Kasper marries a Malay woman with the intention of making a fortune from mines, but his dream goes nowhere and he becomes devastated physically and mentally. Longing for his hometown in Europe and out of contempt for the locals, Kasper sends his daughter Nina to get a Western education, but that can’t change who she is. In her lastest feature, the master Chantal Akerman casts her sorrowful eye on the legacy of white colonialism. The film starts with the river, the lights reflected on it and a boat. Someone is then killed and the next scene showing a singing woman intrigues the audience. The story then goes back to the past. The river which dominates the entire film and appears again at the end becomes a silent character of the film. Akerman violently draws a portrait of a defeated colonialist who is contemptible. Her direction skills transform colonialism into a fresh topic. In particular, she successfully keeps the audience from focusing on narrative by expressing the colonialist’s despair with a dark long take and by showing the flowing river as something calm but alive everywhere in the film. (RHEE, Soue-won)