It’s no secret that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has an authoritarian bent of mind. And that includes his hatred of any criticism. That makes for a very hostile environment for the country’s journalists. One of the country’s preeminent newspapers, Hurriyet, which has a liberal secularist outlook, suffered two attacks on its offices in Istanbul earlier […]
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 […]
It may surprise some that the infamous Hollywood blacklist, the subject of Trumbo, was almost single-handedly broken by the director of Exodus, the blockbuster movie about the birth pangs of a new nation, Israel. Trumbo, which premiered at this week’s Toronto International Film Festival, revolves around Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter whose high-flying career was shattered by the […]
Amos Gitai’s chilling docudrama, Rabin: The Last Day, which will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16 and 18, is ostensibly about Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995. But on a deeper level, it’s about the politically charged, divisive and poisonous atmosphere that emboldened his assassin, Yigal Amir, to kill […]
Lars Kraume’s German-language movie, The People Versus Fritz Bauer, bores into Germany’s dark past with unflinching intensity, exposing the raw wounds of its preeminent role in the Holocaust. Scheduled to be screened at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival on September 15 and 18, it takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when West […]
Nitzan Gilady’s debut feature film, Wedding Doll, is astonishingly self-assured and profoundly poignant. Due to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16, 18 and 20, it’s the work of a budding talent in Israeli cinema. Hagit (Moran Rosenblatt), a mildly retarded woman of 24, is at the core of the movie. […]
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan ventures into new territory — the Holocaust — in his latest film, Remember, which had its Canadian premiere at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. It’s apparently inspired by real-life events. After World War II, a handful of Jewish Holocaust survivors hunted down and murdered their Nazi tormentors […]
In the late 19th century, the German Marxist August Bebel observed that anti-Jewish prejudice was “the socialism of fools.” Is Jeremy Corbyn demonstrating the accuracy of this phrase yet again? A far-left Labour Party member of parliament in Britain since 1983, Corbyn has just won the leadership of the party following the resignation of Ed […]
Pedro E. Guerrero (1917-2012) saw an image and knew how to photograph it. Frank Lloyd Wright, the illustrious architect, recognized this talent and availed himself of Guerrero’s expertise until his death in 1959. No other American photographer was as closely associated with Wright as Guerrero. But Guerrero was not merely a one-trick pony. He also worked with the […]
So fierce and unrelenting is the civil war in Syria that 11 million Syrian nationals have been displaced from their homes in the past four years. Of these, four million have left the country altogether. Staggering statistics. Many of the bedraggled emigrants, having landed in makeshift camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, have begun streaming […]