In a scene from Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sène Absa’s trilogy-concluding “Xalé” – the opening film at Joburg Film Festival – a bunch of kids sit on a beach and watch a movie as a projector throws grainy images on a white canvass while the magic of filmmaking transports them to another world.
About the scene, the 65-year-old director, who says he still wants to be a rebel filmmaker, tells Variety from Dakar he included the scene as a homage to his own past and how film can help transform lives.
“I started seeing films like this in the open air, next to the beach. I shot ‘Xalé’ in the place I was born. This beach is my beach. It’s a bit of my own childhood. I felt that I had to include in ‘Xalé’ a memory of my own childhood – a moment where you can jump on a boat and...
About the scene, the 65-year-old director, who says he still wants to be a rebel filmmaker, tells Variety from Dakar he included the scene as a homage to his own past and how film can help transform lives.
“I started seeing films like this in the open air, next to the beach. I shot ‘Xalé’ in the place I was born. This beach is my beach. It’s a bit of my own childhood. I felt that I had to include in ‘Xalé’ a memory of my own childhood – a moment where you can jump on a boat and...
- 1/30/2023
- by Thinus Ferreira
- Variety Film + TV
Raw, raging realism clashes with melodramatic contrivance in Moussa Sène Absa’s “Xalé,” and that’s before a theatrical chorus of women seizes the screen to comment on the unfolding tragedy. The latest film from the veteran Senegalese director blends narrative styles and traditions with abandon, running the gamut from local folklore to Western-style soap opera, in an effort to make its tale of female subjugation and self-liberation as stretchily universal as possible. If that makes “Xalé” uneven practically by design, it’s consistently, colorfully diverting and honestly felt — it’s not hard to see why Senegalese selectors tapped it as the country’s international Oscar submission this year, though it lacks the finesse and political complexity of their recent, shortlisted entries “Atlantics” and “Félicité.”
In a market still largely unaccommodating of sub-Saharan African cinema, those films benefited from competition berths at Cannes and Berlin respectively. Having quietly premiered at...
In a market still largely unaccommodating of sub-Saharan African cinema, those films benefited from competition berths at Cannes and Berlin respectively. Having quietly premiered at...
- 10/26/2022
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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