Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A FRUSTRATED GENERATION FINDS A VOICE—AND THE SOUND IS HOWL If you have never attended a poetry reading, now you have the chance. Howl, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is a poetry recitation, explication, exegesis, and deconstruction with graphic imagery unexcelled in film. The focus is Allen Ginsberg’s 75-cent, 26-page jeremiad Howl, which […]
THE BIOPIC JOHN RABE CELEBRATES A NAZI WHO SAVED 200,000 CHINESE LIVES Historians record the death of 300,000 Chinese in the “Rape of Nanjing” of 1937 at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army. Similar to Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), the film John Rabe, directed and written by Florian Gallenberger from John Rabe’s diary, reveals
AGORA RECREATES EVENTS OF THE YEAR 391 IN ALEXANDRIA While the Roman Empire was in decline, Alexandria flourished not just because of the famous library and archeological wonders but also the exercise of free speech, philosophy, and science, as depicted in Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar. The philosopher of the day is Hypatia (played by
PRINCESS KA‘IULANI DRAMATIZES THE FALL OF THE HAWAIIAN MONARCHY After years of research at the Bishop Museum, Marc Forby directs Princess Ka‘iulani as a tribute to the sad history of the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy. The drama picks up steam when King Kalākaua (played by Ocean Kaowili) is forced in 1887 to sign the
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BLOOD RUNS IN GREEN ZONE, BUT WHY? Although Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass, attributes facts portrayed in the film to journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006), the sequence of events from the American occupation of Baghdad in April 2003 has been provided in several accounts. Much more are in George
FORMOSA BETRAYED DEPICTS THE DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN TAIWAN In 1989, the Political Film Society voted A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) as the best political film at the East-West Center Film Festival. The film depicted the brutal takeover as the Nationalist China Army retreated from Mainland China to the island of Taiwan, killing
BUSH’S “POODLE DOG” TONY BLAIR IS ACCUSED OF WAR CRIMES IN THE GHOST WRITER The words “war crimes” are not allowed on American media. When Jack Cafferty and Jon Stewart used them accusatorily, they were forced to retract. Not so in Europe, where a German court has ruled that the Iraq War is illegal, a