Along with Francesco Rosi's Illustrious Corpses, it's another film based on leftist conspiracy theory at the time that turns out to be true (the case of Mehdi Ben Barka). Very realistically grim, to the point that we actually witness on screen the portrait of a CIA agent under the cover of an American "leftist" participating in the chilling and nasty plot of the imperialists, and works as an absolutely potent assault on nonsensical bourgeois fantasies of some Western leftists (what…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
This Is My Country 1984
There’s a writing discussing about the detail that the mother and her newborn are unable to leave the hospital because the father can’t pay the bill (she also desperately tries to write a letter to her ex-military father living in the U.S. to ask for money) as an allegory of Philippines being held hostage by international financial institution like IMF and the World Bank, and it actually makes a lot of sense. This is one of many films using the…
Popular reviews
More-
In Search of Famine 1981
An actress plays a game where she asks the film crew about some photos of starving people and from which famines they are taken. A villager mocks how this filmmaking group accidentally causes a famine in the village where they shot a movie about famine. With just a few minor details but these have already established what maybe the most sardonic yet politically sensitive work I have seen from Mrinal Sen so far. In the treatment of 1943 Bengal famine,…
-
Hunters' Sense of Touch 1995
Honestly, the most compelling quality about Hunters’ Sense of Touch is how a pink film so deliberately abstract and ambiguous can somehow capture incredibly well repressive obsessive feelings and yearning like this. I can say very few films are able to strike at the very core of homosexual desire as Hunters, and this is a no small accomplishment for a straight filmmaker. Normally, in this type of abstract works in queer cinema (and even in previous queer works of Sato),…
