If you want to see a great film about life in post-genocide Rwanda then watch Munyurangabo. The production quality isn’t great and there’s a lot of singing that pops up now and then, but the dialogue is simple and waterproof. It doesn’t offer you much at the start, but it slowly reveals more and more as the film progresses until you realise you’re watching a much deeper film than you thought.
If you like rom-coms you’ll love Sepet. But even if you don’t there is much more to this film then a cheesy romance. Sepet exposes the class and race dynamics of Malaysia of a society that evidently still hasn’t recovered from the effects of colonialism.
Why Watch Sepet?
It’s a chick flick with substance
You’ll learn a bit about the legacy of colonialism on Malaysia
Learn about social and racial discrimination in Malaysia
The Breakdown
The romance between Jason and Orked starts after a chance encounter at Jason’s VHS stall on a busy Malay street. However, they are both from opposite ends of Malay society, Jason (or Ah-loong) is ethnically Chinese whilst Orked is ethnically Malay. As you’ll learn, this is a problem. Chinese-Malays are seen as inferior to ethnic Malays and therefore relationships between Malays and Chinese is taboo.
In case that isn’t enough to emulate Romeo and Juliet, Jason also has a much lower social standing than Orked. You might notice this from seeing each of their respective houses. Orked walks around in a big bedroom with big closets, walks up and down stairs to show that her house has two floors, and has a maid. In contrast, Jason’s house appears open to the elements with concrete floors. His family all crowd around a small table for dinner.
However, what does Jason do to help his chances of getting with Orked? He tells her his name is Jason, a ‘nice name from London.’By associating himself with Britain, he associates himself with the old rulers: British colonists. Orked doesn’t fall for this trick. She later brings up the issue of colonialism with her friend and references French colonists in Algeria. They instituted a belief that whites were superior and that the darker you were, the more inferior you were. It’s obvious that Malaysia has shared this colonial legacy the way the lighter skinned Malays treat the ‘slit-eyed’ Chinese.
Conclusion
Sepet is a great example of a chick flick that has layers. Behind the cheesy romance is a country still dealing with the legacy of colonialism. Jason and Orked are two sweet teens trying to navigate the race and social boundaries of Malaysia.
Will they stay together? Watch it here on YouTube (although some sound is missing).
In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or a homeland. Stateless follows Rosa Iris, an attorney with family who have been exiled by the country’s recent laws, as she mounts a grassroots electoral campaign to advocate for social justice. But it also follows her antithesis, Gladys Felix, an outspoken supporter of the nationalist movement, fighting for for stricter immigration control.
Like Softie, Stateless is an observational documentary that captures an activist from outside of the system fighting against corruption. Through Rosa’s story we’re exposed to the emotional trauma of the country’s recent anti-immigration policies. Simply put, they’re racist, and this is obvious right from the opening scene in which Rosa is representing a client in a government office. Her client is applying for an updated citizenship card but is being denied by the officer because “he doesn’t speak clear Spanish”. This is not an isolated incident. Rosa’s activism is also justified by her personal stakes. She has the same Haitian lineage as the people she’s representing that the country is persecuting. So she runs for government to represent people like her exiled because of their race.
However, unlike Softie, which focuses solely on Boniface’s family life and his campaign for government, Stateless also documents the other side of the fight against racism by following Gladys Felix, a member of the country’s anti-immigrant nationalist movement. We follow her as she spews racist rhetoric about the nature of Haitian immigrants and gaslights the experiences of Haitians she meets at a government built camp for sugar cane workers near the border. Whilst it feels odd to have their stories running alongside each other, it makes Stateless stand out. It allows us to see how present the threat is – not just to Rosa and her cousin Teofilo, but to all Haitian immigrants and Black Dominicans. Gladys adds a face (and very present reality) to the sometimes invisible state sanctioned racism of the Dominican Republic. She gives the audience something visual to root against.
If you’re looking for a documentary that examines racism in the Dominican Republic’s past and present through two women campaigning at either end of the political spectrum, this is the film you’re looking for.
Rewind and Play is an incredibly uncomfortable example of how the Black experience has been written out of history. Alain Gomis digs up the outtakes from an interview Thelonious Monk did with French state television in 1969. It reveals that behind what perhaps appeared to be a simple profile of a Jazz musician, is a heavily edited, whitewashed version of one of the genres largest names. His talent and experience is deliberately reduced to a few stereotypical nuggets to fit a white European audience.
Initially, you might think that Thelonious Monk is just shy, from the short answers he gives to the interviewers questions. For example, he barely responds to the interviewer when asked about his first experience in Paris. However, as the film progresses, it becomes clear why Monk isn’t responding. He’s actually already answered the question multiple times – telling the interviewer that he faced discrimination despite being the top billing at the Paris Jazz Festival in 1954, but the French interviewer doesn’t want to hear it. He dismisses his experience of racism as ‘not nice,’ ‘derogatory’ words and keeps asking the same question to get Monk to lie.
He gives short answers as he’s not allowed to say anything else. His life and music are defined by his race, but he’s prohibited from mentioning it. In order to enforce the ‘color-blindness’ of France, the interviewer and state TV have written Monk’s life instead of allowing him to tell it. As they edit out everything he says, the interviewer ends up telling the French TV audience Monk’s life instead. Monk’s experiences have been turned into cookie cutter pieces of his life to be digested by a middle-class white audience.
The short answers, just like the shots of Monk leaving the stage after his piano pieces, also convey his justified frustration. Unfittingly for the celebrity he is, Monk is captured like an animal at the zoo, turning him into a token of fluke Black genius rather than celebrating his genius completely. He’s lit up with a ton of lights, causing him to sweat profusely, and then the camera zooms in for extreme close ups as if analyzing his anatomy to try and find something to prove his inferiority. He’s the celebrity, but he’s never offered a drink or anything to make him more comfortable. Instead, it’s the white interviewer in the position of power, leering at him whilst leaning over the piano and mandating how to respond to his questions and what to play. French TV want to take his music and separate it from his life. There’s no respect for him as a person.
Alain Gomis manages to brilliantly bring out the awful experience Monk faced in Europe through the outtakes of this French interview. He reveals that there is often much more value in the outtakes than the actual chosen footage. By highlighting this injustice, Gomis forces viewers to question all portrayals of Black celebrities and experiences by the media.
A made-for-Australian-TV documentary that covers Australia’s refugee crisis that it brought to Nauruan shores. The lack of an indigenous perspective makes Nauru: The Forgotten Children problematic.
Ultimately, this isn’t really a Nauruan film. It’s a made for TV documentary about the residents of the Nauru Regional Processing Facility, aka the offshore detention facility, that Australia uses on the island. The documentary itself is produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV network and the subjects of the documentary are either refugees from Asia or Australian charity workers. However, we’re using this TV documentary as a proxy as we couldn’t find any films of any length that were made by Nauruans. This could be because they’re not readily available to watch, or perhaps because they don’t exist yet (Nauru is one of the smallest countries in the world, hosting a population of just 12,000 people). Please let us know if you can share any films from Nauru.
Despite being set in Nauru, this documentary does not interview any Nauruans for the film. This is problematic as the documentary emphasizes their ‘violent nature’ without attempting to present their perspective. Instead it chooses to show us second-hand footage of violent fights between Nauruans as evidence to back up the comments on their violent nature made by the non-native refugees and Australian charity workers. Without an indigenous perspective, the documentary encourages us to accept a stereotype that Nauruans are violent and unwelcoming. The lack of a Nauruan perspective also dehumanizes the native people, placing the pseudo-colonizers (in this case the Australian charity workers) and the Asian refugees as more respectable than the natives that have been displaced by both through recent and current history. Perhaps, as this is an Australian documentary made by Australian national television, dehumanizing the Nauruans makes the Australian use of the island as a detention center more palatable.
Unfortunately, the lacking indigenous perspective detracts from what is otherwise an interesting documentary of the refugees detained on the island by the Australian government. It conveys Australia’s disregard for legitimate refugees and their neighbors (in throwing their problems onto other countries to avoid dealing with them), as well as the sad personal experiences of some of the refugees.
What to Watch Next
For more films showcasing how ‘the West’ poorly treats their refugees, check out:
Limbo(U.K.) where refugees are sent to remote Scotland instead of Nauru
Split at the Root (U.S.) where children are split from their parents when seeking asylum
Between Fences(Israel) where African refugees are detained in the Israeli desert
Plus, you don’t even have to be a refugee for the West to treat you badly. Sitting in Limbodramatizes one man’s experience during the U.K.’s Windrush scandal.
You must be logged in to post a comment.