Zack_Tu_Nan

The Territory is visually striking, with polished cinematography and high production value, yet it ultimately feels like a soulless spectacle. It relies on familiar Western tropes; beauty shots, expert interviews, aestheticized destruction, and pushy sound design that dictates emotion. Even with Indigenous camera participation, most of the film, around 70%, still reflects an outsider gaze.

The narrative feels fragmented, as if the filmmaker parachutes in for beautiful shots rather than building a complete, lived in story.

The film ends abruptly, as if unsure of its direction, leaving me feeling abandoned as a viewer. I wanted to truly know the Indigenous people, but the film only skims the surface, never letting us into their lives beyond brief fragments.

Perfectly packaged for Western funders, festivals, and their echo chamber of validation, the film checks every expected box; Indigenous struggle, climate change, Amazon deforestation, while fitting neatly into a digestible format.

A more meaningful approach would involve deeper research and longer immersion, creating a film that reflects the community's ways of seeing and relating to their land. This does not mean handing authorship to untrained individuals; it means using cinematic craft to express a worldview rather than bending that worldview into a pre existing festival friendly arc.

Honeyland demonstrates this alternative. With a fraction of the budget, it achieves intimacy and cultural authenticity without interviews, explanatory devices, or spectacle. It invites viewers to inhabit its characters' rhythms rather than observe them from afar.

The filmmakers clearly have noble intentions and technical skill, yet the result feels designed to satisfy the Western gaze, a polished product made for festivals and funders, validated by the same systems that continue to gatekeep Indigenous storytellers. For all its urgency, it reinforces the very power structures that reward impact driven statement films while sidelining authentic Indigenous voices.

When I started watching I Am Because We Are, I didn't know it was written, narrated, and produced by Madonna. In fact, I spent much of the first half trying to decipher who this disembodied, almost savior-like narrator was, a voice delivering moral reflections on Africa's suffering and resilience, but never appearing on camera. That initial choice set the tone: the story is framed by an outsider's journey, with Malawi and its people positioned as a backdrop for her awakening.

The first half of the film was difficult to watch, not just because of the harrowing subject matter, the impact of HIV/AIDS on orphans, but because of the way it was presented. Madonna speaks of her mission and guilt, pointing out the prevalence of witchcraft and stigma, while admiring the children's optimism despite their hardship. This gaze felt flattening and reductive: the Malawian characters were presented as noble, admirable, even mystifying, but rarely allowed to speak as full, complex individuals. Although the children and others are technically given space to speak from the beginning, their words are selectively used to support the Western narrator's own sentiments and assumptions, rather than as complete stories of their own. The film's treatment of witchcraft and stigma is particularly problematic: it demonizes these aspects of Malawian culture and flattens them into mere evidence of backwardness, without offering sufficient context about their social meaning or role.

It was only in the second half that the film began to resonate more strongly. Here, the children's own voices and stories took center stage, and their dignity and resilience came through more authentically, without so much external narration or framing. This shift showed what the documentary could have been if it had trusted its subjects more fully from the start.

Since watching, I've reflected on what made me uncomfortable. The film exemplifies what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called "the problem of representation": even when well-intentioned, Western filmmakers often speak for marginalized people, instead of letting them speak. Similarly, Claude Lévi-Strauss observed how Western observers tend to exoticize other cultures, projecting meaning onto ordinary behaviors, something this film does when it romanticizes communal life and resilience as if they are inherently superior to Western alienation. What Madonna reads as an African paradox, materially poor but spiritually rich, is perhaps just the baseline of how Malawian society expects people to behave. These are not magical or saintly characters; they are humans shaped by their culture and circumstances.

That is the recurring problem I now see in many Western documentaries about the Global South: they claim to give voice to the voiceless, but end up dominating the narrative arena, leaving local people as supporting characters in someone else's moral drama. This gaze is very prevalent and repetitive in most of Western made documentaries, I noticed the same dynamic recently in Everything is Temporary (2024) by Juliette Klinke, which similarly admired the optimism of a young Myanmar woman while flattening her into a symbol of noble suffering rather than presenting her as a full human being. I Am Because We Are has good intentions, and some moments of genuine power, but it ultimately re-centers the Western gaze, failing to fully trust the people it seeks to honor.

A such great potential documentary with a great subject yet Sloppy storytelling lacking in depth and also so many of her family members popping in randomly. Sometimes I lost track of whose who. One third or fourth of the film is Lorena running.

Lots of beautiful drone shots but that's about it and doesn't add any value to the story.

A waste of potential.

--- A such great potential documentary with a great subject yet Sloppy storytelling lacking in depth and also so many of her family members popping in randomly. Sometimes I lost track of whose who. One third or fourth of the film is Lorena running.

Lots of beautiful drone shots but that's about it and doesn't add any value to the story.

A waste of potential.