Recensioni de* critic*

At times, the script travels well-worn terrain and leaves too many questions unanswered, which for a film with such considered visuals can feel more imprecise than deliberate.

An immigration story that manages to draw in themes about manhood, familial identity, and cultural preservation, director Matias Mariani has crafted a picture that speaks to a broader transient experience that transcends both time and place.

Set in a richly textured vision of Sao Paulo, largely among the Igbo community of Nigerian immigrants, the slow-burn film features superbly understated acting and astute visuals. This is Mariani’s first fiction film after having made two documentaries and shorts, but its ambition and accomplishment are fully formed.

Sparse but simple at the outset, “Shine Your Eyes” gets more opaque and ambiguous as it dips into magical realism and ornate philosophical musings. If the setup intrigues slightly more than the payoff, this is still a work of original, crystalline beauty, bursting with restless, refracted ideas.

Shine Your Eyes is not a film with easy answers – it resists categorization by shifting between genres with a light-touch. It is romance, self-discovery, a mystery and a film firmly placed in magical realism.

Shine Your Eyes is an extraordinary, lyrical film about tradition, family and new beginnings... It is a tale that is out of Africa but is soaked in the magical-realist tradition of South American storytelling. This beautiful conflux of styles paired with an incredibly jazzy score is like being given the perfect wine to match a meal.