due to Coronavirus, many of the films listed are available for streaming. Check out their program here or the link below, featuring works by John Carpenter, Sergio Corbucci, Eduardo Coutinho, and more.

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/mapping-bacurau/#films

Los Conductos – Piece Together Colombian Society – Berlinale 2020

Los Conductos starts off like Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. A Dostoyevsky-esque man of the shadows (like the protagonist of Notes from Underground) peers out of the shadows watching the source of some footsteps nearby. He disappears and a gun appears. Shots are fired. The outcast steps out from the darkness and peers into the fresh bullet hole in his target. As the camera zooms closer to the wound, it cuts to a petrol pump being inserted into the petrol tank of a motorbike (a technique most recently used in Uncut Gems). Our shadow dweller, Pinky, reappears, robs the motorbike and escapes. It’s a minimalist opening that uses editing to generate the action and excitement without explicitly showing any violence.

The minimalist thriller opening doesn’t last as this film switches styles throughout. Here’s a quick list of all the different styles I caught in the film:

Music video: Pinky takes drugs and we get a close up of two Pinky heads bopping madly to very loud music. Reminiscent of the music and drug driven scenes in Trainspotting.
Documentary: The scenes in the print shop are static and slow, showing the workers guiding the printing machines without any narrative. Feels like Sergei Lonitza’s Factory, revealing the everyday workings of the factory.
Storytelling: A well-trimmed copy of Pinky tells his double a story about The Fallen Devil, adding mystery to the film like the storytelling of Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto and Mariano Llinas’ Extraordinary Stories.
Sketch Comedy: There’s even a scene in which Pinky and his double appear as clowns in a go-kart patrolling the streets of Bogota.

The stylistic mashup reminded me a bit of Pedro Manrique Figueroa’s collages, explored in Ospina’s A Paper Tiger, which bring together conflicting images to create political statements. In Los Conductos, the mix of styles construct Colombia as a nation built upon a mix of histories. Without a solid past, the country has no solid foundations to move forward from or even exist upon.

It isn’t helped by our single narrator, who we never feel like we can fully trust. He’s a murderer and junkie, plus he also splits into two characters at one point. Hardly elements that build a trustworthy narrator. He even looks like he’s been living in a cave for a few months, with wild unkempt hair and a long beard. But, whilst we can’t fully trust him, he’s a great candidate for narrator on the state of Colombia. Who best to comment on society, then someone who seems to exist outside of it? He’s experienced a lot and followed a range of cults and philosophies. He shows us Medellin from the street: inside the factories and vacant lots; and from above: through many shots of the city lit up from the hills he lives in.

From his perspective, we see the failures of consumer culture and capitalism in Colombia. The warehouses producing fake t-shirts to sell on the black market that Pinky works in, are ironically the only way Pinky can earn an ‘honest’ living. The mountains of garbage become Pinky’s search for treasure, a physical scar on the land courtesy of the endless waste produced by capitalism. Plus, there’s a distinct lack of care for the average worker. Pinky is forced onto the street by the factory and lives an existence as a forgotten man. This Colombia is cold and heartless.

Camilo Restrepo makes sure you feel it too by embodying a physicality into his film. The 16mm film gives the picture a graininess that you believe you could reach out and feel, whilst the close up of hands constructing, drawing, holding objects pulls you closer to the action, making it feel more tangible, like you’re controlling a character in a first person video game. You’re a part of the puzzle of Colombian society, and you, with the help of Pinky are given an opportunity to try and figure it out.

If you want to read more about Los Conductos, I strongly recommend reading Ben Flanagan’s review of the film for Vague Visages.

Death of Nintendo – Berlinale 2020

Death of Nintendo feels a lot like your typical nostalgic American middle school coming of age story. It has a group of friends that are desperate to become more popular than they are and a lot of pop culture references. However, there are a few unique Filipino elements in Death of Nintendo that you’re unlikely to see in American productions: a volcano, a body eating monster, and circumcision. These help the film to stand out in a pretty crowded genre.

A strong nostalgia for the early 1990’s is what hits you at the start of Death of Nintendo. It starts with two kids slotting colorful Nintendo games into their Nintendo, something that many 90’s kids will happily remember doing. Then in the following 15 minutes, you’ll hear hip hop and dancehall, and see them skateboarding and playing basketball in Nike shoes. The combination of visual and aural references quickly sets the film within the 1990’s. The way it’s presented, lit up in vibrant colors under the Filipino sun and with a few slow motion takes, makes sure it looks good enough to evoke a warm nostalgia for the era. If you’re a 90’s kid, this opening will make you want to be back in your happy childhood memories.

We’re knocked out of the nostalgic 1990’s childhood opening by a bully and love. The American bully disrupts their love for all things American, whilst their young love prompts a quick quest to grow up and become men. Being men = being popular and being popular = girls and no bullies. However, to become men, they have to embrace their Filipino identity. They have to come to terms with the volcano which threatens their neighborhood, their fear of the Manananggal (a Filipino man-eating mythical creature), and finally, they have to get circumcised (to help them grow and turn into men). Plus, they have to figure this all out on their own. Neither of the three boys have a fatherly role model to guide them through puberty, which perhaps leads to their strange idea of how to become men.

The 1990’s references and coming-of-age tropes are all taken from American culture. Without the Filipino references (volcano, Manananggal, and circumcision) and Tagalog, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a U.S. film. Whilst every international film shouldn’t have to set out cultural identifiers to situate it within the country it was made, they should try and differentiate themselves from existing films and make something new. Whilst Death of Nintendo is an enjoyable coming of age film from the Philippines, there’s not too much to help it stand out from an already crowded genre of nostalgic coming of age films.

However, don’t let that stop you from watching more films from Raya Martin. Manila, a film he co-directed with Adolfo Alix Jr. is much darker and intriguing. Read our review here.