Films that bring previously obscured truths about the political process to the attention of the public, showing for example how offices of public trust are used for private purposes.
IN MY COUNTRY DEPICTS APARTHEID OBSCENITIES BEFORE & AFTER MANDELA BECOMES PRESIDENT When an unjust regime falls, how can a new government provide justice? Whereas the French and Russian revolutions killed off the royal family, the film In My Country attempts to explain the South African approach–through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Directed by John […]
DOWNFALL EXPOSES THE LAST TEN DAYS OF HITLER’S SURREAL WORLD In Downfall (Der Untergang), director Oliver Hirschbiegel presents a vivid docudrama of the last ten days of the Third Reich, mostly inside Hitler’s Berlin bunker surrounded by the luminaries of the Nazi state. To achieve historical accuracy, the script relies on Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s
CHILDREN IN A FORGOTTEN IRAQI REFUGEE CAMP IMAGINE THAT TURTLES CAN FLY Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand), a joint Iranian-Iraqi production directed and written by Bahman Ghobadi, begins just before Gulf War II at a refugee camp in Iraq’s Kurdistan. The principal actors are children, and the fictional story represents a slice of
CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD INACTION EXPOSED IN HOTEL RWANDA In 1994, Paul Rusesabagina saved the lives of 1,200 persons in his role as manager of Sabena Airline’s four-star Hotel Milles Collines in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Hotel Rwanda, directed by Terry George, tells that story. As the movie explains through the dialog of various actors,
KINSEY REVEALS THAT SEX WAS ONCE A VIRGIN SCIENTIFIC TOPIC In 1948 and 1953, Alfred C. Kinsey published the two books that ushered in the sexual revolution. The film Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon, is a biopic that explains how and why he wrote on the subject, including flashbacks to key aspects of his youth.
The Yes Men, directed by Dan Ollman, Sara Price, and Chris Smith, is an autodocumentary in the same genre as Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989). Indeed, Moore appears on the screen twice with his usual eloquence. However, the real inspiration appears to have come from Candid Camera’s Alan Funt, as the two principals, Andy
Why would an apolitical medical student from an affluent family in Buenos Aires become a revolutionary? The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de Motorcicleta), directed by Walter Salles, not only explains why but also reminds filmviewers that the same injustices, which affected him so profoundly, still exist. With one semester to go in order to complete medical
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Although Nazi law exempted Jewish spouses from liquidation if they married “Aryan” Germans, in February 1943 the Gestapo rounded them up anyway. When the film begins, sixty-year-old Ruth Weinstein (played by Jutta Lampe) is mourning the recent death of her Jewish husband; her daughter, thirtysomething Hannah (played by Maria Schrader), is not only baffled at
IMAGINING ARGENTINA DEPICTS THE HORRORS OF THE “DIRTY WAR” In Operation Condor, which involved eight Latin American countries from the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of political dissidents and leftists were rounded up by the police and never heard from again. Military and police practiced torture techniques that were learned while they were students at
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THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW WARNS THE WORLD ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING For years, scientists have known that the warming of the earth might result in the onset of a new ice age, which would be caused when Arctic ice melted in sufficient quantity to stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks. Estimates of the critical years
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