Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 24 June

War Witch aka Rebelle (Nguyen, 2012)

The con­stant struggle to find some­thing not com­pletely obvi­ous to recom­mend – that is also actu­ally avail­able to most read­ers – continues.

I’ve wanted to fea­ture War Witch here since we star­ted but it there has been nowhere to stream it until now.

I wrote about it for the Capital Times in May 2013:

War Witch is a remark­able magic­al real­ist por­tray­al of the tragedy of child sol­dier­ing in one of Africa’s many civil wars. The phe­nom­en­al Rachel Mwanza plays Komona, kid­napped from her vil­lage by the rebel army and forced to murder her own par­ents. She is the only one to sur­vive the new company’s first action and super­sti­tious com­mand­ers start to believe that she is a lucky charm, hence “War Witch”.

Hypnotic, beau­ti­ful, upset­ting – War Witch is an extraordin­ary achieve­ment, totally deserving of an Academy Award nom­in­a­tion against Amour and No earli­er this year. By any defin­i­tion, this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m going to highly recom­mend it anyway.

Also in that CT column: 76-year-old Robert Redford teams up with Shia LaBoeuf for the thrill­er The Company You Keep, Haute Cuisine in which Catherine Frot cooks for President Mitterand, “intel­li­gent low-budget hor­ror” Antiviral by Brandon Cronenberg, and the 3D con­ver­sion of the ori­gin­al Jurassic Park.

Comments

Reader SD of Onehunga respon­ded to my review of Kōkā in yesterday’s new releases newsletter:

That’s a very thought­ful and gen­er­ous read­ing of Kōkā. While I agree there will be aspects of te ao Māori that may not res­on­ate with all Pākehā view­ers, it’s also very on-the-nose in script and per­form­ance, which I found extremely dif­fi­cult to con­nect to and lose myself in.

SD is not wrong that a lot of the sup­posedly con­tem­por­ary scenes in Kōkā are pretty hard to accept at face value but I have chosen to believe that they are down to con­scious choices – that I might not have made – rather than competence.

Editor’s note

Yesterday, I signed a one-year con­tract to do three days a week of com­mu­nic­a­tions advising for a Wellington-based organ­isa­tion. It’s pleas­ing to be asked and it’s sta­bil­ising for the fin­ances. They want me full-time Wednesday to Friday which means I may need to drop the reg­u­lar Friday news­let­ter. Apologies in advance if that turns out to be neces­sary. My reg­u­lar Friday RNZ Nights arrange­ment con­tin­ues – indeed it now airs an hour earli­er, at approx­im­ately 8.40pm.

Where to watch War Witch

Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on Beamafilm (free from par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies or a digit­al rent­al1)

Canada: Streaming on Crave or Starz

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Fawesome

UK: Not cur­rently avail­able online