Movie Critique: Beats of The Antonov
Its very name poses a formidable paradox. The Antonov is heartless! If you think of deriving beats from it, then your own vocal chords are surely better and safer sound generators. Ok, how about thinking that the Antonov, an airplane, urges people to go find drums and start making beats, you have to remember that Antonovs bomb to kill and destroy! But this last assumption is actually what the film tried to examine!
The movie would have been a great visual research on the link between bombing and singing; One would learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, actually. But of course this hypothetical link between bombing and dancing was not thoroughly examined and resolved because there is always an
easier way to resolve films. That is to finish them!
Beats of The Antonov has no storyline to follow. No narrative. Most images could have been adapted from the official Sudan TV archives, if they still know or respect this word in their campaign to erase as much of secular Sudan as they can.
Not having a thread of narrative is Ok if other intentions are laid out from the beginning. But not
having a story and not abiding by your intentions to prove that people can learn to carve beats and scrape songs from their daily dose of killer bombings is not ok. And it isn't enough to use that generic, ill-trodden term: Music heals!
Well, nothing easier than to bring in some politicians to talk about genocide, oppression which is really crap when it replaces the
movie's preposition.
The movie resorts to interviewing local musicians who talk mainly about non-musical matters and politics.
The film brings in a Phd holder who thinks that all people in the North of Sudan are sick and 'in identity crisis'.
The second narrator of the movie Alsarah wages a war on skin-lightening creams and even targets a brand name of such types of skin care creams. Ironically the lady from the Antonov beaten area disagrees with Alsarah and thinks the creams to lighten the black skin color are good in certain conditions!
Then, in an apparently political shift, Alsarah wonders: Why Sudanese don't know that 'Black Is
Beautiful'! Who really knows if black women in the country from which she borrows this dictum
..also use skin lightening creams.
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| Kuka: Winner of TIFF'14's Docu Prize |
Kuka's movie has unfortunately replaced the visual and auditory experience its name promises by political one-sided talk on why the Antonov is targeting these wretched human beings living in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains areas of the now divided Sudan.
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| Alsarah, singer/narrator |
Beats of The Antonov won The People's Choice Award at TIFF'14.
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* Beats of the Antonov 2014
65 min. Documentary
Director/screeplay writer: Hajooj kuka
Narrator: Hajooj Kuka and Alsarah (singer/songwriter)
the importance of beats of the antonov is in the way it depicted the sudanese people suffering under the rule of the Islamists and in the way it pictured the poor life of Sudanese in South Kordofan and in South Blue Nile, Yes may be the cinema technicalities were not to the expected level, such thingscan be ignored when we look at the content that brought the richness of cultural practices of people who make music starting by making their own musical instruments, the freedom of soul the dancers glorify by their great and artistic body moves, the vastness of the Sudanese landscape. some of the interviewed intectuals stated thier views in controversial issues just like that without bothering to address other views. Hajooj is a young and very promising movie maker let uslook forward to see new and charming pictures with him, he is really able and could do. I donot agree with calling the beats of the antonov a film its because their no plot to follow rather than bare reality, it can not also be named as a documentry because there are many stories wiat telling in the rich lfes of the politically maginalized Sudanese people in Nuba mountains and Blue Nile, is it a new genre? beats of the antonov can be dealt with as pattern of pictures and moments that use the viewer eyes and thoughts to ceate a very individualised plot, itsan invitation for you to make your own story from what reality tells
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