From: Egypt, Africa Watch: Trailer, Mubi, Prime Video, JustWatch Next: After the Battle, The Insult, Saudi RunawayContinue reading “Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story – Down With the Patriarchy”
If you love controversy with plenty of drama, check out The Crime of Father Amaro. It’s a full frontal attack on the Catholic Church in Mexico which many tried to ban. Whilst it’s not as damaging as Spotlight, it will remind you that all of us are human no matter what position we’re in.
Here’s a dramatic trailer for a dramatic film.
The opening of the film deliberately leads us to sympathize with the young Father Amaro (Garcia Bernal). Firstly, he’s charitable. When the elderly man he sits next to on the bus is robbed, he reimburses him with his own money. Secondly, he appears friendly. The local kids run around him after he playfully grabs their football and he chills with the fellow pastors to watch football on TV. He has all the makings of a great guy. However, the melodrama slowly kicks to life as he begins to take advantage of one of the parish girls who is clearly infatuated with him.
There are plenty of omens that something is going to go wrong. Firstly, you’ll notice that wherever Father Amaro is, the statues of the Saints and Jesus are always watching him. There’s a statue of Jesus that watches over him at home, from his bedside table. Furthermore, the director makes sure you notice each of the saints looking down at him whenever he is in the church by cutting to static shots of each one as he walks down the aisle. Nothing he does escapes from their view.
Secondly, the saints have a helper in a crazy old woman aptly named Dionisia after the Greek God Dionysus, the God of Wine, as well as ritual madness and religious ecstasy. It’s clear that Dionisia is both mad and madly religious. In addition, she also comparable to the witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She predicts the love affair between Father Amaro and Amelia.
The two omens (the Saints and Dionisia) are both critiques of Catholicism. Firstly, of all the sins that are committed in plain sight of the saints and then confessed the next day. And secondly, of how it is interpreted by the population (Dionisia has malformed dolls posing as Saints, and tries to exorcise her disabled neighbor).
The Crime of Father Amaro is another great controversial melodrama from Mexico. It attacks the Catholic Church it’s hypocrisies, so it’s not surprising that Catholic groups tried to ban it. Unfortunately for them, the controversy propelled it to become the biggest film in Mexico.
If you want even more religious controversy, check out Oscar winner Spotlight. However, if you want blatant provocation, check out the Mexican film Battle in Heaven. If you want to see some more great Mexican film, check out our Top Ten Mexican Films here.
Are you looking for a big film for a bit of entertainment? With music, melodrama, and some epic shots? Look no further than Majid Majidi’s Beyond the Clouds. This Iranian director is one of the best at making great family films (check out Children of Heaven). Plus, if you liked Slumdog Millionaire (another great Mumbai film made by a foreigner) you’ll love this. It’s pure entertainment.
Beyond the Clouds opens with a wide shot of a highway bridge in Mumbai. The camera tracks downwards to show us life under the highway. As Majid Majidi (the director) states, he wanted to get under the skin of the city, and right from the start he focuses on life that has escaped modernisation.
There’s a lot going on in each shot. We meet our protagonist walk-dancing along an empty path with his friend. They both hop on the back of a motorbike and zoom off down an empty straight road like cowboys riding towards the sunset. The sweeping camera movements and dance steps make it feel like you’re watching a big film. This is pure entertainment.
You’ll also be led by Majidi’s use of colours and darkness. When Amir visits his sister, she recounts all her traumas from the shadowed darkness of her bedroom. She has been ignored, emphasised by the darkness she is left in. Likewise the white sheets left to dry outside the busy clothes washers are a perfect symbol of innocence. Innocence that is fated to be stained…
This is why you go to watch films on the big screen. It has the wide sweeping shots, vivid colours, music, and plenty of melodrama. Yes, there’s a little cheesiness, but not enough to put you off. If you want to be entertained for a few hours, you can’t much go wrong watching Beyond the Clouds.
Do you want some drama? Well this film has plenty. In Murder in Pacot, Peck shines a light on all of the tensions that the earthquake revealed. You’ll hear fierce arguments from the start between Haitian’s and the NGOs, and between the middle and working classes. This is Haiti at it’s worst.
This film starts with dramatic music accompanying workers in white body suits carrying bodies pulled from the rubble. It’s 3 days since the 2010 Haiti earthquake struck and a middle-class couple are trying to get by after their house has been made almost inhabitable by officials. So they’re living in their former servants shed and need to let out their main house to try and make enough money to pay for repairs.
The person who starts renting their house is Alex, a young NGO worker from France. However, it is never clear what he does for the fictional ‘Beyond Aid’ NGO, as all he tells us is that ‘he helps’. 
The only evidence of his work are of the photos he takes, featuring him with smiling kids reminiscent of your typical ‘gap-year’ pictures (see right). These pictures are his ‘trophies’. They symbolise his delusions that he is actually helping Haiti recover from the earthquake when he is really not helping at all.
Furthermore, Alex also has a Haitian girlfriend, Jennifer, who comes to live with him in the derelict house. She has escaped from the poor south of the country which has been devastated by the earthquake and is trying to use Alex as a way to get her to Europe.
Jennifer becomes a symbol of Haiti. Like many in Haiti, she lost her family and home in the earthquake and now she is temporarily enjoying the benefits of NGO support. She lets Alex (the NGO) take advantage of her in exchange for temporary shelter and food. She also lets her ‘brothers’ into the house when Alex is away to pleasure them. However, Jennifer, like Haiti is doomed to be exploited. She can never escape the society that she was born into and is doomed to be stuck in poverty.
It’s clear that Peck (the director) doesn’t think much of the NGOs that came into Haiti following the earthquake. He makes Alex into a pathetic NGO worker who only works for the photos that he can share with his friends at home rather than actually committing to help change the country. In addition, Peck also attacks his fellow Haitians for taking advantage of Jennifer (our symbol of Haiti). She is free and beautiful, but is taken advantage of by men and the middle classes who are keen to keep her in her place in poverty.
In Simshar, 11 year old Theo’s first trip with his Maltese fisherman family goes terribly wrong when the ship sinks far from land in the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, Alex a medic on a Turkish merchant vessel that rescues a group of migrants in trouble gets stuck on the ship as the surrounding countries wage a bureaucratic war over who should take them in.
From: Malta, Europe Watch: IMDb, JustWatch, Kanopy Next: The Black Pin, The Courtyard of Songs, The Insult
There’s plenty going on in Simshar. Perhaps too much. Instead of focusing on the Simshar incident or the migrant crisis, it tries to connect both in two separate stories. However, their connection never feels strong enough to make Simshar a compelling melodrama or political drama.
Instead of being a movie that examines the migrant crisis through the Simshar incident, this movie is a dramatized depiction of the Simshar incident featuring another narrative tied to the migrant crisis. Whilst they both are related to the sea and Malta, the director doesn’t nearly do enough to tie the two stories. It feels like the migrant crisis pieces are included to make the film more relevant to the political climate in which it was made.
Even the dates of the film feel off. Whilst the Simshar incident happened in 2008, the migrant crisis didn’t fully explode until slightly later in the 21st century. This is not to say that there weren’t African migrants traversing the Mediterranean in 2008 – there were – but it was not nearly as well covered in European news in 2008 as in 2014 when this film was made. Making this movie about an international immigration crisis, and not just about a fishing tragedy, probably made Simshar a lot more marketable on the film festival circuit than if it just focused on the fishing tragedy.
However, if you’re into Mediterranean melodrama, the Simshar incident narrative might appeal to you. It’s sepia tinted scenes backed by a slightly whimsical accordion soundtrack evokes a romanticized depiction of Maltese life. It almost feels a bit nostalgic too, as if it’s looking fondly back on a time in Malta before the migrant crisis and foreign rules (fishing restrictions) threatened it. The no-nonsense Maltese family that clings onto their way of life despite national and international fishing restrictions runs against the change caused by the migrant crisis.
The romanticized portrayal of Maltese life feels slightly problematic in contrast with the underdeveloped migrant characters in the migrant crisis narrative. The Maltese characters are given screen time to build their characters through dialogue and actions, whereas the migrants are only spoken to. It means that viewers naturally sympathize with the traditional Maltese people and not the migrants as they’re actually humanized on screen. This is most evident in a scene in which one black migrant shouts “you don’t know what we’ve been through” to white Maltese hecklers. We, like the Maltese characters don’t know what they’ve been through, and unfortunately the film never tries to answer this either. As a result, Simshar’s attempt to cover the migrant crisis, whilst also dramatizing the Simshar incident feels half hearted, leaving both narratives feeling flat.
If you like warm portrayals of quaint Southern European life, check out Cinema Paradiso and The Courtyard of Songs. Both fully immerse the viewer without trying to make political statements. Or if you’d really like to see film that does manage to integrate a political statement into a small town Mediterranean film, try the gentrification narrative of Montenegro’s The Black Pin.
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