Matthew Mark Luke John
This film is in some ways covering old news or at least a very old story of how young women want equality and to aspire to higher things than the sometimes but certainly not always – thankless task of staying at home rearing children and cooking cleaning and shopping for their husbands and children.
The actress who plays Rebeca – the lead character, is young enough to play such an innocent and natural lead that one is baffled at exactly how very real she comes across. I commend her highly. She is given the daunting task of carrying a story weighted with poverty destitution and disadvantage coming from a Romani Baptist Village and from a line of imported slaves to fight hopelessly it seems for a good future for herself and her friends by making a play to go to high school and study.
The men in the plot seem uncaring and blinkered. They dont only seem like that, in the story that is clearly factual, they were these things. Rebeca takes to the church and reading the bible to a group of women who become her followers only to find her best friend fade away from the high school aspiration and her father locks Rebeca in her room.
The end of the film is pretty negatvie. We are left as an audience wondering what on earth will happen to Rebeca and her very delicate and ordinary aspiration to go to high school and maybe become a teacher with some money in the bank.
One aspect of the film interested me. I am not sizest but this community of apparently very very poor people contained a cast of very many who are obese.
Matthew Mark Luke and John is a film which will tear at your heart strings as you watch the plot unfold. But for the acting skills alone, do try to see it. Also I am not sure what message it has for the church but it does not seem positive in this particular story. Try to get to see it and feel how good life is for most of us compared to this sad drama.
Penny Nair Price