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First Reformed

2017

Rewatched 25 Dec 2018 7

I rewatched this on Christmas day with my good friend Jonathan, and spent the next few days trying to figure out how I would write about this film. Letterboxd has gone to shit over the holiday season, and so I finally felt motivated to start my own blog where I wrote an extended piece on the movie. I'd appreciate if it could be given a read, I'd transfer it straight here but I don't think it would look visually appealing on this site given its length, and I liked using stills to illustrate different points.

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The Stairway to the Distant Past

1995

Watched 17 May 2026

Kaizo Hayashi and Masatoshi Nagase only made three of these? They shoulda made ten.

The Silence of the Forest

2003

Watched 16 May 2026

It's not every day that you get a film about Africans exploiting other Africans. Eriq Ebouaney has a savior complex and gets brought back down to earth. Very much of a piece with Ba Kobhio's other films, but even more entrenched in specific cultural rituals, and even more explicit in delineating the boundaries of social systems.

I wrote a little about Bassek Ba Kobhio on my s*bstack, his films and his role in the development of Central African cinema.

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A Moment of Innocence

1996

Watched 25 Apr 2019 1

Incredible. One of the most deceptively complex films I've ever seen, with a setup that seems startlingly simple and straightforward but slowly reveals layers upon layers of ideas and emotions. What struck me the most was how these two men attempted to reconstruct memories from their past, perhaps as a way of exorcising these difficult feelings that they've had for years but also raising feelings of regret and longing for the idealism that they strived for in their younger days.…

Emitaï

1971

Watched 08 Dec 2018

Possesses an urgency and a succinctness in its politics which is unlike anything I have seen before. Sembene wastes no time at all in laying out his intentions for the film, as the opening sequence portrays young individual tribesmen being forcefully conscripted into the French army. This is a film about the importance of the collective in the face of resistance, and the struggle that results from being broken up into factions which splinter and cause greater confusion when it…