Films that demonstrate the folly of political violence as a means for resolving conflict and/or show the superiority of nonviolent political conflict resolution.
LIGHT IT UP ILLUMINATES THE NEED TO END STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE When Light It Up begins, we view run-down Lincoln High School in Queens. Principal Armstrong (played by Glynn Turman) has assigned Dante Jackson (played by Forest Whitaker), a highly decorated police officer who is on leave due to family stress, to deter school violence by making his presence […]
AMERICAN WAR CRIMES AGAINST IRAQ EXPOSED IN THREE KINGS If war is hell, then going AWOL must be a relief. Not so in Three Kings (originally called “Spoils of War”), directed by David O. Russell, who also developed the screenplay after eighteen months of research about the waning days of Operation Desert Storm. At the
AMERICAN WAR CRIMES AGAINST MEXICO EXPOSED IN ONE MAN’S HERO When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States was aroused to respond to unprovoked aggression. When the United States performed a similar act of aggression against México in 1846 and marched triumphantly in México City in 1848, world public opinion was not mobilized against Washington.
EARTH NOMINATED FOR BEST FILM ON PEACE FOR 1999 When Britain contemplated granting independence to India, leaders of the future Pakistan encouraged Moslems to press for a separate country. When the partition occurred on August 15, 1947, with the collaboration of Britain and the Pakistani leaders and over the opposition of Mohandas Gandhi, Pakistan was
In most Eastern European countries as the Cold War ended, the answer was for the leaders to resign, new leaders to rise to power democratically, and for the situation to calm down as the government was seen as reasonably legitimate. Not so in Yugoslavia, where ethnic scapegoating on all sides led to civil war. We
West Beirut, written and directed by Ziad Doueiri, tells the story of the disintegration of Lebanon from April 13, 1975, through the eyes of high school students who bridged the gap between the Christian and Moslem communities and the parents of one of the students, a Christian mother and a Moslem father. When the film
Based on James Jones’s autobiographical novel of the same title that was unsuccessfully made into a film in 1964, The Thin Red Line has been nominated for an award as this year’s best film in raising the consciousness of filmviewers on the advantages of peaceful methods for resolving conflicts. Filmed in the Solomon Islands, where
In Predrag Antonijevic’s Savior, the protagonist (Dennis Quaid) spends most of the film as a terrorist. An American whose spouse and son are killed by a terrorist bomb in Paris, throws a bomb in a mosque, joins the Foreign Legion, and ends up fighting for the Bosnian Serbs as a terrorist, inflicting atrocities in acts
Never before has the filmviewing public been sensitized to the conditions that spawn the American neo-Nazism of the skinheads. In American History X, British-born Tony Kaye zeroes in on race relations within the United States in graphic detail (though he has attempted to dissociate himself from the film because the studio has changed a lot
American History X Read More »
The second nomination in the category of peace is “Regeneration,” a British film directed by Gillies MacKinnon and based on the novel by Pat Barker. The film begins with a scene displaying the squalor of the trenches of World War I and then focuses most of the film on soldiers psychologically unable to continue at