FREE STATE OF JONES REDISCOVERS A FORGOTTEN PAST
During the American Civil War, a group of runaway slaves and antislavery Whites in the vicinity of Jones County, Mississippi, decide to fight the local Confederate Army and are able to achieve a small victory. When they ask for assistance from the Union Army, they are turned down in 1864 because the strategy of the war was to head for the heart of the Confederacy to end the war. As a result, one day Confederate deserter Newton Knight (played by Matthew McConaughey) reads a statement declaring the area thus liberated as the Free State of Jones, one of four such renegade regions during the Civil War. But the film would be short if the story stopped there. Titles trace major events from the end of the Civil War, the period of Black Codes, the Reconstruction era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the end of Reconstruction, indicating that the union was preserved but the former slaves were not really liberated for very long. Director Gary Ross devotes two hours and nineteen minutes to recount the history, a tale that could have been edited to be more exciting, but the imperatives of dramatizing a true story are followed instead, and the Political Film Society has nominated Free State of Jones for best film exposé of 2016. MH
LIES ARE REDEEMED IN THE DEBT
In 1965, Mossad assigns Rachel Singer (played by Jessican Chastain), Stefan Gold (Marton Csokas) and David Peretz (Sam Worthington) to kidnap Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), the Surgeon of Birkenau in East Berlin. They succeed, but Vogel escapes. But the trio tells Israel that Rachel killed Vogel. In 1997, when Rachel’s daughter Sarah Gold (Romi Aboulafia) publishes a book about the mission, Rachel is obviously uncomfortable with the lie. Stefan finds that Vogel is in a Kiev hospital and is about to be interviewed by a journalist. Rachel (now played by Helen Mirren) and Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) now realize that they must really perform the mission, especially after David (now Ciarán Hinds) suddenly commits suicide. Not only is the film about the two escapades but also the personal relations involving the trio. MH
SEOUL SEARCHING ALMOST GOES BACK TO THE WOMB
Thousands of Koreans have been adopted around the world. In some cases, their mothers wanted them to have a better life for reasons mostly unspecified in Seoul Searching. The film tries to recall the annual summer camps for teenage Korean expatriates held in Seoul so that they can learn about their cultural background. Directed by Benson Kim, the camp held in 1988 evidently was more raucous than previously but that makes the story more enjoyable. The focus is on three boys living in the same dorm room—from Hamburg, Los Angeles, and México. Emulating, their host country’s stereotypes, the German Korean is calm and collected; the Angeleno is a punk; the Mexican is oriented toward sex. But the punk is presented in the most depth: His Korean father does not show any favorable emotion toward him, and his response is to act up in an asocial manner until the camp leader explains that he had the same problem growing up in Korea. They also are aggressive toward a group of visiting tourists from Japan that turn out to be Japanese Koreans. The main politics in the film, as in many feature films, is the effort of a leader to keep order amid a lot of chaotic behavior. One Korean female finds her birthmother with disappointing results but later falls in love with the Korean from Hamburg who has previously helped her to set up the encounter. MH