“You’re right from your side and I’m right from mine. We’re both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind” — Bob Dylan In the Israeli-French co-production West of the Jordan River, Israeli director Amos Gitai (“Rabin, the Last Day”) returns to the West Bank to interview journalists, politicians, non-profit groups, and ordinary…
Like a lonely, mysterious gunslinger from the Old West, a tall, slender rugged-looking man with a thick mustache comes to a small Bulgarian village near the Grecian border as part of a German work crew in Valeska Grisebach’s (“Longing”) Western. The man is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), in Bulgaria to work on a hydroelectric power station…
Whether or not it is designed as an allegory of modern Russia, no film in recent memory has examined the growing emptiness of human relationships with such expressive force as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s (“Leviathan”) Loveless, a heart wrenching drama about a couple on the brink of divorce whose emotional neglect of their son leads to devastating…
89-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda (“The Beaches of Agnès”) said, “I have a nice relationship with time, because the past is here, you know? I’ve spent time, if I have something of my past, I’ll just make it, nowadays, I make it now and here.” Varda makes both past and present come alive in Faces Places…
In 1968, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, ushered in a program of reforms that he called “Socialism with a human face.” The new “Action Programme” allowed greater freedom of speech, press, and travel, limited the power of the secret police, and raised the possibility of democratic elections. The achievement…
In 2016, the Freedom in the World report named Tibet as one of the most repressed countries in the world. Since China occupied Tibet over sixty years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured and imprisoned. Although the political conflict between China and Tibet plays a part, Moon Chang-Yong and Jin Jeon’s documentary…
Guatemalan Indigenous Leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum said, “We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected.” Unfortunately, however, Indigenous people have been the subject of racism and discrimination throughout history. Massacres, forced-march relocations, the “Indian wars,” death…
