White Material (2009)'s activity

Claire Denis returns to Cameroon in White Material, a film that's a lot more blunt than Chocolat in exposing colonial obliviousness, as Isabelle Huppert refuses to leave her coffee plantation even as the civil war in [unspecified country] starts to close in on it. At first, it's a familiar sort of denial ("there's always been trouble, people are panicking for nothing"), but it becomes more and more delusional as time goes on. Huppert and her family speak from a place of privilege and safety, but also as people who have lived in Africa for most or all of their lives. It's their land, isn't it? They're not bad people. They contribute to the economy, they have a lot of local friends, and so on. But the land remembers. And its righteous rejection of them may be hard to take, but nonetheless is. Of course, Denis isn't all that kind to the African side of things either - child soldiers, genocide... - her eye is as impassive whether looking at the conflict as it is when showing how coffee is harvested. Impassive, or perhaps better to say empathetic in equal measure.