It Begins. Algeria submits "Papicha" for the Oscars

by Nathaniel R

We were waiting to see which European country would be first to announce before publishing our famous Oscar submission pages. But an African country surprised us by being first up to bat. Word is in that Algeria will submit Papicha as their Oscar entry this year.

Papicha centers on a teenager (her nickname being the title) who dreams of being a fashion designer despite conservative bans. The film, a debut from the 41 year-old director Mounia Meddour, premiered at Cannes. No word yet on US distribution. This is the second consecutive submission from Algeria by a female director. Only two previous women have been submitted by Algeria: Yamina Bachir (Rachida, 2002) and later her daughter Yasmine Chouikh (Until the End of Time, 2018) 

Papicha's trailer, and more on Algeria, Africa, and the Oscar race after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Berlinale 2019: Three queer selections, a doc from the Sudan, and one walkout

Hallo! Seán here reporting from the 2019 Berlinale. It's the first big European film festival of the year, where new work premieres, deals get made, parties go on (and on) and where cinephiles prove their love of film by standing around in the freezing cold. I'm doing my best "Berlinale business bear" I'm here in an offical capacity: getting a first look at the queer TEDDY titles (which we'll talk about after the jump) and the short films for festivals in London and Dublin, but aside from that I'm also here to enjoy the film festival experience i.e. standing in the wrong line and walking in completely cold to something truly bizarre and extraordinary.

The Berlinale has many distinct and diverse sections, each with their own different forms and appeal. As someone who (a year later) is only a year later beginning to figure this out, allow me to impart my knowledge on the sections before we jump into the queer selection...

Click to read more ...

The 50 Greatest Films by Black Directors

Slate magazine has drawn up an interesting list of great black films, the twist being that they have to have been directed by a black person rather than about the black experience so out go Old Hollywood musicals like Carmen Jones or Cabin in the Sky or Oscar favorites like Sounder.  In the wake of recent conversations about Hollywood's power structures and overwhelming whiteness, Slate assembled a field of critics and filmmakers and scholars to produce the list.

Eve's Bayou

I need to get cracking on my gaps in knowledge from this list, especially because of the titles I've seen from this list several were great and the ones I didn't personally connect to were still interesting (Night Catches Us) or memorable (Eve's Bayou - I've been meaning to give that another shot now that I'm older). Unsurprisingly Spike Lee has the most titles with six. Curiously, though I've seen many Spike Lee joints (and tend to like them - I'd have included Chi-Raq on this list), I've only seen half of his titles that actually made it (gotta get to Mo' Better Blues, Crooklyn, and When the Levees Broke soon). The list is after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Berlin: Tunisia's "Hedi"

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. For his first dispatch, he’s reviewed Tunisia’s Hedi

Although Hedi (Inhebbek Hedi) is Mohamed Ben Attia’s first feature film, it comes with the pedigree of being co-produced by the Dardenne brothers, and it’s not difficult to see why they were drawn to this story. Hedi (Majd Mastoura), a 25-year-old, Tunisian car salesman, would fit neatly into the gritty, realist universes of the brothers’ working class protagonists. A slow-burn study of an unhappy young man on the verge of getting married, Hedi builds up to an intensely emotional, rewarding finale that is once personal and political.

Under the overbearing, towering influence of the family’s matriarch, Hedi is the second of two sons whose father has passed away. Whereas the elder son has moved to France and lives with his French wife and daughter – much to his mother’s chagrin – Hedi remains in Tunisia, working a job he neither enjoys, nor seems to flourish in. He is engaged to be married to Khedija (Omnia Be Ghali), a modest, traditional girl whose dreams about married life and her insistence on celibacy are equally endearing and claustrophobic to Hedi. Yet, what seems like a monotonous, unsatisfying existence is set ablaze when Hedi meets Rim (Rym Ben Messaoud), a travelling dancer at a local hotel, mere days before his planned wedding.

Mastoura plays Hedi with stoic detachment, an approach to the character that allows the audience to project onto him a whole range of emotions that Hedi cannot express. As the film progresses, and different facets of the oppressive environment and communal culture in which he lives are revealed, the character, and Mastoura’s performance, become increasingly more identifiable. The movie isn’t as generous to its secondary characters, rarely affording any of them the chance to establish themselves without relation to Hedi, but the uniformly strong performances of the cast, particularly the warm and enchanting Ben Messaoud’s create fully realized characters.

Ben Attia’s sharply constructed film uses visual markers to put us in Hedi’s headspace, with subtle shifts in the rhythms of the film’s handheld cinematography and brief glimpses into Hedi’s hand-drawn comic strips. His rooted but trembling ties to anachronistic traditionalism become symbolic of the country at large. This is a piercing character study, a deeply felt film about the complications and confusions of youth that, through its focused lens, rewards the audience with a story about the broader implications of liberation from tradition, on a personal level and, allegorically, for the North African country at large.