Fifidou

I went to the cinema on the advise of one of my friends. In France, this movie had an award from the watchers only a few movies in a year have and my friend voted for it. In the first minutes, I thought that it will probably be exaggerated, this will be a excellent movie on the ghettos, full of violence and empty on spared lives, showing the gears pushing a sensitive man towards cruelty, violence and death. This kind of movie really tears me apart, but i really enjoy in movies originality rather than seeing a good movie but made up with all recipes and kind of boring. And I already saw good movies on ghetto violence (in particular Cidade de Deus). But this movie isn't about that really. It is a kind of learning process when he discovers that life is not only hiding his feelings behind a gun, and moreover that holding the gun isn't the only way to power. But everything is only shown in a simple way, there is nothing like a great speech of one character about virtues in life, as you would find in casual Hollywood movies. Everithing is transmitted through little things, a look, a tone of voice, it's delicate, it's bashful. To support that, the actors do the job, to say the least. Presley Chweneyagae is wonderful, such as Terry Petho. Every face to face between the two is a great instant of the seventh art. The only thing I didn't quite like in this movie is the soundtrack. It is rap music, and i do not like that kind of music. But for a movie in the favellas, there is no other choices.

This is not a pretentious movie, but it appeals to the memories we have from childhood, so we all have this kind of sympathy for the subject. Vacation camps. I don't know whether this concept is popular in the US, but in France, every child has attended to one of those. And everybody can find out some stuff in this movie closely related to what was the vacation camp when he was young. And this is what makes this movie work, it appeals to one's nostalgia. This is not a great movie though, the story is not different from the real story that happened for many people. It could have been a documentary on vacation camps, anyone would have seen the difference. The actors are quite good, and the dialogs are often funny, when they are not really funny. I do have a particular tenderness for the one where the director of the vacation camp, Vincent, spends several minutes explaining to the parents on the station platform that they must sever the link with their children, and 20 seconds later doesn't manage to have his father hang off the phone. Everything is like that, and as a movie made to make us laugh, it comply well with this definition. So make your choice if for you this movie is who the price of the ticket, but the audience when I saw it exited with a big smile on their face...