Tag: movies

  • Eisha Marjara’s Calorie is moving and heartwarming

    by Imtiaz Popat

    Eisha Marjara’s Canadian Melodrama Calorie will be featured at the Sunder Prize Film Festival.  Like her previous film, Marjara explores discovering identity. This time she goes into her own past through this fictional story.  

    Monika Singh (Ellora Patnaik) a recently divorced, Sikh-Canadian architect is at a crossroads in her life. She’s overwhelmed and under-appreciated at work. Her 13-year-old teenaged daughter, Alia (Shanaya Dhillon-Birmhan), who obsessed with her body image, counting calories, skipping meals, and maintaining a rigid workout regiment. Her 17-year-old daughter, Simi (Ashley Ganger), is a singer, who in love with a boy she plans to move in with the second she turns 18.

    The family travels to India, visiting their Uncle Mohan (Anupam Kher) and Auntie Gurdeep (Dolly Ahluwalia). Alia and Simi have never been to Indian before, and their set-in-stone ways run afoul of a major case of culture shock.

    The trip will further drive a wedge between mother and her daughters when the kids learn that Monika has been lying to them about how their grandmother died. She hid the traumatic truth that her grand mother had died in the 1985 Air India bombing.

    Marjara takes great pains at examining not only the tremendous feeling of loss during one of the most devastating terrorist acts to impact Canadians, but also the lives lost during the Indian government’s deadly Operation Blue Star, which occurred at an iconic and revered temple in the film’s chosen setting of Amritsar.

    Marjara also revisits other personal traumas and works from her past, by giving one of the primary characters an eating disorder, a topic the director previously covered in her short film Am I the Skinniest Person You’re Ever Seen?.

    This melodrama is very compelling with a thing of Bollywood flavor. Particularly with the Bollywood screen legend Amupum Kher. The story, direction, cinematography and the music weaves a heartwarming story about healing from our traumatic past.

  • Review: President’s Cake is reminiscent of the Gulf War against Iraq

    by Imtiaz Popat

    The President’s Cake (Mamlaket al-Qasab) is a surreal vivid story set in before the Gulf War against Iraq, it comes out in on back drop of the anther Gulf war, this one against Iran. New York-based writer/director Hasan Hadi draws on his own childhood in 1990s Iraq under the regime of President Saddam Hussein.  At the time, the country faced UN-backed sanctions, leading to extreme poverty and food shortages.  Saddam still required all Iraqis to celebrate his birthday.

    To live in 1990s Iraq was to live in Saddam Hussein’s shadow, his image plastered onto walls across the city and his name drilled into the psyches of children. He scripted himself as a savior to a country hollowed out by the Gulf war. This is the Iraq first-time filmmaker Hasan Hadi remembers growing up in, a snapshot seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) whois tasked with providing a nice President’s birthday cake for her school class. 

    Along with her pet rooster Hindi, her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and a classmate Waheed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Lamia ends up in the city, looking for ingredients like flour, sugar and eggs, even if it means selling her late father’s heirloom watch.  But it turns out that Lamia’s grandmother is in the city for another reason. 

    The film was shot in Iraq in real historical locations, including the Mesopotamian marshes (believed to be the birthplace of civilization), where people still live as they did thousands of years ago, paddling by canoe to get around.  In the city, a restaurant scene actually takes
    place at the restaurant where Saddam used to eat when he was young.

    Lamia’s odyssey begins with an assignment that feels deceptively simple: She is charged by her ex-soldier schoolteacher to bake a cake in honor of the president’s birthday. It’s evident that the task is truly a test of obedience. One of the first scenes of the film features schoolchildren, including Lamia, chanting, “With our blood and our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!” beneath the sound of fighter jets. Hadi carefully stages this atmosphere of mounting tension, where baking a cake is haunted by the quiet terror of getting it wrong. 

    The President’s Cake is carried by the remarkable performances of its predominantly amateur cast, especially its child actors. Nayyef and Qasem convey how children adjust to the environments they live in as their characters traverse and adapt to their fractured home. The pair’s overwhelming frustrations are also punctuated by moments of joy, from a staring contest to Nayyef dancing with a cafe singer.  

    At times, the odyssey leans on a fairy-tale chain of coincidences, but what lingers is its fidelity to lived experience. Hadi conveys the blunt, unvarnished realities of everyday life, particular under immense pressure. The director channels his childhood to comment on issues that are no less familiar today: power, patriarchy, poverty, and most of all, the damages of war.

    Coming out during Ramadhan and with back drop of another Gulf War, the filmography is very vivid and is really worth watching on the big screen at this time during the Oscar award season. The film won both the Caméra d’Or (best first feature) and the Directors’ Fortnight
    Audience Award at Cannes 2025.

    The film is in Arabic with English subtitles. The President’s Cake is being released in Canada by Mongrel Media.

  • Review: ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ tells a story of Gaza

    Motaz Malhees in “The Voice of Hind Rajab.”© Willa

    The Voice of Hind Rajab is a dramatization and visualization sound files of the Voice of Hind Rajab during phone conversations at a Red Cresent call centre from a car caught in a brutal Israeli attack in Gaza.  

    A call comes into Omar’s call centre line, a woman screaming, “They are shooting at us!” A hail of fire. The call ends. Omar soon learns that a 6-year-old girl is still alive in the car.

    Hind is not just trapped in the car — she’s trapped in time, in history, in headlines, in the audio that materializes on-screen like a line of digital razor wire and charges the film with an unceasing current of emotional voltage.

    The film’s final turn is once the recording runs out and Hind’s voice can no longer be heard strips away all narrative padding and grants her mother a place to memorialize her grief. This time, the view of the horizon and sea is clear.

    This isn’t filmmaker Ben Hania’s first time refracting reality through the lens of performance: In the Oscar-nominated experimental 2023 documentary Four Daughters, she integrated actors into the household of a Tunisian mother and her two youngest daughters to play her missing eldest two daughters, who left to join Daesh fighters in Libya. The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.

    The film has won a number of film festival awards and It has been selected as the Tunisian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, making the December shortlist. At the 83rd Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Non-English Language Film.