MORNING LIST
Cinephiles will be able to find the 8 p.m. screening this week, with the curfew shifted from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. The opportunity to go and discover Nomadland, awarded with numerous awards, including the Golden Lion in Venice and three Oscars in Los Angeles.
Two other films are interested, like that of Chloé Zhao, in America of the margins, 17 Blocks and The Last Hillbilly, while Nafi’s Father transports us to Senegal and 200 meters at the Israeli-Palestinian border.
“17 Blocks”: twenty years of a black family in Washington
Here is a movie that nothing and no one will say anything to anyone. This handicap in terms of “market” is very largely offset by the originality of the project.
In 1999, journalist and director Davy Rothbart met 9-year-old Emmanuel Sandford-Durant and his 15-year-old brother Smurf during an impromptu basketball game in Washington. The two young people are endearing. A friendship develops between them and Davy, who is adopted by the family, begins to film it regularly.
Seventeen “blocks” from the Capitol, the mother, Cheryl, and her three children – a sister, Denice, holds her place between the two brothers – live a precarious life, marred by drugs and violence. Out of reciprocal friendship, they nevertheless lend themselves to the game of filmed intimacy and occasionally seize the camera. Twenty years later, when Davy puts his nose in the thousand hours of accumulated rushes, he decides to make a film of it.
The reason why he made this decision is obvious when we discover this film which is both edifying and moving. On the one hand, it stems from the intimate testimony thus brought from within on the extreme precariousness of certain African-American families in a society which keeps them within a humiliating margin, throwing them into a form of self-destruction.
It is also justified by the fact that the ingredients of this filmed reality as well as the singularity of the shooting – two decades within the same family, large ellipses – make the filmed diary drift towards the universe of the series and the fascination that accompanies it. Jacques Mandelbaum
“17 Blocks”, American film by Davy Rothbart. With Cheryl, Smurf, Denice, Emmanuel and Justin Sanford (1 h 34).
“The Last Hillbilly”: an unusual trip to deep America
They live in the heights of the Appalachians, east of Kentucky, and form a separate, somewhat self-sufficient population in the United States, regarded with haughty eyes by the people below, who agree not to see in them only a bunch of backward scoundrels.
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