IMPORTANT NOTE: please use a VPN whenever visiting Hextube, or anywhere else on the internet, for that matter. Protect your privacy.
For this Sunday Kino Night, we’re giving some African cinema a try, with the highly-acclaimed Senegalese WW2 film Camp de Thiaroye (1988). It concerns the real-life story of a platoon of West African soldiers who fought for the French during the Battle of France in 1940. Upon their release from German POW camps in 1944, they return to Africa, and the French thank them by locking them up in another prison camp, this time in Dakar. The prisoners mutiny against poor conditions, resulting in the Thiaroye massacre, one of France’s worst colonial atrocities. God Damn the French: The Movie. This is one of the highest-rated African films on Letterboxd, and a classic of Third World cinema in general. The director, Ousmane Sembene, is otherwise best-known for Black Girl (1966), which we should also watch sometime.
After that is The Boxer’s Omen (1983), one of the most renowned cult classics of Hong Kong cinema, an off-the-walls fantasy-action-horror film about a boxer’s quest into a sinister underworld filled with monsters and magic to free his family from an evil curse. Can he punch his way to a happy ending? I guess we’ll find out. This is generally seen as one of the best classic Hong Kong effects films, being particularly noted for its ridiculous amount of gore. It is also the best-known and best-regarded work of director Kuei Chih-Hung, who specialized in this sort of thing.
We’ll start at 8PM EST on Hextube, right here:
https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies
Be there, comrades!
Letterboxd:
- Camp de Thiaroye: https://letterboxd.com/film/camp-de-thiaroye/
- The Boxer’s Omen: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-boxers-omen/
Doesthedogdie.com links:
- Camp de Thiaroye: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092716/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg
- The Boxer’s Omen: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/135500
CWs for Camp de Thiaroye:
- Deaths of animals.
- Animal abuse.
- Smoking.
- Colonialism.
- Blood and gore.
- References to sex. Not depicted.
- Alcohol.
- War crimes.
- Sad ending.
CWs for The Boxer’s Omen:
- Nudity.
- Sex scene about 7 minutes in.
- Sexual assault: the aforementioned sex scene, between the protagonist and his love interest, is rather rough. It isn’t explicitly non-consensual, but I’ll put a CW here just to be safe.
- Deaths of animals.
- Vomiting.
- Bodily fluids all over the place.
- Blood and gore.
- Decapitation.
- Spiders.
- Animal abuse.
- Snakes.
- Bugs.
Links to movies:
- Camp de Thiaroye: https://tankie.tube/w/7j3zpjeyGQa6jyTSqhuR4L
- The Boxer’s Omen: https://tankie.tube/w/aZKBGUR1bjGnPbiR88jrR5
