At the beginning of World War II, the Ministry of Propaganda in Britain asked the movie director Michael Powell whether he would be interested in making a documentary about minesweepers. He offered a counter-proposal — a feature film that might inspire the United States to abandon its neutrality policy and enter the war against Nazi […]
On January 8, 2020, Hamed Esmaeilion’s life was torn asunder. Since then, he has struggled with loss, pain and agony. On that catastrophic day, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 bound from Tehran to Kyiv was shot down by an Iranian missile. All 176 passengers and crew were killed, including his wife Parisa and nine-year-old daughter, […]
As Netflix began streaming Farha, a restrained Palestinian feature film that presents the Nakba in microcosm, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a resolution to commemorate the seventy fifth anniversary of this event come next May. The resolution, sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, the Palestinian Authority and Senegal, was passed on December […]
Turn off your reality monitor as you watch Eyal Halfo’s The 90 Minute War, which can be viewed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. This fanciful Israeli film is built around a wildly implausible plot: The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have decided that the logical way to end their conflict is by means of […]
On the last day of the 1967 Six Day War, an Israeli army officer named Menashe comes under fire from enemy positions and his comrade-in-arms is killed on the battlefield. Six years later, Menashe is still struggling with its psychic fallout and is not the man he used to be. Having been traumatized by the […]
Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent, was released in mid-August 1940, a year after he left his native Britain to settle in Los Angeles. A spy thriller in the mould of his iconic 1935 film, The 39 Steps, it stars Joel McCrea as a hardboiled American reporter who’s dispatched to Europe on the eve […]
Faran Moradi’s Tehranto is premised on his belief that two types of Iranian immigrants live abroad — those who left Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution and those who emigrated after that momentous upheaval. He applies this definition to two Iranian families at the center of his alluring romantic drama, which opened on VOD platforms […]
The lives of Palestinian Arabs under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank can be circumscribed, given the presence of Israeli checkpoints and the closures that restrict their movements. Ameen Nayfeh’s feature film, 200 Meters, which opens in New York City theatres on November 18 and on digital platforms on December 6, delves into this troubling issue. The […]
Sergei Loznitsa’s understated yet compelling movie, Babi Yar: Context, documents the monstrous German occupation of Ukraine, a province of the Soviet Union until its independence in 1991. To be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation from November 10-13, it puts the Babi Yar massacre of 33,771 Ukrainian Jews in September 1941 into perspective. […]
The Lancaster heavy bomber was probably the most feared British airplane during World War II. Swift and responsive, this iconic aircraft bombed military and civilian targets in Nazi Germany, helping the Allies turn the tide of the war and defeat Adolf Hitler’s despicable Nazi regime. Lancaster, a stirring documentary by David Fairhead and Anthony Palmer, […]