A sensoral experience in which the natural world is used as a tool for reflection on the state of humanity through the prism of the migrant crisis, Island of The Hungry Ghosts is revelatory documentary filmmaking in which the vary foundations of philosophical readings into humankind's place in the natural world are manifested through the analogous nature of the film's form and function. Brooding with atmosphere, Island of the Hungry Ghost's employs an impressionistic lens, presenting the natural world as ominous, stoic, yet spiritual, with the island being a place of long history, one which is home to continually one of the largest migrations in the entire world which occur in the form of red crabs. Juxtaposing the humanitarian crisis of migration restrictions for asylum seekers with this phenomenon of the mass-migration and freedom of movement in the natural world of these crabs, Island of the Hungry Ghosts reveals the manufactured, unnatural ideal of the nation state itself, one thats restrictions on freedom of movement are arbitrary and intrinsically at odds with the natural state of things, one which humanity itself isn't above but a part of. The primary subject of this film is a trauma therapist whose altruistic intentions are slowly confronted by the cold mechanisms at play in the migrant detention center and system at large. Reaching a point in which being complicit by mere participation in a system in which the perpetual state of repression is intrinsic to its formation entirely, she is implored to leave this island behind, living what Aristotle himself may have viewed as 'the examined life', intent in her unwillingness ethically to participate in this unjust, perpetual, and unnatural system of repression. A powerful study of barbarism in the modern world, Island of the Hungry Ghosts reflects on the inconsistencies of aid in modern society, exhibiting in this case how the difference between migrants and natives is merely predicated on natural selection and spatial good-fortune, thus it becomes not only unnatural but nonsensical to deny others when a significant faction of the natural state itself has no relationship with meritocracy, virtue, or determinism.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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