Newsletter

PRIVATE PEEKS INTO A PALESTINIAN HOME WHERE ISRAELI SOLDIERS ARE QUARTERED Directed by Saverio Costanzo, Private is a film about a Palestinian family that owns and lives in a home within the West Bank (though the filming is in Calabria, Italy). One day, the Israeli army takes over the house to serve as a command […]

OIL IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO HONEST CAPITALISTS IN SYRIANA Syriana, directed and written by Stephen Gaghan, is suggested by the book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (2002), written by former CIA field officer Robert Baer. The film attempts to portray how

JARHEAD AND BEFORE THE FALL STRIP SOLDIERS NAKED MENTALLY AS WELL AS PHYSICALLY Directed by Sam Mendes, Jarhead is about Anthony Swofford (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who joins the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton in 1989, goes to Saudi Arabia in 1990, sees combat in 1991 in Iraq, and returns home thereafter. Early, during one

NORTH COUNTRY PORTRAYS THE ROSA PARKS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT North Country, directed by Niki Caro, begins with titles that inform filmviewers that 1975 was the year when the first woman was hired in the coal mines of the Mesabi Iron Range, Minnesota, and that by 1989 the ratio of men to women was 30:1. The

INNOCENT VOICES INDICTS THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS Titles at the beginning of Innocent Voices (Voces inocentes), directed by Luis Mandoki, inform filmviewers of the civil war in El Salvador from 1980-1992 that began when peasants under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front organized opposition to the dispossession of their lands. Titles

TWO FILMS DEPICT VERY DIFFERENT RESPONSES TO THE POLITICS OF ACCUSATION Anti-Communist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to prominence in the early 1950s with the accusation that some 200 Communist Party members were employed in the United States government, though he never presented evidence or names. When attacked for his methods of badgering witnesses, making

THE TITLE ROLE IN LORD OF WAR DARES INTERPOL, “CATCH ME IF YOU CAN” When a film ends with the title “Based on True Events,” the impact is much more profound than if the title appears in the beginning. Lord of War, directed and written by Andrew Niccol, is indeed an exposé of major significance.

A GIANT PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY KILLS AFRICANS & WHISTLEBLOWERS The novels of John Le Carré have established a reputation as superb spy novels involving government agents. The film The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles, is based on another Le Carré novel, but the subject is espionage of dirty industrial secrets. The first fifteen minutes of

TWO FILMS DEPICT CHINA’S CONTEMPORARY MASS SOCIETY In 1971, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, two teenagers in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise) are sentenced to reeducation for four years in Mount Phoenix, a remote area in Sichuan of breathtaking beauty, because of the “bourgeois crimes”

THE GREAT RAID DEPICTS JAPAN’S VIOLATIONS OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION On January 30, 1945, the largest rescue in American history occurred in the Philippines, where some 511 Americans were rescued by the 6th Ranger Battalion from a Japanese prisoner of war camp at Cabanatuan. The Great Raid, directed by John Dahl, provides a dramatization of