Rachid Bouchareb’s indelible and haunting short film The Colonial Friend is a muted, yet thoughtful and compelling true historical account of the 1944 massacre by the French army of indigenous African soldiers who sought to collect wages for their military service. Centered on a Cameroonian farmer, Abi, who, like many able-bodied indigenous men from colonized […]
Capturing the point of intersection between the conformity of adolescence and the independence that comes with maturity, Emmanuel Bourdieu’s Poison Friends is an intelligent and insightful, if oddly sterile and empirically rendered chronicle of academic life as seen through the perspective of a loose knit group of university-aged students at the transformative stage when they […]
Ostensibly an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s baroque fairytale, Bluebeard is also a distilled and densely layered exposition on Catherine Breillat’s recurring preoccupation with socioeconomic and sexual politics. Structured as a tale within a tale, the film alternates between past and present, childhood and adolescence, fiction and reality. On one level is bright, cherubic Catherine (Marilou […]
There is a moment in The Last Mistress when the Comtesse d’Artelles (Yolande Moreau), after having played her part in mitigating the scandal surrounding the dashing, but inscrutable rogue, Ryno de Marigny’s (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) unresolved romantic entanglement with his long term mistress – and, consequently, enabling his marriage to the Marquise’s granddaughter and heir, […]
The national unrest and confusion following the massacre of King Birendra and the Nepalese royal family by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra in 2001, and the subsequent dissolution of parliament by the ascended king, Gyanendra in response to an escalating Maoist insurgency, set the tone for Julie Bridgham’s compelling and incisive portrait of a broad […]
In 1998, photojournalist Zana Briski came to Calcutta’s red light district to live in the subhuman conditions of a typical area boarding house among the prostitutes in order to chronicle their existence and soon became drawn into the world of their children who, because of their parents’ involvement in the sex trade, are denied acceptance […]