The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review – the legacy of a dissident and inspirational surrealist author

Brief film looks at the intense flowering of essays by the Caribbean feminist and anti-imperialist who saw surrealism as a revolutionary mode This brief work from New York film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is the equivalent of a platform performance in the theatre: a look at the works of Caribbean feminist, anti-imperialist and surrealist partisan Suzanne Césaire, played by Zita Hanrot; Hanrot, rather, plays an actress musingly preparing to play her. Césaire’s brief, intense flowering of work occurred in second world war Martinique, then a colony of France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government. Paradoxically liberated by this oppressive situation, Césaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published an influential series of essays on politics, literature and art, which showed how passionately inspired she was by her encounter with the great surrealist André Breton. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/rx4iLoM via IFTTT

Polite Society review – inventive action comedy soars, then falters

Sundance film festival: We Are Lady Parts creator Nida Manzoor’s initially refreshing film follows two sisters torn apart by impending marriage but a big swing is taken that sinks what follows

Polite Society, the feature debut from British writer-director Nida Manzoor, traffics in several familiar lanes: the coming-of-age high school comedy, a Bollywood movie, the light gravity-bending and slo-mo shots of a martial arts flick. Its particular flavor, however, is immediately distinctive and winning – at least at first. The 104-minute film from the creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts has one of the most refreshing first halves of a comedy that I’ve seen, with a promising set-up: genuine sibling concern over what an older sister’s engagement means for their bond and creative dreams, crossed with a teenage girl’s capacity for self-centered fantasies.

The younger sister in question is Ria Khan, played by delightful newcomer Priya Kansara, a London-based Pakistani Muslim girl who dreams of becoming one of Britain’s top stuntwoman (in one of the film’s more successful bits, Priya’s unanswered feelings-dump emails to Britain’s actual top stuntwoman double as both voiceover and diary.) She’s close to Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) in the spiky, secret-language way of two sisters against the world – Lena, recently returned home after dropping out of art school, will protest and spar with Ria but ultimately still films the amateur stunt videos for Ria’s YouTube channel, to the gentle chagrin of their more traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor and Jeff Mirza).

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