Palestinian-British documentarian Saeed Taji Farouky takes a, largely, observational approach - with a welcome touch of something more abstract - as he embeds himself within a family in rural Myanmar for his latest film. Htwe Tin and his wife Thein Shwe are just one of many couples in the Magway region to swap reaping crops for drilling for oil in a bid to get by as they hope for a brighter future for their kids, the lush greenery of the countryside in sharp contrast to the thick black oil they bring to the surface with a motor pump that has seen better days.
Farouky relaxes into the gentle rhythms of everyday family life for the couple, as they joke with one another about work or play with the children, in between doing their best to extract barrels of the black stuff. We see the major role keeping faith has in.
Farouky relaxes into the gentle rhythms of everyday family life for the couple, as they joke with one another about work or play with the children, in between doing their best to extract barrels of the black stuff. We see the major role keeping faith has in.
- 4/26/2022
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
“A Thousand Fires” is the newest full-length work of documentarian filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky. Like his previous project, in this film too, the director spends a prolonged period of time with his subjects, an unregulated oil field proprietors Thein Shwe and Htwe Tin in Magway region of Myanmar.
A Thousand Fires is Screening at the Museum of the Moving Image
There isn’t much of a story to “A Thousand Fires” per se. We see the family dig oil and live their lives but that’s about it. There isn’t any drama and tension here, except maybe for the fact that the son of the couple we follow tries to be a football player. But there is no tension or drama to his desire to go beyond his family’s means here, nothing to root for, nothing cinematic or dramatic per se. It just feels natural.
This feeling of naturalness defines the entire documentary.
A Thousand Fires is Screening at the Museum of the Moving Image
There isn’t much of a story to “A Thousand Fires” per se. We see the family dig oil and live their lives but that’s about it. There isn’t any drama and tension here, except maybe for the fact that the son of the couple we follow tries to be a football player. But there is no tension or drama to his desire to go beyond his family’s means here, nothing to root for, nothing cinematic or dramatic per se. It just feels natural.
This feeling of naturalness defines the entire documentary.
- 3/1/2022
- by Martin Lukanov
- AsianMoviePulse
The first time we hear music in Saeed Taji Farouky’s mesmeric A Thousand Fires is also the first time we’re offered a glimpse of the viscous substance around which the whole documentary orbits. Set in the Magway region of Myanmar, it concerns a family struggling to make ends meet by drilling oil in an unregulated field—a Heart of Darkness-like landscape dotted with derricks, huts, and countless fires. We open with a man cranking a manual well, but it takes a few moments for Farouky to show the fruits of his work; when it happens, the oil splashes through the frame in a kaleidoscope of colors, an impossibly gorgeous vision of shapeshifting hues, accompanied by a synths-heavy melody, a murmur of the Earth. It’s a marriage of sounds and visuals that turns oil into a magic potion, an amniotic liquid, less a resource to be exploited than...
- 8/11/2021
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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