“Don’t chase me away”: The crisis of social belonging in tumultuous times
A desperate mother makes a painful sacrifice: she sends her son away to an uncertain future in order to spare him from an almost certain death.  The last thing she tells him is “Go, live and become” and these words will resonate heavily throughout [...]

The idea that you can make a musical about apartheid gives me chills. To see it on my laptop screen seems even more inappropriate. In recent times, some wise directors tried to give a new perspective on the Holocaust by using movie genres other than dramas, and they succeeded. I cannot say the same about [...]

After I reviewed Clint Eastwood’s latest movie, Invictus, an anthropologist I care deeply for sent me an email with her insights on the movie. She had this to say at the time:
“I have complex feelings about Eastwood and his libertarian politics: for me, he has never understood social processes, and works with lone, heroic figures [...]

Somewhere in West Africa, Karaba is a mean sorceress who has killed almost an entire generation of warriors. She is so loathed and feared that she lives away from the village, on top of a hill, where her only friends are dreadful walking trees and little robot-like spies that keep her informed at all times. [...]

A French team of journalists traveled to Congo, Brussels and Paris in order to reveal to the general public some of the reasons why the Democratic Republic of Congo is still a war torn zone. Instead of providing the audience with a larger picture, something I would have done instead, they focused on one commodity [...]

The State of Denial is a heartbreaking documentary that explores the difficulties HIV-infected South Africans face on a daily basis. And their inspiring struggles. It provides an insider’s view, South African born director Elaine Epstein, into the complicated factors that allow HIV/AIDS to spread at such an alarming speed.
The documentary focuses on what used [...]

Blood Monkey is a movie set in Africa which is not even worth the envelope Netflix used in order to ship the DVD to me. It is so bad that I find it is my civic duty to write this movie review and convince you never to borrow or buy the movie. Blood Monkey features [...]

Senator Obama goes to Africa is a travelogue / movie propaganda made by Bob Hercules and Keith Walke. The directors follow the then senator Obama through this short African odyssey. In this documentary, Barack Obama visits the city of Kisumu in western Kenya, the capital of the country, Nairobi, as well as South Africa and [...]

Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls Is a 2008 direct-to-DVD movie  loosely based on H. Rider Haggard’s classic novel King Solomon’s Mines. It stars South African actor Sean Cameron Michael as Quatermain. The movie was actually shot in South Africa, with mostly local actors and the story is somewhat similar to the original book. Quatermain is [...]

There are no easy solutions in life, and Disgrace, the movie adaptation of Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel of the same name, tends to express that reality more dramatically than any movie I have watched in recent years.
Before going into details about the movie, I would to stress the fact that I [...]