Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has launched a public relations blitz. Two weeks ago, he sent Jews a Rosh Hashanah greeting from his Twitter account. In the past few days, while in the United States, he has tried to convince the international community that he is a moderate and a breath of fresh air compared to his clownish yet […]
Wadjda is a cinematic rarity, the first Saudi Arabian feature-length film to be directed by a female Saudi woman. Haifaa al-Mansour’s movie, shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most closed and theocratic societies, is ostensibly innocuous. Wadjda (Waad Mohammed), a spunky 1o-year-old Saudi girl, has her heart set on a green bicycle. […]
Gouged out by the crushing forces of nature during the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the ravines of Toronto form an enchanting urban forest in the heart of Canada’s biggest city. More than a century ago, when wilderness areas were usually regarded as expendable, the ravines were ravaged by logging and industrialization. But […]
When I was a university student in the mid and late 1960s, the war in Vietnam was big news. Rarely a day passed that the local newspaper, the now-defunct Montreal Star, did not carry at least one story about it, sometimes displaying it on the front page. As portrayed in the media, Vietnam was […]
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida explores a dark and miserable period in Poland’s history: the Holocaust. Polish films have embraced this theme with increasing frequency since the end of the communist era, as scholar Marek Haltof has written. Ida, which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, is part and parcel of this genre. Filmed […]
Fifty six years after the appearance of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky serves up a movie remarkably like it with respect to theme, content, spirit and locale. The Railway Man, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, is based on a true story by Eric Lomax, […]
A Russian joke from the 1970s: How many Jews are there in Russia? Six to eight million. How many Jews would leave Russia? Twenty to twenty five million. During the communist era, when Russia was known as the Soviet Union, emigration was generally not permitted. Restrictions were loosened in the early 1970s, allowing a trickle […]
A camera pans over an expanse of impenetrable jungle before zooming in on the boughs and leaves of a soaring tropical hardwood tree. Birds chirp and trill, and in the distance, an airplane trailing smoke and fire crashes into a body of water in a fiery explosion. It is 1942 and the Japanese army is […]
Nathanael West (1903-1940) was a promising but under-appreciated novelist during his brief lifetime. His four novels – The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939) – sold fewer than 5,000 copies, garnered mixed reviews and earned a pittance. Tragically, he did not […]
Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini from 1922 to 1943, was the model of Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian state, as well as Germany’s major European ally before and during World War II. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini was not a rabid antisemite and had Jewish followers and friends. Indeed, Mussolini praised Italian Jews as good citizens and […]