Help!
We just watched this film in a class I'm taking about race and gender in film. I really did not "get" this movie. What is it exactly trying to say?
shareThat you just wasted two hours of your life watching this mess.
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It is a film about the transition that all African Americans faced at the time...the old African ways against the new "American" ones, progress vs. tradition, settling down and maitaining roots vs. branching out for better opportunities and the like.
Mainly I think it was about a family defines it's identity.
This movie is EXCELLENT!!!! It is a 'womanist' movie. (trans. Black Feminist)
Full of symbolism of the Orishas (Yoruba culture), which was brought to the Americas by slaves from Africa. Each woman symblolizes an Orisha or African Goddess. It did win some awards. Check out the website.
"If I HAVE to, I WILL"
my grandma-
I loved it too, and couldn't wait to make it a part of my DVD collection.
Maybe you or I should review it. A lot of people didn't get it. All the cricisms that I have heard seem to amount to a person expecting a westernized point of view and getting disappointed.
Well, I for one wasn't looking for a "western" point of view here. My comments on the "boring" thread were simply looking at it from a cinematic p.o.v.
A beautiful setting, a good idea for a story - it just said little and went nowhere. Not to mention the music - I am a big fan of African music - and this was
what I'll call African Elevator Music. I am not saying I hated this thing -
I was just expecting a whole lot more. And let's be honest, feminists of whatever color, this film is really pretentious and just doesn't deliver. Orishas my butt.
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I have to admit, when i first saw the film years ago in a theatre, I didn't get it at all either---the main problem being that I wasn't really used to seeing a film where the narrative was so unconventional and didn't make any damn sense to me at the time---plus not being familiar with the culture and the dialect,which was hard to understand at some points. Now, after years of having seen indie/foriegn films, and getting used to how they work, I do agree with the other poster that is exactly why this flick was so hard to grasp at first---it really isn't being presented from a Western point of view, it's more from an African POV, which is unique for an American film. I enjoyed watching it the second time around, because I understood it much better (plus years of getting into African films probaby helped,too.)
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