What’s so brilliant about this film is that is a narrative rebuttal to exasperated oppressors complaining “why do the marginalized ALWAYS gotta make everything about race/ religion/ oppression/ etc etc etc”
For a vast majority of its runtime, Alam is about a very normal teenagers wanting nothing to do with the political world they’ve been born into. They want to goof off, chase girls, talk shit, and do their best to keep their parents off their backs. The very existence…
Abbasi’s gaze along with incredible performances by Strong and Stan gives you this really uneasy feeling as the film progresses. It’s almost as if the characters in this film begin to be aware that they have an audience on them and start becoming more self aware in their performances regarding how they project their own image. Which then folds back into itself because these characters are real men who thrive on perception at the expense of reality so you see…
Fascists will always use any means necessary to erase and control history
Yet time and time again you keep seeing pockets of the sins of the past crawling up from the gutter.
A Pans Labyrinth in our own time
SIFF2023
What interests me most about this story is how closely it hews to our modern myth-making around how America was built by hard working immigrants enticed by the land of opportunity. This central facet of the myth is still firmly in place but Corbet distorts the lens in order to explore what dreams really cost, and who has the ability to sell dreams to desperate buyers in the first place.
Also I'm choosing to interpret the Zionism angle that can't…
