Tomer Heymann’s Mr. Gaga, a fast-moving and absorbing documentary about one of the world’s finest choreographers and dancers, takes flight from almost the moment it begins. As the camera pans on the protagonist, Ohad Naharin, he coaches a dancer in his studio. “Really beautiful,” he says before instructing her to loosen up and “let go.” A man […]
In the spring of 1945, as World War II was winding down, the British government commissioned a documentary about the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The supervising director would be the Hollywood auteur Alfred Hitchcock. The screenwriter would be Richard Crossman, who would go on to become a British cabinet minister. The […]
There are now 225 Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank, conquered by the Israeli army during the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Israel and the West Bank have morphed into a single geo-political unit. This inescapable reality has enormous ramifications on the long-simmering Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel’s armed presence in the West Bank […]
Reinhard Heydrich, one of highest-ranking German SS officers, was posted to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to stamp out its resistance movement. Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust, dealt crushing blows to it. As a result, the London-based Czech government-in-exile decided to assassinate him. Two operatives, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, were parachuted into Czechoslovakia to carry out […]