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.
BEYOND BORDERS SHOWS THE UGLY SIDE OF REFUGEE RELIEF According to Sarah Jordan (played by Angelina Jolie) in Beyond Borders, there are some 50 million refugees in the world; the United Nations High Commission for Refugees handles half, and various nongovernmental organizations cope with what they can of the rest. Directed by Martin Campbell, the […]
AMERICAN JOURNALISM ABANDONS ITS DEMOCRATIC ROLE, ACCORDING TO SHATTERED GLASS Journalism is a serious business, according to Shattered Glass. Directed by Billy Ray, the film is a biopic of Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christensen), an associate editor of The New Republic until 1998, when he was found to be fabricating stories. The film operates
A JAPANESE AMERICAN BUILDS AN EMPIRE IN COLOMBIA IN EMERALD COWBOY Colombia is the world’s main source of emeralds. In the Colombian biopic Emerald Cowboy, based on his biography, a twentysomething Eishy Hayata (played by Luis Velasco), an American citizen born in Tokyo, one day decides to visit Colombia. On learning first-hand that miners are
RUNAWAY JURY DEPICTS THE NRA IN A JURY TAMPERING FRENZY On June 26, 1996, thirty-six-year-old Irish journalist Veronica Guerin was gunned down while driving her car on a motorway outside Dublin. The film Veronica Guerin, directed by Joel Schumacher, tells why she was assassinated and how her death changed the political landscape in Ireland. After
RUNAWAY JURY DEPICTS THE NRA IN A JURY TAMPERING FRENZY Early in Runaway Jury, we are told that 30,000 Americans die and 100,000 are injured each year by guns, statistics that do not stop the National Rifle Association from serving as the public relations front for an industry that rakes in $2 billion each year.
LA CASA DE LOS BABYS UNMASKS THE BABY ADOPTION RACKET Some women with means in the United States want but cannot biologically have children. Many women in Latin America have children but cannot afford to care for them. The solution would appear to be for the Americans to adopt the babies. In La Casa de
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TAKING SIDES ASKS WHETHER FINE MUSIC COULD REALLY BE SEPARATED FROM NAZI POLITICS Taking Sides, directed by István Szabó, provides an intense prosecution of a man outside of a court, punctuated by scenes of Nazis, their followers, and the obscene carnage that they produced, along with the tragic opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Although
GREEN CARD FEVER EXPOSES IMMIGRATION SCAMS Green Card Fever, directed by Bala Rajasekharuni, is an exposé of the illegal and unethical traps of the immigration process in the United States, as seen through the experience of an Indian named Murali (played by Vikram Dasu). When the film begins, Murali is in Columbus, Ohio. He has
TYCOON DEPICTS DARK FORCES THAT BROUGHT DOWN A RUSSIAN ECONOMIC OLIGARCH Tycoon: A New Russian (in Russian the title is Oligarkh), directed by Pavel Lounguine, is a loose biopic about Russian billionaire and Kremlin fixer Boris A. Berezovky, whose cinematic embodiment is as Platon Makovski (played by Vladimir Mashkov). In a larger sense, the film
INITIALLY BANNED IN INDIA, SANDSTORM REVEALS A FIGHT AGAINST ENTRENCHED CASTEISM & SEXISM Some years before the release of Sandstorm (Bawandar), Sanwari (played by Nandita Das) of the Untouchable caste works as an organizer for a feminist organization in India to make some extra money for her family. Shobha Devi (played by Deepti Naval) hired