Rise
2025 · 22m · Zimbabwe
Directed by Jessica J. Rowlands
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A fearless young boy surviving on a Victoria Falls rubbish dump dreams of becoming a boxer and seeks training from a withdrawn ex-fighter.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent boxing-dream-kid-from-poverty storytelling, which means it's exactly the kind of well-meaning narrative that gets made a hundred times because nobody wants to ask what happens if the dream doesn't matter—or shouldn't.
Rowlands demonstrates formal control in the mise-en-scène of the dump itself, situating this within the lineage of humanist cinema that finds dignity in peripheral spaces, though the emotional arc tracks familiar coming-of-age ground.
The choice to let the boy's silence do more work than his dialogue—to build his interiority through presence rather than confession—is what elevates this from scout-film-about-poverty into something that actually trusts the viewer to meet him there.