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

Tiger Stripes review – coming-of-age body horror releases the monster inside

Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu’s debut about a young girl discovering the truth behind her rebellious nature bristles with supernatural energy thanks to a tremendous young cast

There are some arresting images and bright performances in this bristling debut feature from Malaysian film-maker Amanda Nell Eu, who heads off into a jungle of the mind for a supernatural-realist drama and coming-of-age chiller about the female body and sexuality, with hints of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.

The scene is a Muslim school for girls in Malaysia whose pupils are required to submit to conservative dress and attitudes; in the English language class, they are presented with sentences such as: “The father goes to work. The mother cooks at home.” Twelve-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) hangs out with her friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa), and from the very first we see that she is a natural rebel and leader: she is being filmed on someone’s phone in the toilets, dancing and removing her headscarf, a dangerously transgressive act. The teaching staff are highly annoyed at the girls getting up to no good in this semi-private place and the headteacher (Fatimah Abu Bakar) harangues them for their bad attitudes, and laments the fact that Chinese pupils beat the Malaysian in exam results.

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