#WhiteMaterial, 2009, directed by #ClaireDenis and starring #IsabelleHuppert is another look into the #HeartOfDarkness, this time that of the arrogance of #whiteDenial born of #whitePrivilege.

Marie chooses to ignore reality and believe she, her family, and their plantation will be safe even as a righteous reckoning closes in.

She clings desperately to what was never hers, and earns her just, brutal fate.

A tense, slow-burn of a #film on #TheCriterionChannel

https://www.criterionchannel.com/white-material

#ClaireDenis goes back to the colonial Africa & tells a story of a coffee plantation owned by a white family caught in civil war. Maria Vial, a matron of the family is perhaps a clueless, arrogant white woman, as she tries to hire fleeing locals to finish coffee harvest, oblivious to total chaos around her. It's her ingrained sense of entitlement that makes her a curio as she refuses to leave & calling other whites undeserving of the beautiful land. We are in the Denis territory and there are some amazingly blissful sequences- Maria riding a motorcycle on the dirt road, piles of child soldiers all doped up with pills & junk food spread out in the Vial house... #IsabelleHuppert’s glaring whiteness is used well against the black continent. #WhiteMaterial is not her most abstract film yet Denis still manages to keep the film absorbing and enigmatic without ever being didactic or boring. It's definitely headier and feels more substantial than her other works. It's invigorating.