Earlier this month, Film Comment hosted the writer Malcolm Harris for a particular occasion celebrating the launch of his newest e book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis—an invigorating evaluation of local weather change and the collective options required to rescue humanity from it. Along with being a trenchant public mental, Harris can also be a devoted cinephile who typically makes use of films to make sense of politics and historical past—one thing we explored on a 2023 Podcast centered on his earlier e book, Palo Alto: The Historical past of California, Capitalism, and the World. 

One movie Harris discusses intimately in his newest e book is Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s GriGris. It’s a sensuous, suspenseful thriller a couple of disabled dancer in Chad who takes up petrol smuggling with a purpose to pay for his stepfather’s medical bills. As Harris describes in his e book, it’s additionally an extremely clever film concerning the life-and-death stakes of the petrochemical trade, particularly within the International South. To dig deeper into Harris’s distinctive attraction to the movie, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited him to current a screening of GriGris, adopted by a panel dialogue with Harris and Ugandan scholar Anselm Kizza-Besigye. The group dug into the film’s alluring classical construction and its explosive conclusion, cinematic portrayals of the local weather disaster, and far more.