‘It deals with my own blood, my inheritance’: Asia Argento on historical trauma in Death Has No Master

Cannes film festival: The actor’s role in Jorge Thielen Armand’s Venezuela-set surrealist thriller explores deep-rooted tensions of ownership and colonialism In Death Has No Master, Asia Argento stars as an anxious foreigner in Venezuela. Her character, Caro, is on a harried mission to reclaim inherited property from the local caretakers who still reside there. That’s the setup in a surrealist psychological thriller, in which Venezuelan-Canadian film-maker Jorge Thielen Armand unpacks personal history alongside deep-rooted and “eternal” tensions that still affect the country today. “The film has multiple layers of meaning,” says Armand, ahead of the film’s premiere in the director’s fortnight section at Cannes. “Recent events only make those multitudes greater.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/VutlFjb via IFTTT

Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

Documentary collects sequence of interviews with prisoners, not all repentant, alongside footage of war-blasted Syrian Kurdistan

Here is an astringent, devastating and truly extraordinary film that is hard work to watch, but entirely worth it. Rojek probes the roots and fallen leaves of the Syrian civil war, a conflict the western media has practically forgotten as news of Ukraine and Gaza-Israel-Yemen dominates international reporting. Director Zayne Akyol, heard off-camera throughout, interviews members of Islamic State, now being held in high security prisons by the Syrian Democratic Forces, about their lives, with some recalling more innocent days when they hunted goldfinches to sell in markets or liked Canadian pop music. Many recount how they were recruited into IS by cells in local mosques in assorted countries – Germany, say, or Saudi Arabia – and came to have positions both high-ranking and menial in the organisation in the part of Syria with a dense Kurdish population.

In the film’s present, some are still unrepentant, believers that they fought honourably in a holy war; others see things differently and are riven with regrets. Some are women who recall their time of service to IS as the happiest days of their lives. In stately procession, each person speaks straight to the camera in almost disconcerting closeup, and however repugnant some of the things they say might be, it’s impossible to not recognise and see most of them as broken human beings.

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