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Reviews by David Walsh and Joanne Laurier for the World Socialist Web Site

Part 1:  PAINFUL TRUTHS
David Walsh

Sacred Places (Lieux Saints)
Documentary, 2009, Cameroon/France, 70 minutes

Jean-Marie Teno (Chief!) from Cameroon has made a film centered on a local “cine-club,” where movies are shown at low prices, in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The production notes describe it as a work “about the fight to survive and to maintain one’s dignity in a hostile environment.”

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Part 2:  HUMAN DRAMA, PARTIALLY TREATED
David Walsh

Everything Strange and New
(co-stars Bay Area poet Beth Lisick)
Cinema by the Bay, 2008, USA, 83 minutes

Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), a carpenter, who lives in Oakland, California, begins by explaining that his marriage was initially pressure-free. Children arrived, two of them, and complications arose. The ad agency that employed his wife Renée (Beth Lisick) “went belly up.” Child care was too expensive and there was no point in her looking for other work. Wayne and Renée bought a house when they “were still cheap,” but now, like many others, the couple is in “negative equity.” In fact, they are only falling deeper in debt.

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Part 3:  THE TRAUMA PRODUCED BY EVENTS
Joanne Laurier

Don’t Let Me Drown
Feature film, 2008, USA, 105 minutes

New York City’s post-traumatic stress in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks is the setting for [UC Berkeley graduate] director Cruz Angeles’s debut feature film, Don’t Let Me Drown.

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© 2009 World Socialist Web Site | wsws.org

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