Review of “This Magnificent Cake” (2018)
Seen in 2019.
In 1885, a Belgian has used his family’s bakery’s money to build a colonial mansion in the jungle of Leopold’s Congo.
The combination of needle-felted characters, cloth sets and careful, Dutch-master-style lighting is absolutely glorious. The absurd narrative, though very loose and quite remote from the infamous horrors, is also very good. I would have loved a feature-film version of this, veering just a bit closer to the facts.
References here: “And Heard Within, a Lie is Spun” (2022).