A local company owned by a shrewd millionaire, Thabiti, offers young people the opportunity to find work abroad. Mvera, a self-centred woman who is on a mission to search for her lost mother, and also one of the applicants, soon discovers they are all trapped in an organ trafficking ring. She is forced on a hero’s journey as she tries to make it back home to warn the villagers about Thabiti.
As this critic continues to look back at some of this Summer's films I have taken in, I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most overall unsettling trends in Hollywood over the last several years.....sequels, reboots, and remakes. Look, I am all for seeing more than one film for certain originals that made a splash, ie: "Jurassic Park", "Pirates of the Caribbean", "Transformers", etc.
I understood post-memory as passing down stories and images of one’s experiences that are not your own. For decades, rape has been depicted in cinema through a third-person perspective, leaving the viewer to observe rape; not to experience it.
This little Netflix film was very inspirational. It passes the Bechdel test, and features a different worldview with rural Indian representation.
Suppressed intergenerational family trauma and healing, warm welcome to the Marvel Cinematic Universe team, and Awkwafina's humor really make this film the real MVP.
The 2019 film, Vai, takes us through eight stories across the islands of Oceania. The settings are unbelievably beautiful, the cast is beautiful, the languages are beautiful, and the stories are beautiful…but heartbreaking.
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.
