Monday Reviews, Part 2: Mugabe and the White African
I normally wouldn't double up on posts during the same day, especially when I've already linked to five new reviews below. However, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe and the White African, long-listed for last year's Documentary Feature Oscar and a favorite of several film writers I adore, offers an unusual combination of a film that seems like essential viewing while also deeply rankling me, in political as well as aesthetic terms. I think everyone should see it and then argue about it, providing they can resist the otherwise brave filmmakers' implied preference that we respond emotively but not historically or intellectually to the tale they are presenting. Mugabe is only playing at Facets Cinemathèque in Chicago until Thursday (thanks for this one, Facets!), so in the interest that a hometown audience might turn out for this urgent and somewhat inflammatory piece, I'm publishing my full review pronto.
Labels: African Cinema, Documentary, International, Movies of 2010, Split Opinions
posted by NicksFlickPicks at 2:30 PM
3 Comments:
I've been trying to get my hands on this for awhile. Definitly interested...but I'm not in Chicago :-(
Just finished watching the DVD before reading your review(after listening to a hagiographic interview/review on NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday and renewing my unwatched library copy for a third time). I agree with the points you raised pretty much in their entirety. An unsettling documentary that skims over the experiences of the stakeholders richest in complexites, the black Zimbabwean farmers and their families. Still, glad I saw it.
The film fails to tell a coherent story for anyone but a Zimbabwean. The farm is not described adequately. We learn they grow mangoes only through a scene late in the film of mango washing shed. Early in the film we see a guard who has been beaten, but the idea that the farm has guards has not been introduced. Nor has the threat that leads farmers to have guards been presented. These and many other holes in the narration left me unwilling to recommend it to any one.
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