The Home of Best Pictures, UT Austin's Crucible Course
This video essay on Rungano Nyongi’s I Am Not a Witch by Amarachi Ngwakwe explores the film’s depiction of power through an analysis of Nyongi’s deft formal techniques. Through Nyongi’s filmmaking, according to Ngwakwe, we can understand this film as an examination of what power and imprisonment truly mean.
Threading together an analysis of two 2018 films, Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum and Hirozaku Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, Danielle Nwosa argues that both are powerful cinematic depictions of children in dire socioeconomic conditions.
The video can be viewed at this Google Drive link (will open new window).
This examination of humor in Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite Nila Selveraj frames comedy as a key device in both films for interrogating the systems of power depicted by each — Stalinist Russia in the former, 18th century English royalty in the latter.
Amanda Hua’s video essay analyzes the use of magic in two 2018 films: Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch and Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro. In these contexts, Hua argues, magic provides unique formal and thematic capabilities for art that depicts the condition of marginalized and oppressed peoples.
Will Shute chose an unlikely candidate for a final essay topic in the 2019 Best Pictures seminar: the beloved Paddington 2, one of the most acclaimed films of 2017. In his video analysis of the film — quite hilarious in its own right — he details the movie’s literacy of other classic film comedies, particularly those of Charlie Chaplin.