Venice International Film Festival 2009
 Toronto International Film Festival 2009
 

 Synopsis
 Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert lead an astonishing cast in this African-set first action drama from redoubtable French auteur Claire Denis Beau Travail. A film of extraordinary beauty and devastating power.

Program Note
 White Material is a new film by Claire Denis, the most established woman director of our time. After exploring on the verge of personal desire and social taboo by choosing minorities as the main characters, she is coming back to her interest in her debut film Chocolate, where she casts an aesthetic eye on ‘the dialectic between the master and the slave’ in colonial Africa. Somewhere in Africa, political turbulence breaks out. Maria, the owner of a coffee factory where three generations a white family is living, is struggling to keep the factory safe amid the civil war. But one day, a leader of a rebel force breaks into her house. Her ex-husband insists on going back to France, and her bored son gets obsessed with the lunatic atmosphere the war accompanies. In this film, Isabelle Huppert plays the heroine instead of Beatrice Dalle, who had played most of the main characters in Claire Denis’ films. The director once again demonstrates her special talent in conveying the images maximizing the texture of film prints with poetic rhythms. What is most noticeable is that the ‘white materials’ are still exploring introspectively the accumulated historical results in Africa. White Material, which gives a shock in the last scene where the heroine breaks off the white history in Africa, is definitely a postcolonial text written in poetic language. (KWON Eun-sun)