Moonlight: A Review | Lambert AkwaI’d like to preface this review of the achievement, tha
Moonlight: A Review | Lambert AkwaI’d like to preface this review of the achievement, that is the film Moonlight, by briefly discussing Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi’s See Me, See You exhibition which I recently visited at the Nubuke Institute in Accra. It was an unforgettable experience with a power of transcendence which moved me, in a way that art never had before. Perhaps, the only other time I have felt such rapture was in reading Marie Howe’s The Gate; one of my favourite poems. The exhibition, which ended this week after an extended run, consisted of a collection of photographs which documented and projected queerness in Ghana by employing a muted and understated colour palette, enabling the characters to shine brightly. Their smiles are all the more visible, their intimacies more tender, their discomfort all too palpable, and their fates discomfortingly uncertain. This left the viewer to reflect on their own place in an unbalanced world. Moonlight strikes a note that is not dissimilar to what I have just described in relation to See Me, See You. I was just as drawn in – sitting cross legged a few inches from my TV – and again deeply moved.Moonlight is the perfect film for our time. It consists of a very singular and tightly woven narrative split into three parts in which three actors, namely Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes each play the part of Chiron across various stages of his life, doing so with a strong sense of cohesiveness and seamless grace. This is especially curious when you find that the actors were not allowed to see each other’s performances. The structure allows for the film to track Chiron’s maturation as he grows up from a boy who is starkly made aware of his blackness and queerness from very early on in his life. This awareness doesn’t come to him as a result of a romanticised journey of self discovery, nor does it find him progressively. Whether it’s in relation to being black or queer, he is constantly told who he is by others, much in the same way a freight train might tell the stranger lost on its tracks to move out of the way. In fact, by the end of the film, it is still hard to tell if he knows who he truly is, or rather, if he knows what being the person he is means, since he has seemingly never had the opportunity to really reflect on this for himself.Read more on Ezibota.comConnect with us: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Google + | Youtube -- source link
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