Films that demonstrate the folly of political violence as a means for resolving conflict and/or show the superiority of nonviolent political conflict resolution.
5 DAYS OF WAR IS JUST TOO LONG Beginning with a quote from Hiram Johnson that truth is the first casualty of any war and a frame revealing that 500 war correspondents have died during the last decade, 5 Days of War reports on the five-day war in Georgia during mid-2008, which received little attention […]
JOHN SAYLES SCORES ANOTHER HOME RUN WITH AMIGO Feature films are often more effective than documentaries because they humanize issues, depicting interpersonal relationships that symbolize policy problems. From 1899-1902 the United States conquered the Philippines by suppressing the independent Philippine Republic in a war with perhaps 1.5 million casualties. In Amigo, Political Film Society awardwinner
City of Life and Death, may be too graphic for the fainthearted in exposing Japanese atrocities committed in China’s capital Nanjing during 1937. As in the film John Rabe (2010), the focal point of the film is the sanctuary provided by the German John Rabe (played by John Paisley) for foreigners, Chinese women and children,
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OF GODS AND MEN ASKS, “WHAT PRICE TERRORISM?” Grand prize winner at Cannes in 2010, Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux) is a true story of seven French Catholic monks in Tibhinine in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria (though filmed in Morocco) during the war of independence from 1954-1962. As monks, they
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
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
AVATAR IS THE MOST PROFOUND ANTI-IMPERIAL FILM OF THE YEARObsoletorium is necessary for the human race to survive, filmviewers of Avatar are told, so an expedi-tion goes to the planet Pandora in 2154 to get the substance. Humanoidlike creatures, the Na’vi, inhabit the area where the substance can be mined, but the expedition is heavily
BROTHERS SHOWS THE ADVERSE EFFECT OF THE AFGHAN WAR ON A FAMILY Several recent films have tried to tell filmviewers of the horrors of war, either on the battlefield itself, or after soldiers return home. One such film, a 2005 Danish independent film Brǿdre has been reborn as Brothers, directed by Political Film Society awardwinner