Nicaragua, 1979. Set during the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew dictator Somoza Debayle, a young man joins the National Guard to earn a living and receive training, alienating his father, a Sandinista supporter. Gradually, his views change, and he realizes he must stand with his family and community. But the government has invested heavily in his training and is willing to separate him from home and family.
Category: Politics
Fascism has forced the leadership of the Italian Communist Party to settle in Paris. In Italy arrests of militants are decimating the organization, so Emilio is sent on a mission in the area of Turin, to put out of harm whistle-blowers.
Tengiz Abuladze’s black comic allegory – the first instance of a Soviet filmmaker directly confronting the legacy of Stalin’s purges – caused a sensation when it first aired on Georgian television. Unfolding over two timelines, the film combines absurdist parable with wrenching drama. When the corpse of the recently deceased mayor of a small town is repeatedly disinterred, its citizens must face up to the horrors of their buried past. Abuladze’s poetic film is a powerful act of cinematic testimony, combining religious symbolism with knowing references to the various ghosts of 20th-century totalitarianism.
In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript — a novel with the title “Blue Mountains or Tieshan.” The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity.
The World is Watching is a political film about the moral issues surrounding news gathering and newsmaking in the electronic age. Who decides what constitutes the news? How do they decide? And what about the men and women who report from the field. Are foreign correspondents allowed to tell all that they see? The film examines these complex issues by focusing on several international journalists in Nicaragua as they cover the negotiations surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. With unprecedented access to the inner workings of ABC News, what follows is a unique portrait of a news crew in the field, as it interacts with the editorial process in the newsroom in New York City.
A look at the filming of the 1953 political drama “Salt of the Earth,” made by artists blacklisted by Hollywood during the McCarthy era. That film’s producer, Paul Jarrico, speaks about his late colleagues, Herbert Biberman and Michael Wilson, and about the Communist scare that gripped the film community in the 1950s.
A few months before the passing of his friend and close collaborator dramaturge Saadallah Wannous, Omar Amiralay listens to his friend’s somber and relentless words, a farewell to a generation for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the source of all disillusion.
Set during the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and the United Arab Republic this story of familial and national divisions has become one of Chahine’s most popular films in festivals and retrospectives. A young policeman’s adoptive father occupies a high post in the force, while his biological father is reputed to have been a left-wing activist. Raouf begins to search for those who might have known his real father, while his half-brother, stationed on the Sinai front, prepares for battle.