In The Notebook, which opens in Toronto and Montreal on Sept. 26, Hungarian film director Janos Szasz transports a viewer into a Darwinian world where only the fittest survive. It’s August 1944 and Hungary is at war. A soldier returns from the front and is reunited with his wife and two pre-pubescent twin sons. He […]
How did Canada respond, publicly and institutionally, to the rise of Nazism in Germany? Part of the answer is found in Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War (McGill-Queen’s University Press). A book of essays by Canadian academics, it explores a number of overlapping issues — Canada’s reaction to Nazism, Canada’s […]
The creation of Israel in 1948 was a joyous event in Jewish history, but a catastrophe for Palestinian Arabs. Six Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence, while Palestinian fighters continued their guerrilla war against Israel. During the fighting, eight out of 10 Palestinians fled or were driven out, […]
Life brings abrupt and nasty surprises, as New York City gay couple George (Alfred Molina) and Benjamin (John Lithgow) discover one fine sunny day in Ira Sachs’ mellow film, Love Is Strange, which starts its run in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Sept. 19. The pair are resting in bed in the quiet opening scene. […]
Euthanasia is a huge issue that brings to mind a myriad of complex questions: Is euthanasia morally and ethically acceptable and permissible in principle? Is it inhumane? How long should a terminally ill person be allowed to linger on in pain? Should a doctor get involved? And if he does step forward, should his licence […]
One of the strongest impressions I was left with following my first and only trip to Syria in 1975 is that Arabs and Israelis hew to radically different versions of history. Objective facts are not necessarily respected and are commonly manipulated to build historic narratives and agendas that validate or debunk a particular point of […]
Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar: Paradise Lost blends fact with fantasy. Pablo Escobar, the late, legendary Colombian drug trafficker, is the central figure in the movie, which was screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But virtually everything else in it is a figment of Di Stefano’s fervent imagination. Which is to say that Escobar, […]
Giulio Ricciarelli’s riveting German-language movie, Labyrinth of Lies, ventures bravely into rough terrain — Germany’s historic reckoning with the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it takes a viewer back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when some Germans were trying to suppress or forget Germany’s central […]
Olivier Lubrich, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Berne in Switzerland, has compiled a historically useful anthology of essays and letters, both published and unpublished, describing life in Nazi Germany. Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (The University of Chicago Press) presents a chilling portrait of a nation under the thrall […]
Ninety five years have elapsed since world leaders gathered in Paris to create a new international order following the carnage of World War I — the “war to end all wars.” The Paris Peace Conference, a momentous event, is expertly examined by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919 (Random House). France’s foray into fascism and state […]