Media depictions of underrepresented communities don’t get much scarcer than films about native peoples, wherever they reside. The Israeli drama Sand Storm, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and focuses on the domestic crisis of a contemporary Bedouin family living in the Negev Desert, helps fill this gap, making for a worthwhile addition to contemporary international cinema.

The film opens as Muslim college student Layla (Lamis Ammar) returns from a school break to visit family in her home village. Her indulgent father Suliman (Haitham Omari) allows Layla to drive his pickup truck after he collects her in the city, although tradition frowns up such an unsuitable activity for women. Layla’s attitude is progressive by local standards and perhaps even inappropriate from a strictly traditional perspective, a situation that often exposes her unconventional behavior to pointed criticism.

The occasion of Layla’s visit is her father’s marriage to a second wife substantially younger than Layla’s stern middle-aged mother Jalila (Ruba Blal-Asfour). Layla is tasked with helping Jalila set up the newlyweds’ new household adjacent to their family home, a source of evident shame for Jalila. Misplacing her mobile phone, Layla discovers that her mother has located it and answered a call from a young man phoning Layla. Irate that her daughter is socializing with single men unrelated to her family, Jalila insists that her daughter break off the relationship. Although Layla tries to placate her mother, she knows that her boyfriend will be upset if she attempts to put things on hold.

Instead, they decide to try and persuade her father to let them marry, but when Jalila gets wind of their plans she forces Layla to skip classes and remain shut-in at home in order to cut off contact with her boyfriend. Suliman’s response is even more extreme, however, pushing even Jalila to reject a plan that puts Layla’s future at risk and sparks a domestic crisis that completely disrupts the household and reverberates throughout the close-knit community.

Israeli writer-director Elite Zexer has a strong eye for human drama, but neglects to provide critical details on the film’s setting in an exclusively Bedouin village or the settlement’s relationship to wider Israeli society. By maintaining tight focus on a single extended family, she sketches the broad strokes of female oppression within a traditional society where women’s needs are always secondary to men’s. Layla’s dilemma illustrates the clash between ancient customs and encroaching modernity, which forces families to make difficult choices for the future of both their children and their culture. Zexer recognizes that resolving these conflicts will require educated, independent women like Layla participating in a transition to contemporary social values, if only they’re allowed to speak their minds and make a contribution.

Although Zexer conveys these female-centric themes fairly clearly, the film’s visual style remains rather rough, sometimes even working against clear articulation of the storyline. An over-reliance on shaky handheld camera techniques, use of makeshift locations and uneven editing point to a lack of experience or resources, or perhaps both. With a cast mainly consisting of nonprofessionals, Blal-Asfour stands out as the conflicted matriarchal enforcer of traditional values, while Ammar is adequate in Layla’s role, although she too often plays her scenes like a petulant teenager when a greater maturity of demeanor would be more convincing.

Written and directed by Elite Zexer.

Watch the trailer on Deadline.com.

Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe is a Los Angeles-based freelance entertainment journalist and film critic.

The post Sand Storm appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Conflicts over natural resources in the Amazon region have intensified in the past few decades, with indigenous peoples often facing encroachment of their ancestral lands from logging, mining, oil production and hydro dam construction. Sundance documentary When Two Worlds Collide provides an eloquent and detailed perspective on the impacts that legislative policies and resource extraction are having on Peru’s Amazon rainforest communities.

After the US signed a free trade agreement with Peru in 2006, the national congress passed a series of laws that eliminated indigenous resource rights to ancestral lands that were written into the nation’s constitution. Native groups, coordinated by Alberto Pizango of non-governmental organization AIDESEP, insisted that the government rescind the new legislation. Indigenous communities were already experiencing the adverse impacts of logging and oil production in the region and feared that an expansion of extractive industries would irreparably damage the rainforest habitat they depend on for survival. Native leaders also objected that the environmental destruction was inimical to their beliefs that the forest should be protected for the benefit of future generations. “The earth is borrowed,” Pizango noted, asserting their collective responsibility to safeguard communal heritage.

When the government of president Alan Garcia ignored their pleas, native groups staged a peaceful protest in 2009, occupying an oil storage facility and blockading roads in the Amazon sector. As their actions intensified, Garcia’s government ordered the national police to break up the demonstrations and a bloody confrontation broke out in the town of Bagua, with numerous casualties on both sides. The government charged Pizango and his collaborators with murder and sedition, prompting the native coalition to change tactics as legal threats escalated.

Filmmakers Heidi Brandenburg Sierralta and Mathew Orzel venture deep into the Peruvian Amazon to capture Pizango’s struggle to protect indigenous territory and lead AIDESEP’s protest campaign. Following him on hunting and fishing forays, they observe the forest flora and fauna that his community relies on for their survival, as well as the ongoing pollution from oil production and the resulting impacts to community health. Their footage of the nonviolent occupation of the oil storage depot and scenes from the tragic confrontation at Bagua create a compelling immediacy, while interviews with Pizango and his collaborators provide a revealing look at the escalating conflict as Pizango struggles to preserve his community’s rights and his own liberty.

When Two Worlds Collide offers a salient addition to the documentation of resource conflicts in the Amazon and the response of native communities to these threats. The sometimes uneven quality of the filmmaking and an absence of outside perspectives on the issues involved may be a concern for some viewers, but these shortcomings are largely outweighed by the filmmakers’ striking footage and their surprising access to Peru’s native communities.

Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe is a Los Angeles-based freelance entertainment journalist and film critic.

The post When Two Worlds Collide appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

The history of Afghanistan has been punctuated by a succession of invasions from the era of Genghis Khan right up until the present day. The occupation by American and coalition forces beginning in 2001 has shaped the country in definitive ways, just as the Soviet incursion did in the 1980s, and this legacy of foreign interference is poetically examined in Pieter-Jan De Pue’s The Land of the Enlightened.

Although programmed in the festival’s World Cinema Documentary section, De Pue’s film is more a hybrid of narrative and nonfiction, as well as a running commentary on the ancient legacy of the country. To the degree that the film concerns a specific time period, the documentary segments take place following the Obama administration’s 2014 initiation of troop withdrawals and a spike in recruitment and training of Afghan forces.

Narratively, the film focuses on band of about 20 children under 16 who live in a yurt in the barren mountain highlands. Surviving without adult interference they support themselves by scavenging and selling equipment, munitions and scrap metal abandoned over 30 years of war by Soviet and coalition forces. They also trade in opium, Afghanistan’s non-monetary currency, as well as lapis lazuli, the semiprecious azure-blue gemstone that they extract from mountain mines. Their young leader Gholam dreams of leading his followers to Kabul, where he intends to build a palace for the girl he’s seeking to marry, another member of his makeshift gang.

The documentary portion of the film consists of footage shot at a forward operating base in the mountains where US and Afghan troops are attempting to track and neutralize Taliban insurgents. Although there are a few moderately intense live-fire scenes, most of the material consists of soldiers waiting for the action to resume as they pass the time working out, playing guitar and napping.

An unidentified voiceover narration also threads throughout the doc, as an Afghan male intones passages about the mythological origins of the nation, the history and fate of his people and his view of the future following the departure of US and coalition forces. This monologue is presented while a stunning series of landscape scenes of high mountains, fertile valleys and nighttime starfields appears onscreen.

Shot on Super 16mm film, De Pue’s feature has the effect of creating a somewhat disorienting type of Afghan dreamtime, where present, past and future all occur contemporaneously. The documentary footage of military troops is nothing new and seems best understood thematically, as the American occupiers present their plans for withdrawal to local communities that remain stoically unimpressed. The sequences concerning the gang of children, loosely scripted by De Pue, are the most involving and appear to be improvised around some basic scenarios, but any details on the origins of the group, the absence of adults or the lack of social trappings go completely unexplained. Although the landscape scenics are strikingly beautiful, the voiceover narration provides few clues to the film’s unique perspective.

And perhaps De Pue’s intent is essentially non-narrative – an attempt to provide an impressionistic interpretation of contemporary Afghanistan that in its aggregate of fiction, reality and myth may come closer to characterizing the nation’s current state than any other approach.

Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe is a Los Angeles-based freelance entertainment journalist and film critic.

The post The Land of the Enlightened appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

As Colombia’s submission for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar, The Embrace of the Serpent surprised awards-watchers when it secured one of only five nominations for the award in January. Ciro Guerra’s third feature is a searingly unforgettable portrait of the legacy of colonialism in the Amazon region, as well as a testament to both indigenous residents and non-natives motivated to prioritize conservation over exploitation in the rainforest.

Shot digitally in spectacular black and white and based on renowned expeditions through the Colombian Amazon that occurred during two distinct time periods, the film sources the early 20th Century journals of German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg and the midcentury accounts recorded by pioneering American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. Tangentially, the film also examines and questions the botanical basis of existential belief, drawing upon the psychoactive properties of Amazonian plants, which both of the researchers are seeking to investigate with the assistance of rainforest natives.

The film begins as Theodor (Jan Bijvoet) begins losing his grip on reality under the influence of an unidentified tropical disease. His assistant and guide Manduca (Yauenku Miguee) floats him down an Amazon tributary in a wooden canoe searching for legendary shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), the only surviving member of an indigenous tribe decimated by European-driven genocide and disease. Identifying Theodor as an agent of the destructive colonialists, European-Colombian rubber producers who enslaved tens of thousands of native peoples in their quest for untold wealth, Karamakate at first refuses to help Manduca locate the rare and perhaps mythical yakruna plant, source of a powerful hallucinogen that could cure Theodor’s mysterious affliction.

A parallel narrative set approximately 40 years later tracks a solo expedition undertaken by ethnobotanist Evan (Brionne Davis) to catalog rare Amazonian plants, particularly those with hallucinogenic properties. Traveling deep into the Colombian rainforest he encounters a much older Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar Salvador) and persuades him to help find the elusive yakruna for his burgeoning catalog of native plant species.

In each case, the interlopers’ attempts to interact with Karamakate spark conflict, miniaturizing the fundamental clash between European invaders and indigenous peoples. Rather than externalizing these colonialist confrontations as a struggle for control of exploitable resources, Guerra and co-screenwriter Jacques Toulemonde recognize that the essential conflict seeks to determine a dominant worldview that favors either conservation or exploitation of natural resources, whether botanical, human or metaphysical.

Guerra interweaves the two stories and time periods, sometimes almost disorientingly, as Karamakate guides the visitors on their journeys along treacherous stretches of river and deep into the forest, where they encounter the ravages wrought by colonial rubbertappers and Christian missionaries. The narrative is often filled with emotional turmoil, particularly for Karamakate journeying back to his ancestral lands that are now devoid of his tribal relations, but an undercurrent of mutual respect that develops between Karamakate and the Caucasians hints at hopes for a peaceful resolution to conflicts in the Amazon that continue to disrupt native communities.

Adopting an almost ethnographic perspective, Guerra and cinematographer David Gallego immerse their characters and the audience in the Amazonian environment, trekking through the rainforest, gliding down jungle rivers and scaling isolated highland areas. Much of the dialogue consists of an ongoing debate about conflicting native and Western worldviews, with Karamakate largely dismissive of the science and modern developments that the interlopers have to offer.

While we know that resource conflicts in the region have intensified in the past 70 years, bringing to fruition Karamakate’s ominous premonitions, it’s somehow reassuring to watch this re-creation of bygone days and imagine whether some sort of moral and spiritual redemption might still be possible for the plunderers of Amazonia, both past and present.

Embrace of the Serpent is currently playing in Los Angeles and select cities nationwide.   Read a full list of  show dates here. 

Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe is a Los Angeles-based freelance entertainment journalist and film critic.

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