Directors: Roger Allers, Mohammad Saeed Harib, Gaeten Brizzi, Paul Brizzi, Joan C. Gratz, Tomm Moore, Nina Paley, Bill Plympton, Joann Sfar, Michel Socha
Starring: Salma Hayek, Liam Neeson
Rating: ★★★★
Showing: Will be on general release locally, but dates not yet known
Yield to the soulful poetry and powerful philosophy of a wise man trapped in the consequences of his words.
American actress and producer Salma Hayek's childhood passion for Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet imbues life into the inspiring and heartfelt feature film.
Uniting world renowned animators and director Roger Allers (The Lion King), Hayek transforms the internationally treasured poetry by Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran into an enlightening visual experience.
Immersed in colour, meaning and wonder, the film explores a poet’s philosophy into the power of human expression and spirit, which is woven together by Allers’ Disneyesque political parable and the enchanting music.
The burden of adapting one of the most popular volumes of poetry ever written is shared between nine independent animators. Hayek selects only eight of the 26 poems from Gibran’s 1923 collection of prose poetry essays to feature in the texturally varied experimental animation.
The animators, free to transform one of the poems in their own imaginative way, use contrasting themes and differing styles, which surprisingly conjures a sense of unity.
The colourful interludes are bound together by the framing plot of the exiled yet beloved prophet, Mustafa (Liam Neeson), who has been under house arrest for seven years. His crime, he claims, is poetry, but the authorities promise to release him if he returns to his homeland.
Escorted by two guards, Mustafa begins his eerily placid journey to the ship, preaching to the villagers and being shadowed by the spirited and silent Almitra (Quvenzhané Wallis), the daughter of his housemaid Kamila (Salma Hayek). But Mustafa’s freedom may come at a cost that ignites the villagers.
Stirring and evocative, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is a timeless adaptation that may whisk you away from reality while drawing you in with the truth. The whimsical vignettes of Mustafa’s musings do the poetry justice, but the quality of the framing narrative’s animation is outdated and somewhat banal.
The attention of a younger audience may be lost as the storyline is secondary to the visual reinvention of the poetry. This creates an imbalance between the enjoyment of both the poems and the framing narrative, which may arise from the filmmaking judgment of the production team being clouded by their passion for the original text.
But considering the film is devoted to rejoicing in Gibran’s work, it succeeds in taking people who are familiar or not with the poetry on a tender and emotional journey.
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet certainly is a personal experience, as Hayek described, one that dips your soul into the beauty and torment intertwining within our reality – guiding us to remember Gibran’s message that “we are spirits, free as the wind.”
Those who feel the fire burning
Director: Morgan Knibbe
Starring: Ali Borzuee
Rating: ★★★★★
Trapped between Heaven and Hell
In Those Who Feel The Fire Burning, director Morgan Knibbe captures – through the eyes of a ghost – the lives of refugees stranded on Southern European shores. It's a metaphor for their situation , which they describe as being trapped in purgatory between Heaven and Hell.
In his first documentary feature, Knibbe provides us with a counterweight for current affairs reports in mainstream media. Only the opening scene is scripted. Instead, Knibbe weaves footage from over four months of filming in Greece and Italy into a recognisably hallucinatory documentary.
The film follows a group of refugees on their way to Europe. When one man is thrown overboard and dies, his spirit continues his journey in a parallel and dark universe.
Searching for his loved ones, he sees how his fellow migrants live in the place where they were supposed to have achieved their dreams. Instead, they deal with heroin addictions, poverty and death.
Knibbe's camera swerves around them, taking us on a staggering trip through their reality. One particularly powerful sequence consists entirely of Knibbe’s previous award-winning short film Shipwreck, which depicts the Lampedusa accident earlier this year. Three hundred and sixty Eritrean migrants were killed when their ship capsized off the Italian coast.
While never sharing names or places, Knibbe lends faces to the current global refugee crisis in an honest approach. Thousands of people a week try to reach Europe illegally on boats, with more than 2000 refugees dying this year.
Throughout the film, the camera wanders from situation to situation, telling many stories. Even the poetic voice-over of Iranian Ali Borzuee is a story in itself, a recorded improvisation of his own experiences captured in an interview-like setting.
The film is ambitious and unconventional. It questions the working methods of mainstream journalism, reporting current affairs in a new way. The camerawork needs a big screen, but is worth it. Those who feel the fire burning shows the humanitarian dimension of a global social problem, and urges us to connect with it.
Heaven Knows What
Directors: Benny Safdie and Joshua Safdie
Starring: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones
Rating: ★★★
A harrowing and truthful window into the world of drug addiction
Oscar Wilde’s famous belief that "life imitates art far more than art imitates life" is taken to the extreme in the new visceral and realistic film Heaven Knows What, which explores the lives of New York City heroin addicts.
The film is based on the real-life story of Arielle Holmes, a homeless 21-year-old with a heroin addiction, who plays a fictionalised version of herself. It is a personal look at someone’s addictions to drugs and the love of another human being.
Shot in New York, the city is made unrecognisable with its reliance on the most ordinary parts, including a featureless rock where all the addicts congregate. This is the third feature-length project by the Safdie brothers, who are renowned in the independent film world for their short films (The Black Balloon) and documentaries (Lenny Cooke).
Heaven Knows What questions whether personal happiness comes from one’s own actions. The film captures this in a very matter-of-fact way by following the mundane activities of Harley (Holmes) as she scrapes together money to score her next "hit". Alongside her need for heroin, Harley relies on the love of Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), almost to the point of self-harm.
At times, the film seems to drag on as it meanders between a meaningless conversation about how to get drugs again to another "shoot-up", such as an evening spent dancing, kissing and pricking arms out in the freezing cold of New York’s winter. However, it reveals the satisfaction that drug culture finds in the dull activities of life.
Perhaps it would be more successful as a documentary than as a film because the twists in the narrative often come off as forced for the characters.
Regardless, Holmes breathes tangible emotion into the role through her real-life experiences. The choice to incorporate actors and real drug users allows the film to transcend its fictional structure and steer away from the usual romanticisation of drug culture within film.
The film is muddled musically between a score by Japanese composer Isao Tomita reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, and a range of eclectic dance and metal tracks.
The acting, shot composition and conscious decision to tell the truth makes Heaven Knows What a compelling window into the lives of those lost to addiction.
Despite its messages about being content with life, the tablet is represented as slightly more bitter than sweet. However, it represents the truth which is endlessly reflected back on life and art, until the two are the same.
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All three movies showed as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, which finished yesterday.