The focus shifts to Riadh - played by a tremendous Mohamed Dhrif, whose huddled frame and weary face speak louder than words - as he travels to Syria to try to bring back his son. But the director has a bait-and-switch up his sleeve: Midway through the film, Sami suddenly disappears and leaves for Syria, and “Dear Son” broadens from a granular kitchen-sink drama into a meditation on the predicaments of a nation and a generation. Sami is about to take his baccalaureate exam, which will determine his university prospects, and as Riadh and Nazli devote all their time and meager resources to supporting him, Attia traces a moving portrait of a loving family that perseveres through all the odds.
The first half of Mohamed Ben Attia’s social-realist drama draws us into the lives of the middle-aged Riadh and Nazli and their disaffected, chronically ill 19-year-old son, Sami. One of the pleasures of Masurkar’s well-researched script is the ample time it devotes to the nitty-gritty of forestry - the tracking and tracing of wildlife the management of plants and water bodies - while also weaving in the thrills of a creature-feature as a hunt for a man-eating tigress takes over the film’s last half-hour. “Sherni” follows Vidya and her team as they wage a quiet battle against these forces of corruption, insisting upon equity, environmental justice, and above all, science: that institution of evidence and rationality that has become increasingly contested in a venal world. At the same time, warring local politicians milk these tragedies for their own ends, bringing in private hunters who care little about the ecosystem or about protecting endangered animals. Industrial encroachments have robbed local villagers of grasslands for their cattle, forcing them to venture into areas frequented by tigers, whose kills start to include humans. Vidya’s task, and her passion, is to protect and preserve the environment, but as she quickly realizes, there’s a lot more at stake in her job. Set in the jungles of central India, the film follows Vidya (Vidya Balan), a newly appointed forest officer in a region traversed by tigers.
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‘Sherni’Īmit Masurkar’s “Sherni” (Hindi for “tigress”) is a genre of movie I never even knew I needed: a forest service procedural. It’s a poignant encapsulation of the yearning that characterizes adolescence - the yearning for things you cannot yet have, to be someone you cannot yet be. At one point, Celia folds up her T-shirt into a bra (which her mother can’t afford to buy, and which she doesn’t yet need) and sways in front of her mirror, brandishing a pen like a cigarette. To make matters worse, the fact that Celia is raised by a single mother - and doesn’t know who her father is - makes her the subject of her peers’ derision.īut Celia and her friends find their own avenues of rebellion, and Palomero captures their experiments - parties, makeup, cigarettes - with touching detail, neither trivializing nor sensationalizing the girls’ aspirations. She attends a strict Catholic convent where nuns teach young girls to smother their voices rather than risk being anything less than prim and perfect - a repressive pedagogy that the film’s opening strikingly literalizes, with a teacher instructing the less-accomplished singers in the school choir (including Celia) to silently lip-sync.
Set in 1992 in the Spanish town of Zaragoza, the film follows 11-year-old Celia (Andrea Fandos) as she navigates the confusing terrain of early adolescence in an environment of stifling conservatism. Pilar Palomero’s debut feature is the kind of precise, naturalistic portrait of pubescent coming-of-age that might make you wince with recognition.