THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE WHO LIVED FOR TWENTY AND EIGHT YEARS ALL ALONE ON AN INHABITED ISLAND AND SAID IT WAS HIS

A subversive retelling of Daniel Defoe’s novel, Benjamin Deboosere’s debut feature confronts the colonial ideology embedded in the myth of Robinson Crusoe by using satire and surrealist imagery as political weapons. By putting animals and the natural world at the foreground of his work, Deboosere decentralizes human protagonism altogether, forcing us to re-evaluate our charged  connotations of  the so-called “savagery” and “cannibalism” that came to define otherness in the original story. The director’s choice to film this cinematic fable on 16mm aids in creating a tone reminiscent of travel diaries and the golden days of ethnographic cinema, hinting at that poisoned seductive power that exoticized images still hold over us. Bold and incisive, Deboosere’s film is a timely, critical work that comes at  a moment when the art world and its highly influential institutions are facing increased public scrutiny regarding their involvement with colonialist regimes and their immense influence in reinforcing colonialism’s symbolic power through the cultural discourse they produce. (Oana Ghera)