Four recalcitrant teenagers come into conflict with their clumsy parents. The battle escalates when the mother tries to seduce her daughter’s tennis teacher and the children turn the villa into a heavily armed fortress. A classic theme, the battle between parents and children, gets completely out of hand in this black comedy in an idiosyncratic and brutal way, in which the authority of the parents is completely undermined.
Month: May 2025
A split screen shows two tightly synchronized, “impossible” shots of the same scene: a moving POV camera showing what the central character is looking at, and a stationary wide shot, both framing the entire action simultaneously. The deliberate positioning of the static, detached view above the erratic, close-up subjective POV of the central character lends an uneasy feeling to it. At the start of the film, we see the central character’s dream before he wakes up and comes out onto his balcony in the top screen (the bottom screen becomes his POV looking out the window, in sync with the top view.) Set in West Vancouver, BC.
The female Moroccan musicians known as sheikhates sing about the realities of life – about the land, nature, wars, mountains, crises and, of course, they sing about love. In short, their music represents the heritage of Morocco. Director Ali Essafi offers a marvelous portrait of the daily lives of these regional folk singers, exploring how their music has evolved over the years – along with society’s acceptance of the women who perform this music in public. SHEIKHATES BLUES features interviews with many of the popular musicians of today, who perform a number of their wonderful songs, and culminates with a colorful sheikhates performance at the Rabat Music Festival of 2003.