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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.

A Storm Was Coming (Anunciaron Tormenta) – Berlinale 2020

A Storm Was Coming starts with a still shot of the landscape of Equatorial Guinea. Slowly, the landscape becomes more and more overexposed until the shot is completely whitewashed and the landscape has disappeared. This visual example of whitewashing to start A Storm Was Coming is a style that director Jose Fernandez Vasquez uses throughout the film to represent the Spanish Empire’s eradication of the culture of Equatorial Guinea.

The Spanish Empire controlled Equatorial Guinea until 1968. As presented by the Spanish texts from the Francoist era which are read in the film, their rule was benevolent. Colonialism and the power structures it left ensured that an indigenous voice didn’t arise to challenge the Spanish hegemony. This one sided history is represented throughout the film through the scenes of a white man recording Spanish history and the lack of indigenous representation.

Scenes of a white Spanish man in a recording studio reading passages from bibliographies of Spanish colonists make up the bulk of A Storm Was Coming. The passages, which are being recorded in a studio in Madrid, present a one sided view of the history of Equatorial Guinea from the capital of the colonizers. These scenes are visually supported by images of different Spanish missions in Equatorial Guinea appearing out of a blank screen, as if they’re appearing on white photographic paper processed in the photographic darkroom. Their appearance from nothing, perpetuates the controversial colonial viewpoint that colonialism ‘civilized’ their colonies, providing infrastructure, culture, and history. It’s a viewpoint that erases all pre-colonial history, as if nothing of significance existed before the colonists’ arrival. The director combines images of Spanish missions appearing from ‘nothing’ with the reading of Spanish colonial texts to demonstrate the Spanish hegemony of written, aural, and visual Equatoguinean history.

Whilst the voices of Spanish colonists are being preserved, the voices of the colonized have been lost. We hear from a few Bubi people (one of the indigenous groups in Equatorial Guinea), but we never see them on screen. They tell us about Esaasi Eweera, a Bubi leader who tried to resist the Spanish Empire. He’s a heroic leader in their eyes, but his resistance is diminished in Spanish texts. As a result, he has almost disappeared from history, just as the place of his birth has disappeared under overgrown bush. Furthermore, whilst the film spends a lot of time documenting the Spanish voices in Madrid and showing images of Spanish missions, the only pictures of native Equatoguinean people are flashed onto the screen for less than half of a second. Their lack of representation emphasizes how the Spanish rule has lasted visually and aurally, seared onto the minds of the native and Spanish people. In contrast, the Bubi have disappeared from the past and present; they don’t even appear in the film.

Well, at least until the very last scene. To prevent enforcing the Spanish narrative the film reveals, the director, a Spanish filmmaker himself, ends A Storm Was Coming with a face on interview with Bubi scholar Justo Bolekia Boleká. It’s the first time the director shows a native Equatoguinean on screen, giving him more respect than the other characters with a face to face interview. It’s also the first time we hear the Bube language. Ending with Justo Bolekia Boleká and his daughter reciting a Bubi poem in Bube, reveals one thing the Spanish couldn’t eradicate: memory. It’s an ending statement that shows that Bubi culture still survives, despite the Spanish cultural and historical hegemony which still holds power today.

Watched on Festival Scope Pro. This film screened at the Berlinale Forum 2020.

Cries and Whispers (Sweden) – A Brutal Family Drama

Cries and Whispers Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

This is the ultimate malfunctioning family. One of the three sisters is dying, but the other two are preoccupied with their own lives. Watch this amazingly coloured film if you are looking for a brutal family drama. It’s not for the faint hearted!

Here’s three reasons to watch along with the film’s eerie soundtrack

Why Watch Cries and Whispers?

This is brutal family drama Shakespearean style
If you want to see a bit more from celebrated Swedish director Ingmar Bergman outside his big three (Seventh Seal, Persona, and Wild Strawberries)
For another exploration of life and death (this exploration is far more disturbing than Bergman’s Wild Strawberries)
To see some more beautiful colours (just as you just saw in Jude’s Scarred Hearts)

The Breakdown

The film starts with the colour red. The only other thing we can perceive is the chimes of a small bell. Next, we see shots of statues and trees in what looks like a misty churchyard. After a few cuts, the misty churchyard fades into redness.

The red themes continue into the films beautiful red and white pictures (see below).

Image result for ingmar bergman cries and whispers — Vivid red and white palette used in Cries and Whispers

The colour grades are beautifully vivid, but why does Bergman use red and white? Well as put by Bergman below, the red represents the soul. You will notice that the red fades as the film progresses – along with the souls of the characters.

“Cries and Whispers is an exploration of the soul, and ever since childhood, I have imagined the soul to be a damp membrane in varying shades of red”

Another thing that fades as the film progresses is time. From the start you’ll hear the chimes of bells and clocks ticking. You’ll even see shots of clock faces that break up the film narrative. However, just like the fading of the vivid reds (that represent the soul), the images and sounds of time will fade. Agnes, and the other characters, are losing their time on earth.

Conclusion

Cries and Whispers is another dark Bergman film to satisfy your inner demons. It explores life and death and finds emptiness in one of the most vividly coloured sets I’ve seen. Watch this one after you’ve seen Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal, and Persona to expand your film knowledge of the fantastic Ingmar Bergman.

Supa Modo – Online African Film Festival 2020

If you like heartwarming stories of communities coming together you’ll love Supa Modo. Happy tears are pretty much guaranteed.

Supa Modo focuses on Jo, a young girl with a terminal illness, who is brought home by her mother and sister from the daycare where she lives with other kids like her. The only problem is that at home, she’s far away from her friends at the daycare. Instead of watching her favorite Kung Fu movies with her friends, her mum keeps her locked up indoors and buried under blankets to keep her protected from the outside world. Jo’s situation is more heartbreaking because despite her young age, she’s acutely aware of her mortality (“we all leave someday”) and seems to sense that her end is nearer now that her mother has brought her home.

Luckily for Jo, her neighbors want to help her feel special for her last few weeks on earth. They come together to help turn her into a superhero. The stunts they pull are a lot like the real life heartwarming story of Batkid, where San Francisco came together to turn a young cancer patient into Batman for the day. It demonstrates the power of film – they help people to escape from whatever troubles their experiencing; to generate happiness; and to bring people together.

Supa Modo is also a welcome alternative to the typical African festival film that focuses on war, poverty, and aids. It’s a perfect example of the Afro-Bubblegum style (see Akasha and Rafiki): a style that expands the view of Africa and who Africans are internationally with films that make art that is fun, frivolous, and fierce. It’s also refreshing to see a young character with a terminal illness that isn’t a white American (see Fault in their Stars and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl); all young people around the world experience the same depressing illnesses. So if you’re looking for a new African film that presents a different ‘African’ story to the war, poverty, and aids stories that typically make the festival circuit, check out the heartbreaking but inspiring Supa Modo.

Unknown Land (Yemen) – Dreaming on the Island of Socotra

Unknown Land Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

How much do you know about the Arab Spring in Yemen? If you followed the news, chances are you probably know more as the residents of Socotra. That’s because this alien looking island is approx. 380km from the Yemeni mainland and therefore untouched by the mainland’s politics. Unknown Land is a portrait of life on the island and the wandering thoughts of a half dead sailor, marooned on the island following a shipwreck.

Why Watch Unknown Land?

To see the uniquely beautiful landscape of the island of Socotra
If you like listening to dreamy narratives
For it’s musical interludes
To feel truly isolated from the rest of the world

The Breakdown

At the start of Unknown Land a man is washed onto one of the pristine beaches of island of Socotra. It appears that all of his energy was sucked out of him as he struggled to stay afloat after his shipwreck. All he can do is reflect on his past life and make peace with his past choices as he approaches death.

Meanwhile in one of the town’s of Socotra, a old man listens to an old radio as he smokes from a pipe fashioned from a goat horn. The radio gives us our only connection to the outside world. We hear that a sailing boat has sunk off of the shores of Socotra and all of the crew have gone missing. We also hear about the Yemeni protests on the mainland, but the old man’s indifference shows that these are insignificant to the inhabitants of Socotra. The island is too far away to be affected by what happens on the mainland.

The island’s isolation is reflected in the serene footage of Socotra. Firstly, the alien plants and landscape are unlike anything you’ve seen before. There are trees which look like spindly umbrellas, and mountains that disappear into pristine white beaches and emerald coloured sea. Secondly, the islands inhabitants rarely get any dialogue on screen, so you never get to connect with them. This is particularly noticeable with the old man who reappears throughout the film smoking from the same goat horn with a blank stare. The director deliberately emphasises the alien setting and distant people to make the island appear even more remote and dreamy.

Conclusion and What to Watch Next

If you’re into dreamy narratives and alien landscapes, then check out Unknown Land. However, if you’re more of an action thriller fan, it’s best you check out some film difficulty level 2 or 3 films before you watch this.

For another dreamy film from the Middle East, check out Ahlaam (literally translated as dream) from Iraq. It follows a few Iraqis before and after the Iraq War. Otherwise, if you’re looking for something surreal from the Middle East, check out The Challenge. It’s your chance to live the life of the richest Sheikhs in Qatar.

Or if you’re simply looking for easy to watch films from the Middle East, check out some of the following (they’re all great):

Wadjda: A Saudi Arabian coming of age tale featuring an awesome little girl
About Elly: A slow-burning thriller from Iran (although not the film to watch before you go on a big family holiday)
Silvered Water: A portrait of war-time Syria, a great documentary constructed from first-hand footage to experience the horrors of the Syrian conflict.