Cultural Portraits

I found The States of Unbelonging moving in a way that Surname Viet was not–I liked that the States of Unbelonging focused so deeply on one woman’s story, who became another’s obsession–the deeper exploration as a microcosm to explain the macrocosm worked to illuminate the complexities of a long-standing, often-ideologized war. Surname Viet was strangely familiar to me, but removed itself by talking about The Subject at Large, instead of focusing mostly on their own situations. I thought the variety of interviews were confusing, and only slightly illuminating–I liked the fiery little Vietnamese woman who reminds me so much of my mother–when she talked, I thought she brought dimensions and a constancy to the film that the rest of it lacked. The States of Unbelonging took an emotional toll by starting out wide, and then tunneling and twisting into the story of Revital and how she was a “casualty of war”, but she certainly didn’t feel as such. When people talk about a person, there is an immediacy to it, a familiarity that everybody else can empathize with, which is what made the cultural portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so successful.