A Touch of Zen is one of the most inventive martial arts films you’ll see. It combines a bunch of genres, including the historic Samurai films of Japan, haunted house horror, and the classic hero’s journey adventure films. Plus it adds it’s own styles have been hugely influential on later martial arts films. There’s plenty of epic widescreen landscape shots, bouncing characters (that you’ll also see most noticeably in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and innovative editing to create some stunning CGI-free action sequences. On top of that, it focuses on a powerful female fugitive and an unstoppable Buddhist monk. It’s all shot from the perspective of a regular guy like us to bring us into the action. It’s one of the best wuxia films you’ll see.
If you’re looking for a dark portrayal of life in Manila, you’ve come to the right place. In Manila there’s social problems, political corruption, and injustice hidden behind the tropes of the Hollywood noir genre. You’ll meet a few characters of the city, but the focus is always on the city of Manila and its sounds, sights, and life.
In Bantu Mama, a French-Cameroonian woman is arrested in the Dominican Republic for attempting to smuggle drugs back home. However, she’s rescued by the Dominican underworld, sheltering in one of Santo Domingo’s notorious neighborhoods with a semi-orphaned family until she can make her escape.
It’s clear from the start that Bantu Mama is meant to appeal to the audiences at Western film festivals. Like European film festival fare, the images look dark and gloomy, and they carry the bulk of the narrative weight, with the sparse dialogue only covering the basic gaps the images can’t provide. There’s also a lot of movement in every shot, with no tripod or steadicam shots, and the short shot length and fast cutting verges on the speed of montage, especially in the opening. All these stylistic choices match the lean, moody looking standard of the big film festivals in Europe and North America, contrasting with the slower paced, dialogue focused African films that dominate the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.
This is not to say that Bantu Mama is unoriginal; it is. Firstly, it’s incredibly efficient, telling a complete story with limited dialogue in just 77 minutes. Secondly, it’s propelled by a brilliant soundtrack of regional African music and Dominican trap. Both genres mesh together to represent the cultural dialogue with Africa that Emma, the French-Cameroonian fugitive, opens to the Afro-Latino children that shelter her. The soundtrack also creates one of the film’s most memorable moments – a visual example of this cultural link – in which Cuki is transformed into a Maasai dancer with the help of African music and Emma. In this moment, the music transports them from their dangerous neighborhood to an imagined Pan-African utopia. This is just one moment in a handful in which the soundtrack and Emma link the Dominican Republic with Africa. The cultural dialogue they create make Bantu Mama unique.
If you’re a fan of film festivals in North America or Europe and want to see a lean, music-powered cultural exchange linking the underworld of the Dominican Republic to Africa, Bantu Mama is the film you need to watch.
You must be logged in to post a comment.