The opening of "Scorched Earth City" is like the beginning of "Land Dreams of Covered Bridges". The children are packing up the relics of the mother who has just passed away, examining the mother's surprising will, and seeming to find clues to the secrets of the mother's unknown before her death. The subsequent plot development was quite different. "Scorched Earth City" unfolded the mother's tortuous life experience.
Following the clues of their mother's will, the siblings began to search for their mother's past and their lost father and brother. Before immigrating to Canada, my mother came from a war-torn country, but the film did not explain the specific country name, so I started a series of reasoning to explore where it was. Judging from the picture, it should be an Islamic country in the Middle East or Africa; judging from the plot of crossing the North-South blockade, it is a country that is divided between the North and the South; the country that is divided between the South, the South and the North, the first thing I think of is Sudan, and then I see the North-South split. The reason is the conflict between Christianity and Islam. There are not many countries where Christianity and Islam coexist. Turkey is one of them, but there is no civil war in Turkey, so there is only one possibility left, Lebanon. When I got home and checked it out, it was true.
A country in a religious or racial conflict is undoubtedly a humanitarian catastrophe, because religious or racial hatred is often not confined to the military. There are explosions, massacres, lynchings, and revenge everywhere, all of which are like a hell on earth. In the process of the sister and brother's exploration, the film uses a very natural flashback to alternate two eras, showing many different aspects of Lebanon's past and present, from customs to historical moments, from personal grievances to social conditions, The mother's unknown experience has gradually been excavated.
On the other hand, as a suspense film, this film deserves five stars. Taking the search for relatives as a clue, the explanations and layers of the suspense and the lines unfold in an orderly and exciting way. Coupled with the subject matter of the film, the entire viewing process was extremely depressing. There was no noise or drowsiness from the audience in other sessions of the film festival, and everyone was fully focused on the screen. The shock level of the finale, which is rare in recent years, is indeed beyond my imagination. At the end of the film, the audience was silent, and everyone was in shock and did not recover.
Of course, from this shock, we have experienced the tragedy of fate and fate. Another movie about fate. Of course, the plot of this film is also a bit too dramatic. I think this may be the reason why this film, whose subject matter was originally favored by the Oscars, lost to "Better World" in the competition for the best foreign language film.
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