updated on 7/09/2010

Read our film reviews for a first introduction to a new world culture and maybe one sparks your interest to see that film yourself.

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REVIEWS (In alphabetical order)                   

A-B-C4 D-E-F4 G-H-I4 J-K-L4 M-N-O4 P-Q-R4 S-T-U4 W-X-Y-Z4 VARIOUS 4

LATEST ADDED FILM REVIEWS:
Eyes Wide Open     Inglorious Bastards    Persopolis              A Serious Man     Soul Boy             

BAB’ AZIZ                                                    Director: Nacer Khemir                   TUNISIA

Culture Wrap review:
A visually stunning film anchored in the beauty of Sufism, the mystical side of Islam or maybe even pre-Islam, as some followers claim. This tale definitely shows their are many ways and paths to find God and yourself. It’s a moving fable that pulls you into the world of dervishes and takes you along on a journey of self-discovery.

We’ll soon report more about this film and the filmmaker.

Culture Wrap review:

A beautiful film about a fairly unknown tradition in Islam, practiced by fakirs in the eastern part of India. Worshipping man or God in man, the tradition preaches equality and condemns the cast system. Men and women worship together and each other. Its practitioners, however, are a minority and outcasts in Indian society. The film is one of those gems that shows us another face of Islam.

To know more about Islam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam
 

Read more about this film: http://www.idfa.nl/idfa_en_filmdescription.asp?filmid=25669

Culture Wrap review:

An impressive film chronicling the first year of the bilingual and bi-national elementary school for Arab and Jewish children in a small Arab village. The trials, tribulations and triumphs of both teachers, parents and students draws you right into the complexity of Palestinian and Israeli lives. We see parents on both sides struggle with their own prejudices and beliefs and children who are caught in the middle. A thought-provoking film. A must see. Soon, we will report more about this film.

To get involved in a similar project, check out our website:
http://www.culturewrap.org/WORLD_CULTURES/How_to_help/how_to_help.html

A former Thai boxer, turned Buddhist monk, Phra Khru Bah Neua Chai Kositto (also known as the Tiger Monk), travels widely on horseback, fearlessly dispensing prayers, health care, education and tough love to villagers far from the protection and support of governments or non-governmental organizations.
With his Golden Horse Temple he's built an orphanage, school and clinic - a haven
for the children of the region, who see him as a shaman, father figure and coach.

Read more.

Culture Wrap review: A beautiful film that takes you right into the lives of those children, some of whom leave their parents at an early age to be raised by this amazing monk. Their trials, their tears and their triumphs are moving testimonies of how the patience and sometimes loving impatience of one man can move mountains.

Now also at the Palm Springs International Film festival from January 4-15.

to the filmmakers

to the Golden Horse Temple

After watching 'Inglorious Basterds,' we digest Nazis getting their heads scalped, their crainiums being clubbed with baseball bats and brains blown off by all sorts of weapons.

Why?

"BECAUSE IT'S SO MUCH FUN," he once quipped in a TV interview when asked why he makes such gratuitously violent movies.

Is "Inglorious Basterds" a "FUN" film? It is a brilliant, funky, brash and amoral picture that reminds us we are there to be entertained, but occasionally unnerved. We are a part of the action. He is the film world's equivalent to Berthold Brecht.

Tarantino clearly is having so much fun, but he is also a film scholar. His understanding of the antecedent film directors from various countries are apparent in his interviews, and his films. There are movie references aplenty througout the film, some subtle and others not so. He even interplays actors acting within the film itself. He proves he also knows basic tenets of theatre; they are characters in search of an author. Where is Pirandello when you need him?

Tarantino's film company "A Bande Apart" steals its name frm Jean Luc Godard's 2nd film. "Inglorious Basterds" is clearly a sensationalized "European" film, interestingly juxtaposing highbrow art (German and French Cinema of the 1920s-1940s) with low brow exploitation films that Tarantino often cites as his favorites.

I read that only 30% of the dialogue in "Inglorious Basterds" is in English, as French, Italian and German dominate and are employed in the varying European countries whom partook in World War II. It seems that as a purist, Tarantino resents certain American filmmakers who shot their period-pieces like Germany or France for instance, often in English, with a slight accent, suggesting they are from these countries. He finds this inauthentic.

I write Tarantino is arrogant because he would be the first to tell and show his audience what he is doing as wholly innovative. But, unlike arrogant directors who are clueless, Tarantino navigates the film canvas effortlessly. And without apology.

I'm sure when Picasso employed Cubism or Max Beckmann employed German Expressionism, both were mindful that their art was expressed loudly to the world. Tarantino, though, seems to resent American filmmakers who merely try to make an art-house international films in countenance only, lacking whole research. This film took over ten years to make.

Tarantino chose French as the dialogue in Vichy, France not solely due to its mileu, but he sought his own "Bande a Parte," an homage to other great European cinema he often idolizes and cites, surely worthier than recent films. The fact that a crucial aspect of the film deals with a French moviehouse, and European plot points involving European cinema are no small coincidences to Tarantino's world cinema obsession.

To discuss the film's plot points would be tiresome. See it for yourself. But the cinematography by the brilliant Robert Richardson (who often works with Tarantino, Scorsese and Oliver Stone), is worth noting. The man who brought us "JFK" and "The Aviator" knows film stock better than anyone I know, as I can recognize his photography immediately.

Tarantino is arrogant because he wants the audience to remember it is his film. That is not bad per say, as Truffaut noted the auteur (writer-director) must be the patriarch of his film, in tone and in style. Tarantino sought to revise history with this demented and brilliant fable, and by the film's outrageous (too miniscule a word) finale, he is in fact, toying with the medium and all its tricks.

As a Jewish person I hardly perceived this the ultimate revenge story against the Nazis. In fact, I thought the film worked as a fable alone and one should not lose focus that the "characters" Goebbels and Hitler are mere just that in the fable. Clearly, though, Tarantino wants us to believe it is in our subconscious.

I could have done without heads being scalped, but perhaps Tarantino sought to comment on "the horrors of war."

Nah, probably as he once said, he left it in, "BECAUSE IT'S SO MUCH FUN."

He may be right.

Culture Wrap review:
A beautiful personal film from director Marcus Vetter. We follow the filmmaker to Anatolia, where he will meet his Turkish father, who met Marcus’ German mother many years ago while working as an immigrant worker in Germany, but did not stay to get to know his only son. It’s a touching portrait in which we learn how an arranged marriage in Turkey can have emotional setbacks on family life, but most of all how two men who didn’t know each other become father and son after more than 30 years.

The film clearly shows how many lives are affected when cultures mix, both the negative and the positive sides.

Culture Wrap review:
An interesting film that shows how the Ikpeng Indians after their contact with the white men weren’t protected as they were promised, but soon were relocated and lost their land. It’s interesting to see how the elders in the tribe reenact the “First Contact” with the white men for the younger generation. It is painful to see how inevitable the gap grows between old and young, as the old yearn to return to the old land with which the younger generation has no emotional connection. Through the Q&A after the film at the film festival however, we learn that through the film and the reenactment the younger generation gets more involved in the plight to reclaim their birth land.

The film was made with the support of the organization Video nas Aldeias, who support indigenous filmmakers to tell the stories from their culture.

For  more info on Video nas Aldeias: http://www.videonasaldeias.org.br/abertura/index.html
World sales: www.zarafa-films.com

Persepolis: In Search of an Iranian Identity                           Culture Wrap review by  Jared M. Feldschreiber

What a panoramic, impressionistic and surrealistic journey is Vincent Paronanaud and Marjane Satrapi’s “ Persepolis ,” a poignant coming-of age story of an Iranian girl experiencing the tumultuous changes in her country and abroad. Shot in mostly a deceptively simple black and white animation (with occasional colorful images), the film traces Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography beginning with the Iranian Revolution through the 1980’s. The viewer is left in a hypnotic daze watching this kaleidoscopic, even Dali-esque whirlwind portrait. Despite the dense and serious undercurrents of an Iranian conflicted by her country’s regimented structure (and her oft-“Western” influences), the film works as animation since it seeks to be both true to the graphic novel approach as well as satirizing the very nature of government as merely comical.

Marjane is a precocious tomboy with a vivid imagination aspiring to be Bruce Lee. In between playing with her friends and making grandiose plans for her future, she learns from her middle-class, politically active family about the Shah’s autocratic regime. The black-and-white animation is befitting since it depicts how an outmoded, perhaps archaic nature of a country that is so medieval and dictatorial can be so difficult for a young, spirited girl. Brilliantly spliced within the film is her obvious love for the “West” with songs by Iron Maiden, even “Eye of the Tiger.” One sequence involving a depiction of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s with an Iron Maiden song bellowing in the background might be homage to Forrest Gump with Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ suggesting the absurdity of war and chaos.

The anchor of the film, and Marjane, is her grandmother, voiced by Danielle Darrieux, who continually inspires her granddaughter to live a wholesome and free-spirited life. In an unlikely parallel the grandmother resembles Laurence Fishburne’s Jason Styles in “Boyz in the Hood,” the father of Tre, who warns his son of the dangers and travails of living on the worst streets of L.A. He is the anchor figure for his son in much the same way as Marjane’s encouraging grandmother. Marjane is convinced to ask for more out of life knowing there is a liberated world outside of Iran .

Persepolis is a wry film that is just as revealing as it is thrilling. It is hard to conceive of a more inventive mode of storytelling, perhaps comparable (though different media) to the graphic novel, Maus: a Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman., as of yet never turned into a film. In that story, Spiegelman recounts the struggle of his father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew, drawing largely on his father's recollections of his experiences. It depicts the effects of war felt through generations of a family, as the Jews are depicted as mice and Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, and so forth. Steven Spielberg once said the hardest aspect of making ‘Schindler’s List’ was that he had to “explain the ineffable”- so that is why the absurdity of the graphic novel Maus works so well and clearly so does Persepolis. It is remarkably inventive and captivating in its allegorical depiction of repressive Iran . It serves as a visual study-aid, clearly surrealistic in its ability to bring up images from the subconscious. Marjane’s journey is continually juxtaposed, reformed and even metamorphosed to fit the plotline.

Culture Wrap review:
A visually stunning film, giving you a fascinating insight in Chinese culture and the changes it went through over a period of 40 years, told through the moving story of a bus driver assistant.

 A Serious Man                                                                                Culture Wrap review by Jared M. Feldschreiber

In "Annie Hall," Woody Allen said he cheated on his existentialism exam at NYU when he "looked into the soul of the person sitting next to him." I've come to the conclusion it is worth looking into life's biggest questions. It's a humbling experience, and yes also conversely a bit intellectually selfish.

I recently watched "Crimes and Misdemeanours" and "A Serious Man," feeling compelled to compare the two, but just wasn't sure how. Both films ask the big questions, and gives us the freedom and versatility to rush to the philosophy departments of our libraries and bookstores for back-up research.

Most of us want to perfect ourselves and we want to know that we're a part of something greater than ourselves. When we think we're beyond our limits, life has a funny way of morphing us to remind we are all still imperfect and human. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. The Book of Job reminded us that, as have countless works of literary and cinematic masterpieces.

"Crimes and Misdemeanours" seems to have all of the makings of brilliant allegory: a blind rabbi, an immoral wealthy "philanthropic" doctor, a superficial and mean spirited blowhard, a truth-seeking documentarian forced to compromise his integrity. I love this movie, but always feel disheartened by its conclusion. Bad things shouldn't happen to good people and good things shouldn't happen to bad people; it just isn't fair. But realistic? Absolutely.

 In the film, Allen''s character says the perfect tragedy would be for the supposed evildoer (a murderer for instance) ultimately turns himself to the authorities because in a world absent of a god, this act is seen as even more tragic; it would be always be in his conscience any way, and the tragedy lies in him knowing he always has wronged and sinned, regardless of his fate. Knowing you are wicked is a form of human tragedy. And yet, our villain doesn't and is culpable with an even worse crime of never feeling any sort of guilt at all.

"A Serious Man" gives us pause when the end credits roll; most of us want to be a serious, good hearted person, but life works in unpredictable ways. We're meant to never know our impending fate, or what happens to our soul, but we trudge along with our own code and logic. It's funny that the Coen Brothers never allow our protagonist to utter the words "I am a Serious man" clearly; he fumbles it time and time again, perhaps suggesting we all strive to be a serious person, but we don't know how. Also, we do not know our fate, and that being moral and "serious" are even arbitrary, as we allow ourselves believing we are doing the right thing. Our greatest teachers (Rabbis, etc), are merely foils to our own tragedies in life, be it small ones or big ones because they are also imperfect. Being ethically Jewish doesn't always translate to living a serious or even a blanketly ethical life.

I'm curious about the various facets of life, but I know my fate is unknowable. I seek for a better world, but I do know brave angels with the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders whom perform their heroic deeds have thus far trumped me.

Being human, to me, though, is the most wonderful thing.

 Culture Wrap review by Francoise Vaal
The location in which this story is filmed, Kibera, the biggest slum area in Nairobi, is very prominent in this film. One really gets a good feeling of what it must be like, living in this vast overcrowded slum area. You might think that it is enough to get depressed, yet Essuman was capable of making it light instead of heavy.
The story is about a young boy whose father has lost his soul. The boy is determined to retrieve the soul and is helped by a young girl from another tribe. He visits a witch and goes on a quest to restore the soul in his father. He seizes all opportunities and fights every ordeal.
It is a sixty minute film but all essentials are paid attention to: the slum atmosphere, a quest, a short journey, several opponents who dislike the girl from the other tribe, intertribal issues, heroism and eventually teenage love. This shows that you don't always need three hour films to tell an interesting story.

ONE FINE DAY e.V. is a Berlin-based non-profit organisation founded by Marie Steinmann and Tom Tykwer in 2008.

The organisation's aim is to introduce children and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds in some of the world's poorest countries to the imaginary spaces offered by art and artistic exploration.

Many schools and educational projects in the so-called Third World lack the resources to offer classes in arts - be it painting, music, drama or dance.

In close co-operation with the British NGO, ANNO'S AFRICA, ONE FINE DAY e.V. intends to implement a lasting infrastructure through which can change the situation and provide a lasting improvement. Go to Website

Culture Wrap review:
An amazing feature film debut from this young Egyptian director. Egypt’s official entry for the Foreign Film Academy Awards. A special treat for me, as watching this film brought me flashbacks of my own trips to Egypt in the early 1980’s. Eating at Cairo’s famous restaurant Groppi, sitting on the rooftops, watching the lights and the people of Cairo.
The film shows the lives of several people from different classes and different religious backgrounds, and gives us some insight about the relationship between Muslims and Copts in modern Egyptian society. It’s one view on Egyptian life from the views of modern Egyptians as well as from those who live their life closer to more traditional ways of life. It’s a film that doesn’t shy away from controversial subject matter. A must see.

movies to watch_________

This is just a sample of some world culture films and/or DVD bonus materials with cross-cultural elements. A more complete list of reviews will be featured here soon.

australia

Vanishing Cultures: Bushmen of the Kalahari: The San people, more commonly known as Bushmen, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa. They have lived for 80,000 years as hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert, and are well-known for their expert survival skills in a harsh environment.  Their unique clicking languages and their astonishing method of healing through trance dancing have made them a source of worldwide fascination. But these peaceful people are not immune from the problems of modern society, and have faced oppression and eviction from their homelands for years.

“Vanishing Cultures: Bushmen of the Kalahari” visits the troubled San community whose once thriving culture is now facing extinction. This one-hour documentary takes a never-before-seen look at the fascinating history, the brutal struggles, and the seemingly impossible challenges of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. GET INVOLVED.