IS AFTERMATH FOLLOWED BY ACCOUNTABILITY?
One day in the year 2000 Frantisek Kalina (played by Ireneusz Czop) goes from Chicago to see his brother Józef (Maciej Stuhr) in a rural part of Poland, which he left in 1980. Józef’s wife and children have recently fled the country, but Józef inexplicably stays to continue wheat farming. Frantisek demands to know why his brother’s family split up, but Józef refuses to answer. What then emerges, a story based on true events, is that his brother has been assembling a cemetery consisting of gravestones of Jews that had been scattered around the countryside near the town of Jedwabne. Obviously the Jews do not now live in the area, so the question is who, what, when, how, and why. The townspeople, aware of his unwelcome self-appointed task, attack Józef physically, burn his fields, and put graffiti around his house with Jewish symbols, though the Kalina family is not Jewish. At this point in the film, most of the audience will surmise that something happened as a result of the Nazi conquest of Poland, but spoilers prevent this reviewer from laying out the grim story, which comes out through Frantisek’s interviews of elderly persons and digging around the family’s former abode with his brother. The Political Film Society has nominated Aftermath, directed by Wladislaw Pasikowski, as best film exposé of 2013. The reconstructed tale has sparked controversy anew within Poland. MH
SOME PEOPLE ARE TRULY ASTONISHING IN NEBRASKA
All films are “political” because power is omnipresent, even the feel-good portrayal of small-town America provided in Nebraska, directed by Alexander Payne. Woody Grant (played by Bruce Dern) is not enjoying his life as a disheveled octogenarian father in Billings, Montana. One day Woody receives a letter from a marketing firm similar to Publishers Clearing House in which he believes that he has won $1 million. Since he is not allowed to drive a vehicle and evidently cannot afford a bus ticket, he walks on foot outside the city limits, headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, to redeem his award. Police, who have relevant power, catch him the first time. His son David (Will Forte) locates him the second time, returns him home but soon responds to his kindly father’s pressure by becoming the key decisionmaker in the film by offering to drive him to Lincoln with a side trip to Mount Rushmore over the objections of his mother (June Squibb) and brother (Bob Odenkirk). Before reaching Lincoln, they stop in a small town in Nebraska (the actual filming is in Plainview and other small towns), where Woody has many friends who are at first willing to believe that he is about to become a millionaire. When the letter falls into their possession, his former business partner Ed (Stacy Keach) cynically reads the letter before his friends at a local tavern, where Woody suddenly enters to observe that he is a laughingstock. Although there are two hospital visits en route, and Woody appears to agree to abandon the trip after the humiliation, he leaves the hospital unannounced one night and proceeds on foot again toward Lincoln. But he is soon collected again by his son, and they drive to Lincoln anyway. David asks his father what he wants to do with the million and is humbled by the reply. Mature filmviewers may recall how they felt when their parents died, how they wish that they had done more for their parents before their death. Nebraska shows what one decent son did for his father, both on the trip to Lincoln and on the trip back home. MH
AN ANIMATED HISTORY OF BRAZIL IS PROVIDED BY RIO 2069
From the enslavement and massacres of native Amazonians to resistance to military rule from 1964-1985 and the future, director Luis Bolognesi has produced an animated film focusing on a 600-year love story between an immortal warrior (voiced by Selton Mello) and Janaína (Camila Pitanga). MH