deanyang Reviews

What Happened Was... (1994)

It draws you in

[10/10 · 28 February 2003]

After the first twenty minutes of this movie, I was almost ready to turn it off. My fiancee, who was watching with me, fell asleep at about that point. I couldn't imagine that the painful and uncomfortable interactions of the two main characters on their first date could turn into anything vaguely interesting.

But I was very glad that I stayed with it. Both main characters aren't what they first seem to be. It's rare to have one's perception of characters change so dramatically--yet credibly--in the course of single movie. I was intrigued, entranced, beguiled.

Definitely a worthwhile rental for the thinking movie buff.

Rostov-Luanda (1997)

Meeting real Angolans on a quixotic journey

[10/10 · 10 June 2001]

Rostov-Luanda's unobtrusive, languid documentary style disarms you at once. Setting off from his native Mauritania in search of a long-lost classmate from his revolutionary days in Moscow, Sissako begins a quixotic trip to Angola. Armed with just a dated and faded black-and-white class photo, he asks a motley assortment of people all over Angola whether they know where he can find his friend. But the quest to find his old classmate is just a pretext to allow his interviewees to bare their souls about their lives, their histories, their aspirations, troubles, memories in their strife-ridden country. Some are funny, some are sad, many are wistful and all are genuine. Sissako has a gift in finding people with commentary truly riveting in its ordinariness: an elderly Portuguese farming couple, an African schoolboy, a feisty African grandmother, a revolutionary intellectual.

If that's not enough for you, the cinematography is gorgeous, particularly the shots of empty road stretching out to the horizon when the filmmaker is on his way to the next stop on his journey.