This extraordinary first feature by Belgian director Philippe van Leeuw about a woman who survives the Rwandan genocide is a contender for the New Directors Prize and deserves to win it - it is a brilliant film, absolutely authentic and uncompromising. The performance of Rwandan survivor and singer Ruth Nirere is so rigorous an enactment of grief, disorientation and breakdown it is just astonishing to watch. Nirere plays bereaved mother Jacqueline who returns after being trapped in a ransacked house to her cottage to find her children murdered by Hutu gangs; she is subsequently hounded out of the village by its new occupants before she can prepare their bodies for burial. The rest of the film traces the trajectory of her psychological condition as she evades capture, encounters another refugee in the forest and nurses him back to health, and subsequently begins to slide, after these initially life-affirming gestures, into a kind of emotional category of being you have probably never experienced but know on an instinctive level is absolutely correct, ie. commensurate with the facts. It really has to be seen to be believed. The effect is elegantly achieved, without recourse to melodrama or histrionics, so we are afforded what I think is the incredibly privileged opportunity of considering what it means to encounter a world which has turned, in every conceivable way, upside-down and inside-out. We can sense it in Jacqueline's complicated response to her companion's recovery, which heralds a kind of false return to 'normalcy' she finds intolerable, and in her willful self-exposure and ultimate return to the site of her original, lacerating dislocation. The film is an assured, mature, compassionate reaction to what is at bottom an unthinkable, impossible dimension of our history on this planet. As if this wasn't enough, cinematography is inspired as well. Look out for the shot of Jacqueline's unspeakably tormented face intersected by the silver threads of her upturned necklace, with inverted crucifix on her forehead. This one shot sort of says it all.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
SFIFF53: The Day God Walked Away
This extraordinary first feature by Belgian director Philippe van Leeuw about a woman who survives the Rwandan genocide is a contender for the New Directors Prize and deserves to win it - it is a brilliant film, absolutely authentic and uncompromising. The performance of Rwandan survivor and singer Ruth Nirere is so rigorous an enactment of grief, disorientation and breakdown it is just astonishing to watch. Nirere plays bereaved mother Jacqueline who returns after being trapped in a ransacked house to her cottage to find her children murdered by Hutu gangs; she is subsequently hounded out of the village by its new occupants before she can prepare their bodies for burial. The rest of the film traces the trajectory of her psychological condition as she evades capture, encounters another refugee in the forest and nurses him back to health, and subsequently begins to slide, after these initially life-affirming gestures, into a kind of emotional category of being you have probably never experienced but know on an instinctive level is absolutely correct, ie. commensurate with the facts. It really has to be seen to be believed. The effect is elegantly achieved, without recourse to melodrama or histrionics, so we are afforded what I think is the incredibly privileged opportunity of considering what it means to encounter a world which has turned, in every conceivable way, upside-down and inside-out. We can sense it in Jacqueline's complicated response to her companion's recovery, which heralds a kind of false return to 'normalcy' she finds intolerable, and in her willful self-exposure and ultimate return to the site of her original, lacerating dislocation. The film is an assured, mature, compassionate reaction to what is at bottom an unthinkable, impossible dimension of our history on this planet. As if this wasn't enough, cinematography is inspired as well. Look out for the shot of Jacqueline's unspeakably tormented face intersected by the silver threads of her upturned necklace, with inverted crucifix on her forehead. This one shot sort of says it all.
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