White Shadow

The waking nightmare of the African albino muti trade – whereby albinos are hunted for their supposedly restorative body parts – is a tricky subject to film without leaning too far in the directions of exploitation or exoticism, but artist-turned-filmmaker Noaz Deshe's staggering debut feature strikes the necessary balance with vision to burn. Veering wildly between earthy verite and near-ecstatic surrealism, this Tanzanian-set tale of a resourceful albino adolescent (Hamisi Bazili) learning to survive in a community brutally geared against his kind is stylistically reckless in the best possible way – a quasi-horror film that evokes a world physically and spiritually out of balance. The camera is itself a near-performative presence, its frequent, agile switches from high-definition docu-realism in one scene to color-saturated expressionism in the next underlining the young protagonist's shifting sense of security and self-awareness. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)