Apr 15 2005
New Motto
“I am the nagging voice in the night”
Wanted to write a bit about this, but at work and will just sketch out ideas before I forget them later today.
…
I’ve recently watched two foreign films from Africa (which I understand
is like saying I watched two films from Asia and one’s a HK action
flick while the other’s a Japanese movie about death — which I will
write about later (Mr. Kore-Eda and his two movies (Afterlife and
Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shiranai))), namely
Moolaadé and Hotel Rwanda.
Both of these movies were profoundly moving, and in some ways have
similar themes about humanity, technology, and stigma in cultures,
though they take very different paths on this topic.
Moolaadé is a movie about a village in Burkina Faso, which I believe is a French-speaking North African country. The director is male and from Senegal,
a nearby country. Essentially, the movie is about some of the
women taking a stand against female circumcision by providing
protection (the Moolaadé) to the young girls who fled just prior to the
ceremony. This provokes a chain of events that affect everything
from the ideas of religion and cleanliness to gender roles in the
community and the social structure of families. There’s a
heartbreaking scene (to me) where a man is force to beat his favorite
wife because of her "willfulness" to essentially defend his manhood and
tears are streaming down his face. Strong shit.
Hotel Rwanda is about the 1994 genocide that lead to Tutsis being
slaughtered by the Hutus. The main character is a Hutu man who
works in a hotel who decides to harbor Tutsi refugees as the violence
begins in the country. He has to call in all sorts of favors and
make agonizing decisions – like discussing his wife must do if they are
overrun by Hutus – that almost come true again and again in the movie.
Moolaadé – Burkina Faso? Female circumcision, Radio
Hotel Rwanda – Rwanda, Radio
Roles of religion and stigma in both? How does modernization affect em in both? Portrayal of foreigners/caucasians?
