Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah feels like a one-two punch full of dread and anxiety. The beautifully shot film provides a vision of a worthwhile community struggle, intent on preserving the souls of our loved ones, a resurrection of the ones that we’ve lost.
Although blocking the construction project is a nearly impossible task, the community begins to understand the urgency of her efforts and joins her in collective action. Upon realizing that the dam would swallow the village’s burial grounds, dislocating the town’s ancestors, she jumps into action. At first she listens to the news on the radio, resigned to the inevitability of death and destruction. As she prepares to succumb to her grief and old age-induced loneliness, she catches wind of a dam project that would virtually wipe her village off the map. The film by Lesotho director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese follows Mantoa (the late Mary Twala Mhlongo), a widow who just lost her son. It’s been an exhausting and immobilizing thirteen months, so the experience of watching This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection was especially rousing. I have not personally lost a loved one, but I anxiously consume the updated tolls–deaths, but also unemployment, inequitable and racist access to healthcare and education, the blabbering of cynical and virulent politicians–which leaves me bereft.
'Zola'Įach day throughout this interminable pandemic, I’ve been struck by the weight of a grief that I can’t seem to shake. She’s already given us far more than we deserve. At the end of the documentary, an 81-year-old Turner considers making this film her last public appearance, as is her right. Meanwhile, she faced the media, which was determined to retraumatize the star by asking her to give an account of the abuse she faced–or using her story as fodder for books and movies–effectively monetizing her pain. After two decades, she successfully ran away from her husband and began an extraordinary solo career, dogged by racist, idiotic executives who questioned a middle aged woman’s ability to find an audience for her rock music. His assaults were so appalling and nightmarish that Turner attempted suicide. The couple went on to build a successful career together, all the while Ike subjected her to physical and verbal abuse in marriage. If you’re not familiar with Turner’s story, then you should know that she rose to international fame after Ike Turner heard her sing and invited her to join his band. There’s many reasons for its standard coverage–Turner isn’t the subject of a spirited battle over conservatorship rights, for one thing–but that doesn’t make the film any less revelatory in its recontextualization of the media coverage surrounding the megastar. The Tina Turner documentary didn’t launch a thousand think pieces like its cousin, Framing Britney Spears, did.
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Further complicating things are an appearance by her ex-girlfriend, plus everyone asking her what she’s doing with her life. Unfortunately for Danielle, one of her main clients (Danny Deferarri) shows up at the shiva with his wife (Dianna Agron) and kid, which threatens the fragile peace that she had made between her personal life and the image she presents to her family. Although Danielle receives an allowance from her parents to cover her expenses, the remainder of her supplemental income comes from a collection of sugar daddies–or men who pay for company and sexual favors (for obvious reasons, she has told her parents that she’s making her extra cash babysitting). Told from the perspective of the aimless twenty-something Danielle (a wholly empathetic Rachel Sennott), the story follows her through a tense shiva that could upend how her family sees her. Twitter likened Emma Seligman’s directorial debut Shiva Baby to the film Uncut Gems, a thriller known for its ability to cause even the most hardened of us to experience dangerously acute anxiety.