Al Djanat: The Original Paradise review – striking account of Burkina Faso homecoming

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Chloé Aïcha Boro’s watchful documentary charts the disharmony and legal wrangling caused by a dispute in her family over sacred burial land Economic and financial woes cast a dark shadow over family bonds in Chloé Aïcha Boro’s contemplative, searching documentary. Returning to her Burkina Faso village after decades of living in France, Boro experiences an emotional paradox intimately known by all immigrants. Once-familiar places turn foreign, since the migrator has undergone huge internal changes of their own. And with the recent passing of her uncle Ousmane Coulibaly, the head of her extended Muslim family, Boro’s homecoming is marred by disharmony. Between Coulibaly’s brothers and his 19 children, warring interests over inherited land rage on. The film returns time and again to a sacred courtyard where, for centuries, the umbilical cords of Coulibaly newborns have been buried to ensure their ascendence to heaven in the afterlife. More than a ritual, the tradition concretises the li...
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Academy take action: why there should be an Oscar for best stunts

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The director of John Wick: Chapter 4 has revealed that he is in discussions with the Academy to officially recognise the power of action sequences – and it couldn’t happen quickly enough

You could ask a million different people what they want from the Oscars, and you’d get a million different replies. Some would want greater diversity, others for commercial movies to be better recognised. Some would want to see the entire ceremony scrapped altogether and replaced by a list of winners sent out via email, although that last one might just be me. Anyway, the point is that nobody – nobody on Earth – would want the Oscars to be any longer.

To watch the Oscars these days is to commit to slowly losing all feeling in your lower body. On and on they go, for hours and hours. All the awards. All the speeches. All the montages. All the bits where everyone assembled focuses their willpower to shut out the creeping death of theatrical film-making as a financially viable medium. It goes on a while, and at this stage only an absolute lunatic would want to start adding categories to an already overstuffed dance card.

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