These Hands Who would have suspected that a 45 minute documentary about women crushing rocks, without narration or plot, would offer one of the most unforgettable and rewarding experiences of recent African cinema? Flora M'mbugu-Schelling's quiet tribute to women at the very bottom of the international economic order ultimately deepens into a mediation on human labor itself. These Hands will stimulate viewers to rethink documentary and to question their own role as consumers in a global economy. In These Hands, the camera acts as a compassionate witness to a day in the life of Mozambican women refugees working in a quarry outside Dar es Salaam - the relentless toil, the tender childcare, the nostalgic songs and joyous dancing at day's end. We slowly come to recognize that these women are, in fact, parts of a giant machine, not just the quarry but the international economic system as a whole. The rocks, the women, the scarred landscape, are being constantly ground into the common currency of industrial civilization. As the film unspools, we, the viewers, look on powerless and complicit, realizing we too are enmeshed in this global mechanism of social, economic and ideological reproduction. Director Flora M'mbugu-Schelling
has explained why she refused to interpret or romanticize these women's
story, to reduce them to a simple political pose or anthropological
point. "Certain things you can say with words and certain things you
cannot find words for...The time has passed when we can use the classic
documentary style. I don't want to offend my audience by telling them
what they should see or feel." It is precisely this refusal of premature
closure that makes viewers so much more aware of their relationship
to the film and its protagonists. |
"In looking at
lives that in most ways seem hopeless, These Hands discovers
a communal warmth and flashes of joy." "A rare film
which depicts ordinary life with extraordinary clarity." "An exceptional
documentary in both its ethical and aesthetic qualities...A hallucinatory
voyage." "These Hands
doesn't give us an easy way to get inside it; in fact it makes us aware
of our distance from these people...Incredible assuredness, a very strong
sense of voice and vision." Director: Flora
M'mbugu-Schelling
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