Soria Zéroual makes a moving debut in Philippe Faucon’s César-winning FATIMA
FATIMA (Philippe Faucon, 2015)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, August 26
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.kinolorber.com
Inspired by Fatima Elayoubi’s Prayer to the Moon, a collection of writings by a Moroccan woman trying to make a new life for herself and her family in France, Philippe Faucon’s Fatima is a tender, poignant look at the immigrant experience in the twenty-first century. In her film debut, nonprofessional actress Soria Zéroual, who was discovered after a massive talent search, stars as Fatima, a traditional woman raising two daughters in a small Muslim community in France. While her children, Nesrine (Zita Hanrot), who is starting pre-med, and Souad (Kenza-Noah Aïche), a typical disenchanted teenager who prefers hanging out with her friends and flirting with boys rather than studying, speak French and dress in contemporary styles, Fatima converses primarily in Arabic and wears a head scarf. Her ex-husband (Chawki Amari) has remarried, so she has taken on the primary responsibility of raising the kids, working several jobs as a cleaning woman in order to make money to improve their lives and offer them every possibility they deserve. On the surface, Fatima is simple and plain, struggling to communicate with her daughters, her employers, and her doctors. “If my daughter’s a success, my happiness is content,” she tells Nesrine. “You drive me so mad I could go out without a head scarf,” she says to Souad. But Fatima slowly begins revealing that there is much more to her when she picks up a pen and starts sharing her deepest thoughts in a notebook, writing poetry, letters, and short pieces about her life.
Fatima (Soria Zéroual) will do whatever it takes to make a better life for her daughters in French drama
Winner of Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Most Promising Actress (Hanrot) at the 2016 César Awards, Fatima is a beautifully made drama, written, directed, and produced (with Serge Noël) by Faucon, warmly photographed by Laurent Fenart, and edited with a soft gentleness by Sophie Mandonnet. Faucon (L’Amour, Samia), whose grandparents came from North Africa, maintains a patient, naturalistic pace throughout, centered by Zéroual’s sweetly innocent César-nominated performance, as Fatima faces racism from the French and shame from her fellow Muslims. She is a mother who would do anything for her children but is stuck in a world that traps and confines her, limiting her options, some of which Zéroual, who was cleaning banks when she auditioned for the role, has experienced herself. Hanrot excels as Nesrine, a young woman who is nervous about her future, while Souad wonderfully captures the angst and ennui of the rebellious teenager who loves her mother but wants to break free of old-fashioned traditions and outdated social mores. Although the film is not overtly political, it is clearly making a point, one that takes on ever-more-urgent meaning in the postcolonial age of Trump and Le Pen, when immigration, particularly concerning Muslims, is under attack every day.
Ostensibly a female Deliverance gone underground, Neil Marshall’s The Descent is a piss-poor piece of putrefaction. A year after Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband and daughter in a terrible car accident, an adventurous group of friends go spelunking in the Appalachians (though the film was actually shot in England, at Pinewood Studios). But Juno (Natalie Mendoza) has pulled a fast one; instead of the well-traversed caves they thought they were going to, Juno has taken them to unexplored territory, where lying in wait for them are fast-moving mutant Gollums with hardy appetites. There is actually one genuine scare, but everything else is manipulatively mundane and morbidly mangled. Inexplicably, The Descent was a hit in its home country, garnering a handful of British film awards and nominations, and there was even a sequel made in 2009. Oh, and by the way, what ever became of the child’s laughter? The Descent is being shown August 26 at 12:10 am as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “Nitehawk Midnite Screenings” and “Hot Horror,” but you must have something better to do with your time than descend into this disappointing maelstrom.
Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra takes viewers on a spectacular journey through time and space and deep into the heart of darkness in the extraordinary Embrace of the Serpent. Guerra’s Oscar-nominated film, the first to be shot in the Colombian Amazon in thirty years, opens with a 1909 quote from explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg: “It is not possible for me to know if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others to complete and irremediable insanity.” Inspired by the real-life journals of Koch-Grünberg and botanist and explorer Richard Evans Schultes, Guerra poetically shifts back and forth between two similar trips down the Vaupés River, both led by the same Amazonian shaman, each time guiding a white scientist on a perilous expedition in a long, narrow canoe. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, ailing white ethnologist Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his native aid, Manduca (Yauenkü Migue), seek the help of Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman wholly suspicious of whites and who believes he is the last of his tribe. However, Theo claims he knows where remnants of Karamakate’s people live and will show him in return for helping him find the magical and mysterious hallucinogenic Yakruna plant that Theo thinks can cure his illness. Forty years later, white botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) enlists Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) to locate what is thought to be the last surviving Yakruna plant, which he hopes will finally allow him to dream in order to heal his soul. Evoking such films as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Embrace of the Serpent makes the rainforest itself a character, shot in glorious black-and-white by David Gallego (Cecilia, Violencia) in a sparkling palette reminiscent of the work of Brazilian photographer 
