Hand of Fate (2013)
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Hand of Fate Movie Review
Hand of Fate is a 2013 Gambian drama film directed by Ibrahim Ceesay and starring Mariama Colley. It is an uneven, far from cinematic movie that is elevated by its important themes.
An underage girl is forced by her father to marry a man she doesn’t know and quit school. Along with her mother, she tries to change father’s will and educate people about forced child marriages. The Gambia doesn’t have that many movies with this one being among their best-known films. It is directed by Ibrahim Ceesay, who is also a human activist in the country and that strong political bent is evident throughout this story.
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I enjoyed this approach as it gave a lot of urgency to the picture. The world needs to be acquainted with all the problems hailing from this continent and human rights is definitely among their worst issues, in particular women’s rights. Focusing on child marriage, the movie is very difficult to watch, but worth seeing for its importance.
There were so many moving moments here that were even a bit too heartbreaking to watch, especially all the physical and emotional trauma that the main female character goes through. You cannot imagine that many things that would be worse than a young girl getting married to a much older man forcefully, thus the movie is a bit too unpleasant to watch.
Hand of Fate’s main issue is its lack of cinematic qualities. Not only is the cinematography quite subpar, but so is the score and the editing. The editing is particularly mediocre as so many sequences are overlong and the conversations, though insightful, do tend to drag quite a bit. The sound mixing is atrocious as at times you cannot properly hear the dialogue. A more streamlined and more cinematic approach would have done wonders for this story.
The characterization is also only okay while the acting is rather weak with only Mariama Colley delivering a strong performance. Others ranged from fine to quite bad. The movie is one of those films where the themes are so important and the dialogue is so strong that they triumph over weak technical aspects, but still I wished for the latter to be better as well.
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Hand of Fate deals with the subject of child marriage, so it resulted in a rather unpleasant, though important viewing experience. It’s a film that sorely lacks stronger technical aspects, but it is elevated by excellent dialogue and a fittingly urgent, almost activist approach to telling this tragic story.
My Rating – 3.5
