The docu-thriller is a difficult subgenre to get just right. Finding tension and jeopardy in the real-life crises of others can all too often feel exploitative or trumped-up, spuriously shaped for the viewer’s entertainment. In “Saudi Runaway,” an intimate study of female oppression and liberation where the stakes couldn’t be much higher, director Susanne Regina Meures finds a risky but effective solution to the camera’s intrusive gaze on a vulnerable human subject: She gets said subject, a 26-year-old Saudi woman billed only as “Muna,” to wield the camera herself. Our perspective is entirely hers, insofar as she conveys it via a roving, frequently hidden smartphone. It’s a first-person view that few women in Muna’s position get to share, and Meures’ film does not take its exceptional access for granted.
“Saudi Runaway” is a product of extraordinary trust on the part of both filmmaker and subject...
“Saudi Runaway” is a product of extraordinary trust on the part of both filmmaker and subject...
- 6/23/2020
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
by Peter BelsitoThis was the most shocking film I saw at Sundance.A documentary about a Syrian family, a father and his young sons, over a few years where the father is a committed fanatic Jihadist fighter as he raises several of his boys to follow his lead.
No female appears in the film at all here even though they are obviously living in the house with family during the protracted filming.
Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki was most recently at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014 with The Return to Homs, which won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize.
Once again, Derki returns to his homeland, upping the ante of danger to new heights by posing as a pro-jihadist photojournalist making a documentary on the rise of the caliphate.
The result is an unfettered vérité portrait of al-Nusra general Abu Osama — a radical Islamist leader and loving father — and the...
No female appears in the film at all here even though they are obviously living in the house with family during the protracted filming.
Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki was most recently at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014 with The Return to Homs, which won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize.
Once again, Derki returns to his homeland, upping the ante of danger to new heights by posing as a pro-jihadist photojournalist making a documentary on the rise of the caliphate.
The result is an unfettered vérité portrait of al-Nusra general Abu Osama — a radical Islamist leader and loving father — and the...
- 2/5/2018
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
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