Banned in Iran this experimental film uses fictionalized, grainy, home video footage to tell the story of the abusive relationship between a successful middle aged Iranian businessman and his 18 year old wife, Goli. She has just received a camcorder as his birthday present and the entire story is told from the view of this camcorder. Goli has lived with him and been his sex slave since he took her captive as a nine year old from her family in the Kurdish rebellion. Now she is pregnant, but as she starts to talk back to him and he discovers that she has learned English and started to read, he again is making her more and more a prisoner in his home.
The short documentary and second place winner of the Incluvie Short Film Festival, Gender Outlaw: A Bodysurfing Story, challenges any simplistic understanding of trans people.
The three themes of lessons learned from HBO Max's Station Eleven are the same as the pandemic: love, regret, and art.
What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.
This film manages to be simultaneously topical and timeless. Without being preachy, it highlights society’s flawed relationship with tech; insights into the complex ideas of family struggle are expertly dispersed among a perfectly paced and balanced story.
An aspect of She-Ra that I find refreshing is even though a large portion of the cast is on the LGBTQ+ Spectrum, being gay is never mentioned. While this might initially sound like a negative thing, in the show’s land of Etheria being on the gay spectrum is shown to be so common and normalized that straight isn’t the default. As much as there is to appreciate about narratives revolving around the obstacles that may come from being non-heteronormative, it’s nice to get immersed in a world where no one bats an eye at all to any sort of differing identity.
Since Season 2 of Peacemaker is currently airing, let’s revisit the movie that started it all.
