Homs is one of the flashpoints of the civil war in Syria, which is tearing apart the country. Peaceful protests in Homs, north of Damascus, were met with a brutal response by government forces, forcing rebels to take up arms in a bitter struggle that has degenerated into a military stalemate symptomatic of the war […]
Ravi Patel, 29, is a bachelor, a status his traditional Indo-American parents can no longer abide. Strong believers in arranged marriages, they’re certain they can find their son a suitable Indian girl, someone who shares his values and Hindu religion. Bachelorhood, they assert, is not for a nice Indian boy. Ravi Patel Meet the Patels, […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival, the finest cultural event in the city’s Jewish calendar, gets under way on May 1 and runs until May 11. As usual, there are films for every conceivable taste. A sampler: Bernard Natan was one of the founders of the modern film industry in France. A Rumanian Jew whose original […]
Are there second chances in romance? Arie Posen’s beautifully-crafted film, The Face of Love, starring Annette Bening and Ed Harris, delves into that complex and tantalizing question with the persistence and ardour of a long-denied lover. Its premise seems simple-minded at first glance. Nikki (Bening), an attractive widow in her mid-50s still grieving over the […]
Hasn’t nearly everyone, at one time or other, been seized by a fleeting desire to flee civilization and find peace and contentment on an uninhabited tropical island? Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch, residents of Berlin, were two such dreamers. In July 1929, they set sail from Amsterdam, bound for the Galapagos Islands, which the British […]
Tens of thousands of Soviet Jews have settled in the United States in the past three decades, but few have left as lasting an impression as Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart. For many years, his parents considered him a “little failure” because he did not take their advice and become a lawyer. Instead, much to their consternation, […]
The 17th edition of CineFranco, the biggest French film festival in North America, gets under way on Friday, March 28 and ends on Sunday, April 6. Twenty five feature films and 14 shorts from several countries, including France and Canada, will be screened at the Royal Theater in Toronto (608 College). A sampler: Bright Days […]
At one juncture in Ritesh Batra’s bitter-sweet Bollywood film, The Lunchbox, which opens in Canada on March 21, the main character, Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), muses, “Sometimes, the wrong train will take you to the right address.” The observation is apt. Just look at what happens when Saajan’s boxed lunch, punctually delivered to him at his […]
The Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist movement, finds itself on the ragged fringes of American society today, a miserable relic of a bigoted era when ethnic chauvinism, intolerance and racism were fairly common in the United States. But almost a century ago, the white-hooded order was riding high, having elected like-minded governors in Texas, […]
Thirty eight years after the appearance of Hedrick Smith’s best seller, The Russians, Gregory Feifer’s Russians has been published. While Smith, a New York Times correspondent based in Moscow, explored the Soviet Union, Feifer, a former Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio, focuses on the post-communist period, paying special attention to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. […]