The lockdown continues and so do the recommendations!

Sand Storm (2016) by Elite Zexer

Sand Storm is a family drama that takes place in a Bedouin village in the Israeli desert. It is the first feature film of the Israeli director Elite Zexer and was well awarded on the film festival circuit in 2016. It is one of those easily overlooked films from the World Cinema scene. Although about a culture that is very far from our own, it draws us into a story that opens deeply effecting emotions and predicaments in life. It teaches us about difficult life choices that need to be made and about how and why these choices sometimes seem impossible to make.

The film tells the story of two women, Jalila, a women in her early Forties, whose husband just has married a second, younger wife, and her 18-year old daughter Layla, whose secret love affair just is revealed. Both enter into deep emotional difficulties because of their loyalties to their family traditions and culture. They try to solve those problems very differently, but both fail. If they wish to survive they will need to borrow each other’s eyes for making the choices they are confronted with. In the background there is a younger sister, who, when it is time for her, might be freer to make more radical choices. For certain deep cultural changes to happen, it might ask for a new generation. Lovely film!

Strong Island (2017) by Yance Ford

Strong Island is a documentary film about the 1992 murder on director Yance Ford’s brother William. It is about the shattering effect this event had on the Ford family.  It is about social injustice and racial prejudice. William was shot by a white car mechanic, apparently after a petty argument. The killer claimed self-defense and the Grand Jury decided not to indict him. The Ford family was left behind with this incomprehensible verdict. 

The strength of the documentary is that it is incredibly personal. We see and hear the raw emotions and pain in the faces and the words of the director himself, his mother and his sister, when they tell their story of a black family, relatively well-situated and upwardly mobile, and yet so caught into the predicament of being black in America. Ford is driven by the sense that William’s story needs to be told to the world, so that his family possibly can leave it behind and move on. A meditative, powerful film!

Shirkers (2018) by Sandy Tan

Shirkers was the title of a teenage cult film made in 1992 in Singapore by three friends, one of them being Sandy Tan. The footage was taken by an American collaborator, who disappeared with it. Now twenty years later Sandy Tan lives and works as a novelist in L.A. She runs into the unseen footage of the film and decides to return to Singapore to revisit memories of her youth and to finish the film. This is a very creative, irresistable story that works on many different levels. She paints a moving portrait of a formative personal disappointment with lots of observations on creativity, betrayal of trust, lost opportunity and love of art.

Shirkers is a film that should not be explained, but experienced. So, please, give it a chance!

Rinus, April 2020

Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash

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