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.
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE FEATURED IN ARARAT Ararat, directed by Atom Egoyan, is a film about a film. We see only a few scenes staged for the background film, entitled “Arara,” which might have been an exciting epic about the death of one million Armenians in 1915 by the government of Turkey, which forced them on a […]
JEWS CARRY OUT THE HORRORS OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE GREY ZONE Those who have seen the original film footage of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, whether in the 1955 classic Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) or as evidence in the trial of Nazis presented in Nuremberg (1999), may think that they
WORLD WAR III AVERTED IN K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER By 1960 the United States established an offensive nuclear advantage by placing Polaris submarines with nuclear missiles under the Arctic ice cap, in range of Leningrad and Moscow. Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union rushed construction of a similar submarine, named K-19, for operation by 1961.
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CIRCUIT EXPOSES A MERRY-GO-ROUND RUN BY A BAGMAN When a gay person can no longer stand being trapped in a small town, the opportunities of big city gay life seem overwhelmingly tempting, and the gay migration to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco has changed the culture of such meccas irreversibly. But gays,
CAR-WINDOW SOCIOLOGY OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN MÉXICO EMERGES IN Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN Two seventeen-year-old Mexico City boys spend a summer together in the coming-of-age Mexican film Y Tu Mamá También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. When the film begins, their girlfriends are about to leave for a vacation in Italy, though not before one
VIETNAMESE REFUGEES FIND HOPE OUT OF TURMOIL IN GREEN DRAGON Refugees generally leave a country in turmoil without a clear idea of what comes next other than a prolongation of their lives. In Green Dragon, the experience of some 134,000 Vietnamese refugees is condensed into short cuts of a few characters with myriad adjustment problems
THE CONTRIBUTION OF CRYPTOGRAPHERS IS DECODED IN ENIGMA During World War II British cryptographers at Blentchly Park, a manorial estate some sixty miles north of London, decoded German communications and saved thousands of lives, though their efforts were kept secret until 1975. In Enigma, directed by Michael Apted, those involved in codebreaking are honored through
JOHN Q. ENCOUNTERS SICKNESS IN THE HEALTH INDUSTRY John Q. is an exposé about the 40 million Americans who have no health insurance and millions more who belong to health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that provide phony health insurance. The hero, John Qunicy Archibald (played by Denzel Washington), is a family man, a churchgoer, and a
How does a white slavery ring work? The Uruguayan film Tricky Life (En la Puta Vida), an obvious pun in the translation from Spanish, demonstrates exactly how, using a fictional heroine Elisa (played by Mariana Santángelo) as a victim to expose a scam involving Uruguayans in Spain. The story is based on Maria Urruzola’s novel
KANDAHAR RECEIVES THE FIRST AWARD NOMINATION OF 2002 Kandahar (Safar e Ghandehar) is an Iranian film, with a lot of spoken English, which proceeds as if a documentary because the conditions portrayed are real. Nafas (played by Nelofer Pazira), an Afghani refugee who fled to Canada when the Taliban came to power, receives word in