Sports and politics collided in 1936, when the winter and summer Olympic Games were held in Germany. Opponents of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime called for a boycott, believing that participation would be a validation of Germany’s openly antisemitic policies and practices. Critics blasted this approach, claiming the Olympics fostered national pride and unity as well […]
Beyond the blindingly white Sikh temples and sleek highrises of Vancouver, voracious gangsters sporting hip clothes, spiffy shoes and menacing revolvers strut their stuff in broad daylight and in the darkness of night. In Deepa Mehta’s bouncy and buoyant new feature film, Beeba Boys, which opens in Canada on October 16, this violent nether world […]
Is the two-state solution dead? One might think so, judging by the latest violence convulsing the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Padraig O’Malley, a professor of peace and reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, believes that the two-state solution has had its day in the sun and has been overtaken by events on the ground. […]
Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta wades into the quagmire of human emotion and conflict in her atmospheric, multilingual movies. Boldly taking on controversial issues, she sheds light on such topics as sectarian violence and same-sex love. A retrospective of her work, Heaven on Earth: The Films of Deepa Mehta, will be presented by the Toronto International […]
There are 50,000 wild horses, or mustangs, in the western United States. Originally brought to America by the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago, they roamed freely for centuries. But due to the scarcity of publicly-owned grazing lands in states like Nevada and Utah, where most of them are found, these noble creatures are now kept […]
Land , land! — This is the secret to the solution of the Jewish question, the Zionist ideologue Nathan Birnbaum wrote in 1893. While Zionists like Birnbaum regarded Palestine as a panacea for Jewish homelessness and the threat of antisemitism, territorialists looked elsewhere around the globe to resolve the problems that plagued Jews in the Diaspora. […]
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Grandma is a modest, low-budget film about a hectic day in the life of a frazzled American grandmother. It opens in Canadian theaters on September 25. Elle Reid(Lily Tomlin), the grandma in question, is a poet and unemployed academic living on the margins in California. In the first scene of […]
Hollywood, the dream factory and glamour destination, is an endless source of curiosity and fascination. This was particularly the case during Hollywood’s golden era in the 1930s, when the studio system was dominant and mega stars like Greta Garbo and Errol Flynn set hearts aflutter. This incarnation of Lotus Land is resurrected in a lavishly-illustrated […]
The American woman has left the cocoon of her home and entered the work force, thereby enriching herself and society at large. Artificial barriers have fallen or have been stormed, and the United States is better for it. As these words are written, the glass ceiling is being picked apart and dismantled by women who […]
Colombia , in the 1980s and 1990s, was in dire danger of degenerating into a dysfunctional narco state under the thrall of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Netflix’s riveting 10-part series, Narcos, reconstructs Escobar’s rise to notoriety and his blood-soaked confrontations with the Colombian government. The show is narrated in understated tones by a U.S. Drug […]