Among more obvious cinematic parallels to be found in Claire Denis' White Material , I find myself coming back to, of all things, A Serious Man . Some might say that all Cohen brothers movies are strange in their way, but A Serious Man was strange in a very atypical way for Joel and Ethan Cohen. Having never addressed Judaism or general issues of Jewish culture in America, it was as if everything they felt, whatever baggage might have been lurking about their Jewishness came tumbling out of their screenplay for the film, all of which concluded with that final shot of the approaching funnel cloud, one both unsettling and seemingly out of place in their body of work. White Material takes place in an unnamed African country. The film was shot in Cameroon, the setting for Denis' first film, Chocolat , as well one of the countries in which she lived as a child while her father's job as a French civil servant took their family to several countries on ...