1976
With a travel book in her hands and a cigarette in her fingers, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim) deliberates what shade of paint she’d like for her walls. She wants it like a sunset but not too pink. Maybe a bit blue. After all, it’s not like she goes outside too often. Even her commutes, now to her Las Cruces beach house, are isolated. It’s 1976 in Chile, three years into dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rule. While paint drips onto Carmen’s heels, defectors and accused communists fall in the streets. But hey, she’s got a home to renovate. Continue Reading →
Autobiography
Makbul Mubarak’s debut Autobiography delves deep to examine loyalty & family under dictatorship.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival)
Makbul Mubarak’s first feature Autobiography is only truly autobiographical in terms of the larger questions his upbringing in Indonesia under the Suharto regime raises about loyalty vs. fealty and whether “loyalty [is] still honorable if and when it is pledged to something monstrous”. Continue Reading →
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The characters in Mira Nair’s films walk along a knife’s edge of great change. On one side: what was; on the other: what could be. In Mississippi Masala, a young woman of Ugandan Indian heritage and a Black American man fall in love, a relationship that causes a scandal among the conservative in both communities. In Monsoon Wedding, the chaos of a gigantic Indian wedding teases out familial secrets about infidelity and abuse. And in The Namesake, a married couple who are practically strangers move from India to America and start a life together, adapting to the strange rhythms of a new country and each other. Continue Reading →
旅のおわり、世界のはじまり
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth follows Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), a young Japanese woman reporter who is in Uzbekistan filming an expose of the country’s culture for a travel show. She starts off with a smile, but soon after the discrepancies of Uzbek and Japanese culture becoming a hindrance that soon seeps deeper into mental fatigue. Continue Reading →