POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY ANNOUNCES BEST FILMS OF 2015
During 2015 members of the Political Film Society, selecting from a diverse set of nominated films, picked winning films that were equally as diverse:
For the film that best raised consciousness about the need for DEMOCRACY, the choice was—
Jimmy’s Hall, a film directed by Ken Loach, which showed how Jimmy Gralton sought to intro
Duce social democratic values into Ireland after World War I and the independence of the country.
For a film that best depicted a journalistic-style EXPOSÉ, presenting lesser known facts, the winner was–
Experimenter, directed by Michael Almereyda, which depicted the life of psychologist Stanley
Milgram, who discovered that ordinary Americans would use torture to please an authority figure.
For the best film on HUMAN RIGHTS, the voters selected—
Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, which focused on 1912, when the fight for women’s rights
escalated to include dynamite, mass arrests, fasting, forced feeding in prison, and martyrdom.
The best film presenting PEACE as the way to resolve conflicts instead of violence, the awards goes to—
Timbuktu, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, which showed the imperialism of Islamic jihadists
taking over a peaceful village in Africa with firearms and imposing strict rule that produced chaos.
Directors of the four films will now receive award certificates.
A WAR FOCUSES ON RESPONSIBILITY FOR CIVILIAN DEATHS IN AFGHANISTAN
Claus Michael Pedersen (played by Pilou Asbæk) joins the Danish army and is assigned to the battlefield in Afghanistan (though filming is in Spain and Turkey) while his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and three young children try to cope in his absence. One day in the heat of battle he orders bombardment of a compound, and eleven children die. Pedersen was hoping to rescue a fellow soldier, and thought that enemy fire was coming from the compound. When the incident is reported, he is flown to Denmark as a defendant in a military trial, charged with committing a war crime. Directed by Tobias Lindholm, the heart of the film is the trial, though much film footage seeks to humanize Klaus. Nominated by the Political Film Society as best film on human rights of 2016, A War provides much suspense, presumably six months of his life, regarding the possible verdict, as Maria asks Claus to lie to avoid imprisonment. MH
THE WITCH PROVIDES ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE PURITANS
When uneducated people look for explanations of unexpected and unwelcome events, they may revere a religious document as their only source of wisdom. The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers, demonstrates how the Puritans tried to have witches assigned as causes of unusual events. In the film, a family is banned by leaders of a Puritan community for a heresy and has to relocate to a remote rural area. When deaths occur, the blame is placed on their eldest daughter Tomasin (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) rather than a more scientific explanation with which the family is unfamiliar. What is fascinating about the film is that the dialog uses “thou,” consistent with the era, and the story seeks to reproduce a legend that gained currency in Massachusetts (though filming is in rural Ontario) during the late 17th century. The Witch is definitely not for young children and reproduces the crudeness of life and thought in contrast with Arthur Miller’s more cerebral stage play The Crucible (1953). Whereas Miller was vilifying McCarthyism, The Witch can be interpreted as an explanation of contemporary religious fanaticism. MH