The Last of Us

        I chose to watch this film named “Akher Wahed Fina(The Last of Us),directed by Ala Eddine Slim in MOMA. This 95 mins film reveals the story of two men silently traverse a vast landscape, they get in the back of a smuggler’s truck. Sooner, they get attacked by men with guns and one of them escapes to sea, he sooner finds himself in an endless forest, where a kind of spiritual journey unfolds. What makes this film interesting to me at first was that it is dialogue-film, which to me is a rare thing to discover in films that are created nowadays. But that also puts the challenge in character’s facial expressions and the arrangement of the outline in order to keep the story cohesive to the audience. The protagonist’s facials expressions and the scenery shots got me interested the most in this film. I like the way how the director first uses close-ups on the protagonist to enlarge his emotions and then jump out to medium shots of his whole body and then long shots combining with the scenery and himself to show the loneliness of him trying to find a way out but somehow get surrounded by all the objects in the forest. There were some lines displayed after the gunmen trying to attack him and he was escaping to somewhere else, I remembered clearly there was one line that says “I vomited humankind, I surrounded myself along with natural and forest”. That was my favorite line in this film and I think that also highlighted the central idea which is to mark down the negative side of humankind and how it deeply affected and destroys the beautiful nature between each other. The man is a traveler, but the cruelty of humankind gave him disappointment so he then ends up with finding himself in the forest and looking for his own path. There was one scene when he fell into the big hole and underneath he found out the dead body of the baby bear and the sharp weapon that were used to kill the bear and he also got stabbed because he fell down and the weapon went through one of his knees. That made me think of the nature of humankind and how people create weapons that are fatal and use them against each other and nature species. The man also struggles with wolfs in the woods and that lights up one of the theme of this film : the struggle between man and nature and also the situation with contemporary migration. Towards the end I found one shot was very interesting to think of which is when the man was sitting by himself after seeing the death of old man who healed his wound. At night here came up with the bright light focusing upwards the man and as the man moves, the light moves as well. But the light doesn’t approach any closer, it was just in the further distance and lights up towards the man. The film leaves the open ending which the protagonist took of all his clothes and stands in front of the river and show his back to the audience. That makes me think whether he then jumps into the water and committed suicide or he wants to go up to the waterfall and discover the path or he gave up on his human nature and disappear in the woods.After all, I think this film evokes ourselves to think the humanity and struggles between humankind and nature.  

The Last of Us