culture
This is the second and final part of our What Is Film Analysis article. Find the first part, on Narrative and Character, here. Production The giveaway of any bad production is the settings and costumes.
At one point in Good Morning Karachi, a fashion photographer is vocal about the contemporary image of Pakistani femininity and culture he believes his photos represent. He claims that his company is the “women’s revolution the country has been waiting for” and that a simple fashion photoshoot can portray a more forward-thinking society to international citizens who portray Pakistan as a bunch of “fundamentalists”. Yet the views about femininity presented by director Sabiha Sumar in Good Morning Karachi are as confused as those presented by a photographer who believes photos of supermodels represents a realistic feminist ideal and aspiration in society.
When a writer/director makes a film set in a country foreign to them, it is clear to local audiences that this is an outsider’s view of their nation and their culture. There’s a reason Lost in Translation is derided in Japan and Match Point is met with sheer indifference in the UK. It becomes alienating to see your country through the eyes of somebody who hasn’t spent the majority of their life there, especially when the film is a work of social realism made by somebody with merely a second-hand knowledge of the realities of life there.
The film Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski is admired by critics and viewers around the world. The movie won awards at important international festivals and it was nominated for an Academy Award in the category for Best Foreign Language Film. A glimmer of hope woke in the Poles after winning a golden statue:
Mad Max: Fury Road, the latest from Australian director George Miller, is overtly, and perhaps primarily, an action film. The vast majority of its two hour runtime is devoted to a single unrelenting chase sequence; it both drives the narrative and provides a platform for the manic and brilliantly staged action set-pieces which will define the film for many audiences.
We don’t hear about the Tunisian cinema as often as we hear about the Moroccan or Iranian ones. We don’t have a major film festival like the Cairo International Film Festival or the Beirut International Film Festival, but we do have one important, symbolic one: the Carthage Film Festival.