'Body Rice' a European film despite itself

In his film 'Body Rice', the Portuguese director Hugo Viera da Silva describes the exile of young German delinquents in an open centre for re-education in southern Portugal. For Olivier Ségueret, the film "outlines what might one day be meant by the term 'European Cinema'. ... The most reputed and artist-friendly institutions have financed European films that have sometimes been excellent, but have not contributed to that somewhat unsettling and hazy thing called a 'European identity'. ... This time, such a beautiful and indigestible question seems to have found the light-hearted poetry that it requires: A film like 'Bloody Rice', as detached as it might think itself from these issues, is a typical example of the type of film that only exists because it has been preceded by a constitutional Europe and the new kind of human confrontation that it has engendered."

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