Nile Fortner is back with the Retro Review series to review the 1929 short film, Un Chien Andalou.
Synopsis:
“In a surrealistic film with input from Salvador Dalí, director Luis Buñuel presents stark, surrealistic images including the slitting open of a woman’s eye and a dead horse being pulled along on top of a piano. A mysterious film open to interpretations ranging from deep to completely meaningless, this short (17-minute) film certainly presented something new in the cinema of its day.”
The French Film ‘The African Doctor’ is a Satire of Cultural Acceptance
by Nile Fortner
The French film originally titled, Bienvenue à Marly-Gomont (Welcome to Marly Gomont) a.k.a. The African Doctor, tells the true story of Seyolo Zantoko, a French doctor, who struggles to serve as a doctor in a small French village and obtain French nationality in order to expose his family to a wider world. The comedy-drama film is based on the real-life father of French musician Kamini Zantoko, who is also one of the co-writers, and the movie is directed by Julien Rambaldi.
I’ve mentioned before – several times in fact – that I love modern French horror, ‘Martyrs’ is an all-time favorite of mine and ‘Inside’ had messed me up more times than I care to think of. So when news of ‘Raw’ came out with people fainting in the theater, I knew I had to see it. Those fainting rumors turned out to be exaggerated, but I still had high hopes for this to deliver and it more than did so. This is easily the best French cannibal sex movie I’ve seen all year and a near definite for my ‘Top 10’ of 2017.
The film opens with protagonist Justine (Garance Marillier) starting her first year at Veterinary school, the same school her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is currently studying. Justine is a quiet, shy bookworm, and firm vegetarian who struggles with the school heavy use of hard music and harder partying. During the intense hazing rituals Justine is forced to eat raw rabbit kidney and almost immediately has a violent allergic reaction to it with a bad rash breaking out onto her body. However, something changes inside Justine and she soon finds herself with a hunger for meat.
Cinephellas 