Spine 560: White Material

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains an oppressive stranglehold over an entire nation." While colonialist forces wring every resource possible out of the country on their way out the door, unfortunately for Maria the coffee farmer, that doesn't include her coffee.