Yes, I'm being overly simplistic here but Tareque Masud's Bangladeshi film gives us a highly tangible, fictional account of how a fairly routine family background scenario spawns, in a young man, a move from poor family and unemployment into being sucked up and into a fundamentalist group, whose word is spread by violence.
As a white westerner, it's all too easy to suppose how some young men get caught up in such and that is why as a Bangladeshi himself, the director paints a wholly credible and engaging story about his country- folk. He doesn't take sides, the story does the talking, though the metaphors and symbols are all there.
Looking at some of the gorgeous landscapes, where cows graze under setting suns, it is in fact only western technologies and influentials that mar it, more and more. From the jets screaming overhead, to the internet cafe, where our young man finds his new spiritual 'guide' - "There's Islamic stuff on the internet?" he asks, when he is shown a military training exercise on the PC screen and then says "I thought there was only naked women".
When I watch a world cinema movie, especially a rarer one (this was shown very late by those great mavericks - Channel 4), I loosely make a mental note on how many western words have infiltrated the dialogue. These are often sentences. It is chilling and really rather repugnant that towards the end of this film, the western words used here include 'bomb, detonation, terrorism, preliminary search, electrical device' and so on.
An introduction before the film (by I don't know who, a woman, not the director, who died aged 54 last year) talks briefly about the casting and making of the film, how all the cast are non-professional. This cast are uniformly very good and the film overall feels well made, particularly well shot and put together. I couldn't find any DVDs of it on Amazon, which ultimately means that it'll stay in its largely unseen and unknown slot.
I don't think that Marsud tries to or makes any over-spectacular statements, at least politically, though I (of course) could be wrong. To fit a story into 90 minutes there's always going to be contrivances sown in and in some ways, I was almost wanting to say that this story is far too simplistic, or contrived, or whatever. Because I cannot actually say such and whilst far from my own world and daily life, the film certainly has to be admired and highly commended.
As a white westerner, it's all too easy to suppose how some young men get caught up in such and that is why as a Bangladeshi himself, the director paints a wholly credible and engaging story about his country- folk. He doesn't take sides, the story does the talking, though the metaphors and symbols are all there.
Looking at some of the gorgeous landscapes, where cows graze under setting suns, it is in fact only western technologies and influentials that mar it, more and more. From the jets screaming overhead, to the internet cafe, where our young man finds his new spiritual 'guide' - "There's Islamic stuff on the internet?" he asks, when he is shown a military training exercise on the PC screen and then says "I thought there was only naked women".
When I watch a world cinema movie, especially a rarer one (this was shown very late by those great mavericks - Channel 4), I loosely make a mental note on how many western words have infiltrated the dialogue. These are often sentences. It is chilling and really rather repugnant that towards the end of this film, the western words used here include 'bomb, detonation, terrorism, preliminary search, electrical device' and so on.
An introduction before the film (by I don't know who, a woman, not the director, who died aged 54 last year) talks briefly about the casting and making of the film, how all the cast are non-professional. This cast are uniformly very good and the film overall feels well made, particularly well shot and put together. I couldn't find any DVDs of it on Amazon, which ultimately means that it'll stay in its largely unseen and unknown slot.
I don't think that Marsud tries to or makes any over-spectacular statements, at least politically, though I (of course) could be wrong. To fit a story into 90 minutes there's always going to be contrivances sown in and in some ways, I was almost wanting to say that this story is far too simplistic, or contrived, or whatever. Because I cannot actually say such and whilst far from my own world and daily life, the film certainly has to be admired and highly commended.