Cine Club - White Material

Wednesday 20 November - 6.00pm
At the Alliance francaise Basement
$24 / $21 for AFM members

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White Material by Claire Denis
106min - 2009-Drama
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle...

Watch a French movie while enjoying some French cheeses and wine, then take part in a discussion (in French or English depending on participants on the night).
All films are in French with English subtitles.

Maria is a white farmer who runs (with her ex-husband, his father, and their son) a failing coffee plantation in an unnamed African country in the present day. Civil war has broken out and rebel soldiers, many of them child soldiers, are advancing on the area. Rebels on the radio advocate attacks on emblems of colonialism. Maria's workers leave, but she refuses to abandon the plantation, and searches for men to finish harvesting of the coffee. As she and her family await the inevitable, the tensions in their personal relationships, and in their relations with the African community, become exposed. Maria puts the farm in even more danger when she looks after a wounded rebel officer known as 'The Boxer'. Government troops taking control of the area do not hesitate to suppress rebel armed forces located on the plantation.

" A powerful, agonized film", Manohla Dargis, the New York Times.

Roger Ebert (film critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism)  was especially impressed with the performance of Isabelle Huppert, "...small and slender, [she] embodies the strength of a fighter. In so many films, she is an indomitable force, yet you can't see how she does it. She rarely acts broadly. The ferocity lives within. Sometimes she is mysteriously impassive; we see what she's determined to do, but she sends no signals with voice or eyes to explain it."