While no movie can fully capture the madness of what life in a concentration camp must have been like, László Nemes’ Cannes Grand Prize Award winning Son of Saul, his first feature film, may come close to recreating the experience. Written by the director and Clara Royer and shot in 35mm with a 4:3 aspect…
Winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (“Flight of the Red Balloon”) first film in eight years, The Assassin (Nie yin niang), may initially seem out of character for a director whose previous work has been in realistic social dramas set in a contemporary historical context. Yet it is…
For 350 years, Spain built a vast empire in South America based on the labor and exploitation of the Indian population, forcing them to accept Christianity while decimating their culture, religion, and even their language. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, “rubber barons” rounded up all the Indians and forced them to tap…
“Life can be tragic, but let’s not snivel” — Gustav Mahler Alix Delaporte’s (“Angel & Tony”) The Last Hammer Blow (Le dernier coup de marteau) is the story of 14-year Victor (Romain Paul, in an outstanding debut performance that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival) who…
In 1933, Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward, “Blood Cells”) became the only Irish citizen ever to have been deported from Ireland when he was exiled to America without a trial. His crime seems to be that he was a Communist who incurred the ire of the Catholic Church and the landlords by daring to establish a…
In the city of Timbuktu, the fundamentalist Islamist group Ansar Dine (“defenders of the faith”), wearing black flags to cover their faces, decimated shrines, Dogon wood sculptures, and World Heritage sites, considering them to be examples of idolatry, a sin in Islam. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, Abderrahmane Sissako’s (“Bamako”) Timbuktu…
According to a 2013 census, 20.7% of Israel’s population are Israeli Arabs, citizens of Israel who consider themselves Palestinian by nationality. The problems that arise from these conflicting allegiances are dramatized in Eran Riklis’(“Zaytoun”) film Dancing Arabs, a title that denotes those who have to straddle two cultures and “dance at two weddings.” Based on…
