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 […]
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still. Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than it was between President George H.W. Bush […]
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Cuba — the American Vintage Car Capital
Cuba is an open-air museum of vintage American cars. On a per capita basis, no other country on the planet has as many. At last count, 60,000 of these clunkers from the pre-1959 era were still plying Cuban roads. It would not be an exaggeration to say that old American cars are as synonymous with […]
The new interim government in Ukraine, led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has been acclaimed in the west as a plucky defender of freedom and liberty resisting Russian intimidation and aggression in Crimea. Last week, in a show of sympathy for Ukraine, Yatsenyuk was invited to the White House by U.S. President Barack Obama, and […]
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The Lunchbox, a Bollywood Film, Is Endearing
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 […]
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The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan
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, […]
Bashar Assad, Syria’s embattled but defiant president, will stop at nothing to ensure his survival and that of his Baathist regime. A case in point is the popular uprising that broke out in Syria three years ago this month. The revolt, the bloodiest in Syria’s often violent history, has morphed into a civil war that […]
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A Primer On Contemporary Russia
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. […]
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Bethlehem: A Visceral Israeli Thriller
Yuval Adler’s first feature film, Bethlehem, should catapult him into the upper rungs of Israel’s movie industry. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and set to open in Canada on April 4, Bethlehem is strong and explosive. Normally, a visceral thriller of this calibre would have been made by a seasoned director. But in this case, […]
On March 19, the Hungarian government is scheduled to unveil a statue in Budapest’s Freedom Square in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Hungary, an event that robbed Hungarians of their independence and doomed Hungary’s Jewish community. The stylistic statue, brimming with historic symbolism, portrays a rapacious German imperial eagle attacking the […]