Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...

Omen (Augure) review – Baloji offers secrets and sorcery in Congolese homecoming

Musician and film-maker’s story about a Belgian-Congolese man who takes his white wife to DRC to meet the family is complex, risky and bold

Congolese-born rapper, musician and film-maker Baloji (né Serge Baloji Tshiani) was a prizewinner at Cannes last year with this feature directing debut: a dynamic, teemingly populated, multistranded and tonally elusive picture which I initially thought would benefit from comparisons with Jordan Peele’s horror classic Get Out. In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

Koffi (Marc Zinga) is a Congolese man living in Belgium and married to a white woman, Alice (Lucie Debay). They are about to have twins and Koffi feels that he cannot put it off any further: whatever his family will think, the couple must journey back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to let them see Alice and let them get used to the idea. It particularly means propitiating his fiercely conservative mother Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua). He takes care to shave off his westernised afro, and even brings them a financial tribute, or “dowry”, of thousands of euros.

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