White Shadow

This film really blew me away. I saw it recently at the SF Film Festival. The camera work and editing style was both linear and non-linear, which I found totally engrossing and it made me realize how RAW everything about this film is. From the obvious difficulties and complexities of just shooting it, to creating the feeling of "fly on the wall documentary" of a village & culture, and then unfolding a story about a real boy who is in a living hell. I was both paralyzed and traumatized in the experience of watching it. I imagine the director used small hand-held cameras as there was auto focus & exposure,cool angles from the floor, etc. Some very beautiful and arresting imagery punctuated the overall manic texture of this film. The performances the director got from these real people was astonishing.Finally, the sound design and music completed the experience and it is etched in my mind. A stunning and unique achievement. Thank you to the director and for the producers who took a chance.I hope and pray change comes for these people who live as they do.

White Shadow is a vérité style depiction of Alias, a young albino growing up in the outskirts of an unnamed city in Tanzania. The primary conflict is that as an albino, Alias is the prey of witch doctors, who cut up albinos and use them for outlandish potions and mysticism. His journey shows us all sorts of elements of a world that is completely foreign to us, but remains wholly individual and never tries to be the definitive "Africa story" that would be an easy route to take. Because of the film's looser style, it requires extra attention from the viewer and doesn't have a clear through line, but is compelling because of how otherworldly it feels. There isn't a big takeaway or call to action, but the film's expose cannot help but leave a mark. There are a few incredible sequences, including a betting scene and a sequence where the protagonists are digging through e-waste looking for salvageable electronics, but the collective whole still feels looser than it needs to be, and the stylistic elements of the film are not employed often enough to be the focus of the movie. White Shadow will most likely not be playing in US theaters anytime soon due to a depiction of animal cruelty that probably wasn't fake (although is rather tame compared to any day at a US meat factory). However, as a festival film, it is intriguing and unlike anything else you will see, and for that alone it may be worth your time.

The concept of the film is an interesting one, the story of an albino in Africa, facing dangers somewhere where albinos are killed because their body parts are considered to have magical properties. As a premise, I do find that quite interesting.

However, the style of the film-making really rubbed me the wrong way. Rather than one linear story, the film seems to jump around in time a little bit, and I simply don't understand what time points I'm looking at and where, and it just doesn't make sense to me. Without being able to follow it, I just ended up lost, and I didn't feel like the characters were particularly fleshed out, something not aided particularly much by character evolution being difficult for me to spot as scenes jumped around a bit.

I was a bit let down by this as I don't think it conveyed a strong story.

The first 30 minutes of this extraordinary film are almost unwatchable. It's full of dark scenes: not just nighttime scenes, they are nighttime scenes poorly lit and poorly photographed. But I'm sure glad I let it play. White Shadow is a great film.

White Shadow is a portal into a world where witches wield real power-a world of poverty and brutality-in the southern hemisphere, on the southeast coast of Africa, in a village in Tanzania.

The film script and dialog are superb. White Shadow also has some beautiful cinematography. Some of the intimate scenes between the children are tender and stunning. The documentary-style handheld camera is powerful.