Feels like documentary

It feels like documentary and at the same time tells an interesting story covering universal themes (growing up, leaving home, the power of family and community, the curse of alcohol on the dispossessed).

We saw this two days before the director's (Chloé Zhao) latest film scooped up Oscars (Nomanland was already on our to-be-watched list), the boy, Johnny, and girl, Jashaun, could have won acting awards for playing themselves in this one.

Also very satisfying as a narrative with a clear crux point where our hero, Johnny, makes the decision that will determine his future. In the echo canyon as he is setting out to leave, he calls his sister's name and echo came there none.

A classic 'true fiction', that is in fact fiction but in spirit true.  

Gonna Have a House Party, got rhythm, come sing de blues.

Like the first episode, The Mangrove, it felt a bit overlong at times - here particularly in some of the extended party scenes - but overall I guess it is a wonderful evocation of time and place (I wasn't there so I can't know); it certainly feels true.

The dynamics of the party are brilliantly captured, to the extent that you forget it is a film with a camera crew and actors with lines and a director calling "action" and "cut". It just flowed through its different moods as a real party does. 

Seventy Years of Oppression

How can this life be allowed to be? Using footage shot over many years the story of an expat refugee (what a concept - someone whose homeland is a refugee camp!) and his friends back home in the camp in Lebanon again, as with other recently seen films, underlines the human power of community and family and the destructive force of imposed authority.

All hierarchies are ultimately toxic - e need to find a better form of social organisation here value comes neither from possession nor from oppression.