By Laura McNeil The 2019 CaribbeanTales International Film Festivalwas full of treats this year. Things got even sweeter however, with the presentation of a short film called Miss Sugga. This film is actually an excerpt from the popular series written and directed by Jamaican born Mary Wells. We sat down at the Royal Cinema in Toronto to see what Ms. Sugga was all about.
By Chris Cannataro Dolemite is my Name not only reminds us why we love Eddie Murphy (the lead actor of this film), but it should give us some hope for the future of Netflix as a distributor of quality work.
By Benjamin Akpan Noah Baumbach has always had a knack for portraying the mundanity of life with such great detail and grace. Be it an older couple trying to revive their marriage, an aspiring dancer going through the motions in New York, or even the relationship between two deeply flawed step-sisters, Baumbach has without fail managed to make the ordinary feel so spectacular. And so he returns, this time with Marriage Story, delivering yet another melodrama that’s nothing but a showcase of his métier for dysfunctional relationships and their eventual demise.
By Benjamin Akpan Canadian-Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has devoted her half-a-century long career to highlighting stories that advocate for First Nations people. At 87 years old, she has directed 53 documentaries that bring light to the issues and successes of Indigenous Canadian groups. Obomsawin has never concerned herself with entertaining viewers; the painstaking manner with which she approaches her subjects proves that all she cares for is the point she seeks to make, and – 53 films in – she has never failed in getting her point across.
By Fatima Husain Nigerian film director Abba Makama’s latest feature The Lost Okoroshi premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival ’19, exposing Western audiences to a fusion of Nigerian myths and traditions. The film, a rare venture on the big screen, as Nigerian cinema (or Nollywood) - although the second biggest film industry - remains widely underrepresented at many international festivals.
By Benjamin Akpan The year is 2020, and there’s nothing worse in America than being Black. Actually, there’s nothing worse than being gay. Of course, you could be both Black and gay, which is surely a larger recipe for disaster than being either. But The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, Ali LeRoi’s feature debut, posits that there could be something much worse: being a dead, gay Black person. And as if death is not the end-all of worst-case scenarios, try this for size: reliving one’s death as a gay person-of-colour.
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