To see in the cinema: “Shimoni”, “On the Go”, “All for one”

«Dungeon» D'Angla Wanjiku Wamai

“Be quiet now”told him the prison guard, opening the grid. Geoffrey said nothing. “You will be well here in the village”said his uncle, leaving him in the care of the priest, far from the city where he lived. Geoff did not say anything. The priest, the Matron who takes care of his interior, the girl attracted by him, the craftsman who employs him each have a speech, a sermon, advice, jokes, suggestions for this young man installed among them. He didn't say anything.

Silence is not in itself more virtuous or exciting in the cinema than speech: the simultaneous exit of the magnificent The traveler From Hong Sang-Soo, where the words are so important, would be enough to recall it. But in this first astonishing film of the young director Kenyan Angela Wanjiku Wamai, it is well around this silence that the film develops. For the better (cinematographic) and for the worst (as for what silence generates in society – not only in rural Africa).

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The title is the name of the village where the film takes place: it means “the pit” in Kikuyu, the language of this region. This pit is as well that of the buried language of his central character, towards which all acts converge, all words, all the exchanges initiated by the multiple other protagonists.

This hole, this collapse, was dug in Geoffrey by two traumatic events, which literally haunt the rest of the situations that the film features. The ditchwithout showing physical violence, makes the brutality of the reports resonate, the rigidities of perceptions and ways of acting which regulate a community.

The staging organizes the presence of bodies and voices as an affect orchestra, in thinking, ways of regulating individual and collective behavior. Geoff's silence is opposed to the multiple words of others, but also refers them to what they are silent.

It is the relationship to the language of this parish priest riveted to the dogma of his priesthood, it is this scary tale that children hear, it is the exchanges of men and women, especially women, to organize common life, c 'is the girl's secret and the little girl's hope to go to school that weave this tense, vibrant, paradoxical frame.

Beatrice (Vivian Wambui) and Martha (Muthoni Gathecha), two looks on Geoff, two ways of existing. | Sudu Connection

In this interlacing of statements mingle, in addition to the silence of Geoffrey, the other silences: that of the woman who has been brought in and which can not say anything about the tragedy she suffered, but knows how to make a gesture that Translated it, that of the community which is silent and blinds itself on the atrocious acts inflicted by one of its own.

Gradually, The ditch becomes the story of this machinery of silences, beyond the decisions of one and others, and their words–thinking, avenges, hypocrites, affectionate, manipulative. This tension, very inhabited by the powerful incarnations of these multiple figures, defines the singularity of the film and its universality.

The ditch

D'Angla mymani ti

Avec Justin Mirichii, Muthon Gathecha, Vivian Wambui, Sam Psenjen

Duration: 1h37

Released January 22, 2025

“On the Go” of Julia of Castro and Mary Gisèle Royo

It starts with fucking fire, getting out of the sea in a convertible limousine, getting bogged down, making love, meeting a Chinese mermaid. We have already laughed and jumps, before we even knew who or what we were dealing with.

Who are these characters, who are these directors, what is this film? We don't know anything, we just perceive energy, humor, a punk sense of apparently damn transgression and in fact attentive to beings, lights, sounds.

The queen of Triana in a self -proposing mermaid (Chacha Huang) is not the least surprising of the film's passengers. | Outplay Films

And that will not stop, during heckled of the first feature film of two filmmakers, Julia de Castro and María Gisèle Royo, who already have an important activity in different artistic practices. What is guessed in the invention that swarms along the sequences.

With jubilation and a great sense of visual forms, On the Go Thus the adventures of Milagros, very worried about soon not being able to have children, and Jonathan, a gay poet very active on meeting apps, incendiary in his spare time, in a hot, musical Andalusia and not at all tourist.

With this film which reinforces the certainty that a lot of exciting things happen in the young Spanish cinema, we are thinking of the first feature films of Alain Guiraudie as much as to those of Pedro Almodóvar, or at wacky essays of Road Movies crazy from the 1980s, but the film is indeed today.

It is alive and attentive to emotions under its appearances of neat, with a visual invention and small jewels on the musical band which, supreme challenge for this kind of disheveled attempt, made thatOn the Go Never run out on the way.

On the go

by Julia de Castro et María Gisèle Royo

Avec Julia de Castro, Omar Ayuso, Chacha Huang

Duration: 1h12

Released January 22, 2025

“All for a” by Houda Benyamina

Obviously, she is a cunning. Or rather a “concept”, as advertisers say to enhance a tip. But then … then, the setting in motion, in account, in the body of this idea of making Three musketeers An adventure in the feminine turns out to be rich with so many living, intense, fun or rightly raging moments, that the operation is more than justified.

Making her d'Artagnan a Morisque in danger of expulsion from French territory, and Athos, Porthos and Aramis, with barely modified names to continue playing with the classic founder, figures more complex than the only gender inversion ,, All for a
Play both the card of the hood and sword show and that of finer questions about identity.

Oulaya Amamra), Athos. | UGC Distribution

The invention of new relationships with the queen, and between her and the king, mixes wins vaudevillesc and manners of playing with the codes in a more diverse way, if not really nuanced.

Injecting the inspired vigor of Thelma et Louise In the episodes taken up of the tribulations of the quartet invented by Alexandre Dumas in “Les Ferrets de la Reine”, Houda Benyamina's film partially thwarted the trap in which had locked itself, for its greatest but very questionable success, Divines
who revealed the director in 2016.

By escaping the simplism of symmetry offering women usually reserved for males, the scenario but above all the incarnation full of verve of the four actresses enrich the effective adventure film that does not cease to be All for a.

The way in which violence, fury, hateful panic of men confronted with their transgression is staged, becomes the legitimate ultimate fuel of a film whose fighting spirit is not limited to its duels scenes.