mokono

The story itself is not surprising or revolutionary. Everything that happens is essentially what any decent human being can hope to see in any story of integration that involves deprived locals and war refugees from vastly distinct cultures.

It is not particularly well told or developed. Many of the interesting tensions are not well explored. The plot shifts and turns are sometimes predictable, other times quite random and often badly delivered.

The saving grace is that actors are local and the struggles are real. It becomes quite another thing to see local people trying to tell a fictional story based on their own very real history of resistance and change.

It's a beautiful movie with a strong and important political and societal message. It's also a movie with very cliché characters and no real development. The story seems really just an excuse to add a little drama to the main romance, but is even too flimsy to accomplish anything. Does the political message lose its strength? Well, the movie did get banned, so it did enough.