MORNING LIST
The cinema, this week, offers us beautiful and surprising encounters. Meet in more or less known lands with a soldier forgotten on a Pacific island, a family on vacation on a paradisiacal atoll, a courageous mother in the northern districts of Marseille, a doctor in Luxor.
“Onoda”: in search of the lost soldier
Perhaps there are no more beautiful stories than those which focus on these great lost ones who, like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, decide to turn their backs on the world and fight against its relentless course. It is to a figure of this order, both superb and pitiful, that the French filmmaker Arthur Harari, already author of a remarkable Black Diamond (2015), dedicates a second magnificent and adventurous feature film.
Leaving the backdrop of French fiction with a filibuster plume, the film looks at the war in the Pacific and its aftermath. He is interested in the real case of the last demobilized soldier, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, found in 1974 on the island of Lubang, in the Philippines, thirty years after the end of the conflict and the surrender of his country, Japan. This incredible and dizzying experience is retraced here like an escape from history. And so like the attempt of a vanquished to perpetuate his own reality, even if it had to take refuge in an island, interior territory which Thomas More once made the seat of his Utopia. Mathieu macheret
“Onoda”, French, Japanese, German, Belgian, Italian and Cambodian film by Arthur Harari. With Yuya Endo, Tsuda Kanji, Yuya Matsuura (2:45).
“Digger”: Greek western with ecological fiber
Aesthetic outfit, inspiration, sensitivity at the time: what more could you ask for, and which is however so rare, from a first feature film? We will therefore note, for the record, the name of the Greek Georgis Grigorakis, 38, who brings us on a set this beautiful film where tragedy, western and ecological fiber are miraculously harmonized. In other words and in most cases, enough to crash a hundred times.
Somewhere in the north of Greece, Nikitas, inconvenient loner, rifle by the side, living in a beautiful dilapidated house in the depths of the woods, fights day after day against the mining company which covets its ground and implements, by maneuvers obscure and with the help of thugs in his pay, a constant and insidious violence against him.
Helped by a fragile handful of die-hards whom he finds at the village café, Nikitas must also fight on another front. Johnny, his son, whom he has not seen for twenty years, comes to live with him when his mother dies to demand his share of the inheritance. Continuously hostile to this father who turns a deaf ear and whose fight he does not understand, the boy is also recruited by the mining company which causes rain and good economic weather in the region. A generational conflict emerges both at the level of the father-son couple and through the division of a population whose young people are the privileged recruits of the company. Jacques Mandelbaum
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