Vibemami

📍March Around the World (#21 of 30) - 🇰🇪 When life becomes a movie, what role will we inhabit? Mwas, an aspiring actor, moves to Nairobi for a chance at his big break and finds himself struggling to find his footing. Playing different parts in his own life, we see city life transform him from a naive outsider into a savvy grifter. As the harsh brutality of Nairobi takes hold, he finds safety on stage, but it might not be enough to shelter him from reality. A gritty look at the actualities of life, we see the world through a hopeful young man who will stop at nothing until he gets a chance to deliver the performance of his lifetime.  After all, the show must go on.

📍March Around the World (#20 of 30) - 🇲🇽 In a story about preservation, the mending of a friendship becomes the centerpiece for the conservation of an indigenous language.  Isauro and Evaristo haven’t spoken in 50 years, and Zikril, an ancient language that only they speak, is dying. Through Martín, a linguist hoping to record conversations between the two, the audience becomes an observer of a mystical and confusing language— and we begin to understand the importance of Zikril in their bond. Foundationally, language is an evolution in our story as a human species. We need it to communicate the intricacies of our thoughts, and the complexities of our feelings. Within the context of colonization, it’s also survival. Shown in a series of flashbacks, we begin to see that Isauro and Everisto’s bond has survived through Zikril and the secret language that only a profound connection can create. The knowing looks, inside jokes, and intonations that two people share through emotional closeness is a language of its own— and we lose so much texture and magic when that language dies. In an intentional and captivating choice, what is spoken in Zikril is not subtitled on screen, and we’re left the better for it as listeners of a language that is not ours to understand. Qué suerte la mía de soñar en otro idioma ✨

📍March Around the World (#19 of 30) - 🇹🇭 Ego turns into humility in a beautiful story about the power of showing up consistently. M, a college dropout, volunteers to care for his terminally ill grandmother for a chance at inheritance money and ends up securing a kind of wealth he never imagined. While the relationship between M and his grandmother Amah takes root in her late life, we’re reminded that it’s never too late to begin investing in community. A beautifully gentle movie about the unexpected friendships we can find among kin and the dividends that kindness can yield. In the end, M wins his own kind of lottery.

📍March Around the World (#18 of 30) - 🇹🇳 From the river to the sea 🍉 This film is a captivating and heartbreaking account of 5-year-old Hind Rajab’s emergency call to PRCS in the midst of Israel’s attack on Gaza. As an ambulance tries to make its way to her, responders stay on the line and provide comfort as their own fortitude wanes.  Using real audio clips from the day, the story transitions from a thriller into reconstructed reality. The camerawork builds an unbelievable tension and the final scenes and interviews are enough to both break and reconstruct the human spirit. It feels unbelievably silly to review/rate a film that transcends a critique. The best of humanity lives in Palestine.