96% War Witch

All Critics (47) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (45) | Rotten (2)

Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen spent nearly a decade researching this docudrama about child soldiers in Africa, and the film feels as authoritative as a first-hand account.

A haunting take on unspeakably grim subject matter, shot on location in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A powerful and upsetting portrait of a young girl compelled into unimaginably horrific circumstances.

Nguyen, astonishingly, manages to wring something vaguely like a happy ending from this tragic story.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head.

The powerful things we expect from "War Witch" are as advertised, but what we don't expect is even better.

... driven by a remarkably natural, unaffected performance by Mwanza. And Nguyen, despite relying a little too heavily on the initial voice-over for exposition, is a confident and sensitive intelligence behind the camera.

You're likely to ponder its images, its insights into a very foreign (for most of us) location and the tragic situation of Komona (and others like her) for a long time to come.

Is it accurate depiction of Africa's child soldiers? I don't know, thank God. But it feels authentic to its very core, and that makes it as hard to forget as it is to ignore.

Brutal without turning exploitative, the result is harrowing and heartbreaking.

Nguyen creates a mesmerizing tone through his camerawork, editing, sound and the infusion of African folk imagery and ritual, but it's Mwanza's performance as Komona that makes "War Witch" feel so miraculous.

Nguyen reportedly worked on "War Witch" for a decade, and it shows in both the immediacy and authenticity of his tale, and the meticulous craft with which it's told.

Made with extremely clear-eyed restraint from harangues, sentiment, message-mongering, or anything else that would cheapen its central character's suffering and fight.

War Witch features a standout performance by Rachel Mwanza, but the supernatural visions don't really suit the film's tone and mood.

Nguyen's compassion and commitment to the issue is admirable, and at its best, War Witch is devastating.

War Witch is remarkable for the fact that it never strays into sentimentality or sensationalism.

...a love story between youngsters who are forced to become adults all too early in their lives.

This is a straight ahead essay on warfare at its worst and the survival of the human spirit at its best.

An astonishing drama set in Africa that vividly depicts the courage and resiliency of a 12-year-old girl whose spiritual gifts enable her to survive.

It is astonishing that film that contains such violence can have such a serene tone. The source of the serenity is the measured, calm narration by Komona (voice of Diane Umawahoro) that is the telling of her story to her unborn child

An exquisitely made film in direct contrast to the ugliness of its subject matter

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/war_witch/

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CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING IS LACKING IN BOSTON STORY

WASHINGTON -- The first time I met the legendary Sam Jameson we had tea in Tokyo in 1979. He told me with unwavering assurance why he was dedicating his life and talents to Japan.

This tall, stolid Yankee with the open Midwestern smile had arrived in the island nation with the U.S. Army in 1960, when World War II had still not really ended. Parts of Japanese cities were still in ruins and mentalities were still mired in confusion. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the brilliant American substitute for the emperor after the war, had gone home, but the future had not yet arrived.

"I decided I would stay as a correspondent," Sam told me that day. "I wanted to see if two people who had been at war could be friends again."

Those words stayed with me, as from afar I watched Sam go from writing for Pacific Stars & Stripes to the Chicago Tribune and, finally, to a quarter-century as the Los Angeles Times' bureau chief in Tokyo. His first "trick" was to learn perfectly fluent and nuanced Japanese, itself a tremendous accomplishment.

While other correspondents flocked to the "new Japan" and did their jobs well, Sam stood alone in his talents. Whenever his friends from home visited, he took us to his favorite piano bars, and at a certain time, the big Yank got up and sang in perfect Japanese, and the crowd went wild.

Another evening we were having dinner at The Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo, and I began complaining that I had been unable to get an interview with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, already an international leader of considerable note. Sam picked up the phone on the table, dialed Nakasone's private number, spoke a moment in Japanese and hung up.

"Shall we go over there now?" Sam asked, with that wonderful smile hovering on impishness. And that very night, I had an excellent interview with the notably evasive Nakasone.

As Bob Gibson, the L.A. Times foreign editor who worked with Sam, noted this week, "Whereas other reporters often use Western diplomats as sources, Western diplomats in Japan used Sam as a source."

Unfortunately, Gibson was speaking for Sam's obituaries after Sam died at 76 on April 19 of a stroke -- in Tokyo, naturally -- after half a century's work and dedication not only to a profession, but to an idea.

It may seem that I am simply reminiscing here, about someone I greatly admired professionally and had deep affection for personally, but it is more than that. In a time when we have more need in understanding the Chechens, the Afghans, the Sunnis and the Shiites, the Syrians and the Iraqis, and the Malians and the Mauritanians, I am trying to throw much-needed light on how understanding between peoples is best accomplished.

When those two nitwit Tsarnaev boys committed mass murder in Boston, people asked, "Chechen? Chechnya? Maybe, Czech?" And all most writers could come up with was the rather obvious information that Chechnya was a small Muslim tribal area in the Caucasus, and that the Tsarnaev family had come out of Chechnya's wars with the Russians.

This week I found the best analysis to be from Russian writer Konstantin Kazenin, who wrote in Moscow that the Tsarnaev family were not among the Chechen exiles after the wars as expected, but part of a different tragedy.

Instead, this family, which ended up in a unique and unusual diaspora in Boston, is "an example of a Caucasus family which existed in the last Soviet and post-Soviet decades without communal supports and in a vacuum of new unfriendly spaces in which it was necessary to find a way to survive without having any accustomed support," according to Kazenin.

In short, they were not villagers, with a village to support them. They were not city dwellers who fought off the Russians together. They were part of the groups written about by the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago" -- effectively atomized individuals and individual families, lost without any support except themselves.

To me, this means that the brothers could be at least as much against America as against Russia: to the Tsarnaevs, both countries are equally huge, impersonal entities in which they are lost and afraid; both are enemies undeserving of pity.

Another excellent analyst of the Chechens, Almut Rochowanski, coordinator of the Chechnya Advocacy Network, also writes brilliantly about the Chechens' "exaggerated masculinity, the way a 'real man,' a 'real Chechen,' has to conduct himself, and the treatment he is entitled to expect from others."

The Chechen boy in a world like America brings with him the idea that "he should get respect from everyone and tolerate no slights; he should control 'his' women or else lose his honor." And if he doesn't, he strikes out against the society that ignores him.

In Japan after World War II, Douglas MacArthur relied on total victory, but also upon cultural wisdom about Japan from American anthropologists he hired, such as the great Ruth Benedict. In Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces instead treated locals as if they were poor copies of ourselves. We know the tragic outcomes.

Now, as we try to figure out the "whys" of Chechen and other terrorists -- and as more and more talk is given to "getting into Syria" -- it is time that we dig deeper, as my dear friend Sam and even MacArthur so surprisingly did.

(Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer(at)juno.com.)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cultural-understanding-lacking-boston-story-220039656.html

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Koupah Does Tablet-Based Point-Of-Sale, But Also Zaps Credit Card Transaction Fees

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 startup alley company Koupah is a fresh take on the tablet-based point-of-sale space, which is growing in popularity among SMBs who want a solution that's flexible, extensible and less expensive than legacy POS-specific hardware systems. Koupah takes the model a step further by offsetting some or all credit card transaction fees with advertising.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/r33VBNXd7_k/

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'Star Wars' Spotlight: Grand Moff Tarkin

By Ryan Rigley While there may not be all that much to go off of for the upcoming "Star Wars VII" as of yet, it seems as if that won't be the case once the film actually goes into production. "I think the whole issue of confidentiality is gonna be fascinating as we move into [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/04/29/star-wars-spotlight-grand-moff-tarkin/

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Just a fast query about university? - Wiki Q&a

when i leave college i want to grow to be a teacher. i dont know which one yet it will either be a primary college teacher or a secondary school teacher teaching maths. if i was to become a secondary school teacher teaching maths, in university will I be capable to study maths as an undergraduate and for a post graduate course do educational research. will this nonetheless qualify me to become a maths teacher in a secondary college?

Source: http://www.wiki-qa.com/education-reference/higher-education/just-a-fast-query-about-university.html

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IMF flags risks of asset bubbles, middle income trap in Asia

By Kevin Lim

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Asia needs to guard against asset bubbles and its emerging economies must improve government institutions and liberalize rigid labor and product markets if they wish to reach the level of developed countries, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday.

"Emerging Asia is potentially susceptible to the 'middle-income trap,' a phenomenon whereby economies risk stagnation at middle-income levels and fail to graduate into the ranks of advanced economies," the IMF said in its latest Regional Economic Outlook for Asia and the Pacific.

"MIEs (middle-income economies) in Asia are less exposed to the risk of a sustained growth slowdown than MIEs in other regions. However, their relative performance is weaker on institutions," the international funding agency said.

IMF's warning about the emerging risks faced by Asian countries come at time when the region looks set to lead a global economic recovery as risks from a meltdown in Europe recede.

"While the external risk of severe economic fallout from an acute euro area crisis has diminished, regional risks are coming into clearer focus. These include some ongoing buildup of financial imbalances and rising asset prices," the IMF said.

IMF was monitoring credit ratios and output levels in Asia closely as conditions can worsen very quickly, the fund's director for Asia and Pacific region, Anoop Singh, told reporters at a briefing in Singapore.

He said regional authorities needed to respond early and decisively to potential overheating.

IMF, which recently cut its 2013 and 2014 growth forecasts for Greater China, India, South Korea and Singapore but raised its outlook for Malaysia and the Philippines, nevertheless sounded generally positive about near-term prospects.

"Growth in Asia is likely pick up gradually in the course of 2013, to about 5.75 percent, on strengthening external demand and continued robust domestic demand," it said.

ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS, JAPAN

The IMF said India, the Philippines, China and Indonesia needed to improve their economic institutions while India, the Philippines and Thailand were also exposed to a larger risk of growth slowdown stemming from sub-par infrastructure.

Malaysia and China were the highest-ranked developing Asian countries in an IMF chart measuring institutional strength while Indonesia, India and the Philippines were at the bottom.

IMF defined institutional strength as demonstrating higher political stability, better bureaucratic capability, fewer conflicts and less corruption.

For many developing Asian economies, there remains ample room for easing stringent regulations in product and, in some cases, labor markets, the fund added.

The IMF also said various statistical approaches indicate that trend growth rates have slowed in both China and India

For China, trend growth appears to have peaked at around 11 percent in 2006-07, while India's trend growth is now around 6-7 percent compared with about 8 percent prior to the financial crisis.

"By contrast, trend growth for most ASEAN countries seems to have remained stable or to have increased somewhat, with the notable exception of Vietnam," the fund said.

ASEAN is the acronym for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations whose members include Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar.

Turning to Japan, Singh said the IMF "welcomed" Japanese efforts to stimulate its economy, and said quantitative easing was just part of a package of measures that included cutting debt and embarking of structural reforms such as increasing female participation in the workforce.

"In Japan, we have welcomed the measures taken. It's because they are focused on addressing the deflation that has affected Japan for the last 10-15 years."

"As Japan moves back to sustainable positive growth, it's going to help the region and the global economy and that is the most important," he said.

(Reporting by Kevin Lim; Editing by Kim Coghill)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/imf-flags-risk-middle-income-trap-emerging-asia-031000704.html

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Visual Identity Platform Vizify Launches Out Of Beta, Now Lets You Share Graphics Via Social Media Cards

The Portland-based Vizify came out of TechStars' accelerator in 2011 with the goal of helping everyday people turn their personal data -- the stuff that's fragmented across scores of profiles, networks and websites -- into one, unified visual profile. Essentially, piggybacking on the rise of digital portfolio platforms that aim to recast how we use the resume, Vizify wants to help change how we build our identities online.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7Q9qvupUWtg/

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