lustershine-00992 Review of Black

Black (III) (2015)

Not only is this movie racist, it is also just bad.

[3/10 · 14 October 2017]

First of all the plot is very simple. And that's a bad thing. It lies somewhere between Romeo and Juliet and the Brazilian Movie "Elite Squad" but with a soap opera tone that won't seduce anyone above 18 years old. I mean... it's VERY simple. Second comes the way it depicts Brussels and it so said gang life. And that's where the racist part comes in. (SPOILER ALERT, but mainly because the plot is sooo simple) The movie depicts a rivalry between two groups of people, one of which is a gang composed of young men and girls from the Congolese neighborhood and the other group is made out of a bunch of friends from a Moroccan neighborhood. The gang is involved in hard drugs dealing, prostitution, guns trafficking... I mean it's a "gang"; they have a mean leader who himself is the puppet of an older duke of the neighborhood. And on the other hand, the Moroccans smoke weed and sometimes steal a handbag but when they do so the movie depicts it as just a game they play in order to challenge one another. Somehow, the feeling you get is that the Black people involved in gangs are really bad people and Moroccans are not-so-bad-people because actually they're more a group-of-friends-rather-than-a-gang and if they get violent it's more because they are trapped in some moral issues. Now if you live in Brussels you would know that in real life it actually is the opposite that is happening: drug dealing and gun trafficking belongs mainly to the Moroccans of Brussels... the latter terrorists attacks on Paris and Brussels are here to prove it. If you go to the Congolese neighborhood of Brussels you will mainly encounter pot heads and nobody would ever sell you a gun. It mostly is a friendly neighborhood. So the question remains: why is the movie called BLACK? And why do they depict reality in such a twisted way. That's when you realize that one of the directors is from Morocco.