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France, Cameroon · 2010
1h 42m
Director Claire Denis
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Isaach De Bankolé
Genre Drama
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Amidst turmoil and racial conflict in a Francophone African state, a white French woman fights for her coffee crop, her family and ultimately for her life.
Yet in the end it's less the climactic madness and mayhem in White Material that sear the memory than it is the silent, balletic creep of child soldiers, grabbed out of school and sent with machetes and rifles through a forest to exact revenge for decades of repression.
This haunting drama by Claire Denis burns with a mute fear and rage at the ongoing atrocities in central Africa.
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.
Claire Denis' drama is an overly fastidious but insight-filled look at post-colonial Africa.
Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe
This is one of Denis's most provocative films and also one of her most compelling.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in.
Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea
While White Material is very much the story of this one woman, it is also a story of postcolonial Africa, a place where Europeans staked their claim, and where disorder and destruction upended everything. A mournful, frightening, powerful film.
What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.
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