1991-2000

From johnpilger.com:
“Almost 10 years of extraordinary isolation imposed by the UN and enforced by America and Britain have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.”

Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq is a powerful indictment of the largely unreported effects of United Nations sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War – most strikingly, the 500,000 children among more than one million Iraqis who died in almost 10 years of sanctions, figures verified by UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) and other UN agencies.Read More »

Amid the political turbulence and heady counterculture of early 1970s, Vietnam-era America, Irene (Suzy Nakamura), a rebellious sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl, leaves home and takes off on a road trip, heading west with her boyfriend and a pair of political activists. Her journey takes her on an unexpected detour of self-discovery, however, when she decides to visit the internment camp where her parents were incarcerated decades earlier. Drawing on her own family’s history, director Rea Tajiri fashions a profoundly cathartic look at the ways in which the traumas of America’s past echo into the present.Read More »

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A family man slowly becomes dangerously obsessive and paranoid in this grim Austrian drama that contains a graphically violent ending. As the story begins, George, an engineer who works at a science facility, has a normal happy life with his wife and kids. They are in the process of building a new house when George learns that a nearby chemical plant has been leaking dangerous gas into the air. This causes George to begin suffering from terrifying hallucinations. His paranoia increases every time he hears another report of violence, crime, war, or any other social problems on the news. After learning that his company may be overtaken by a larger corporation, George decides to send his family on an Italian vacation while he stays home and turns their apartment into a strange refuge from the terrible world he knows is coming.Read More »

The final film from expatriate American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in France in 1999. Kramer and collaborators tell the somber life story of Ben. After leaving his homeland as a youth, he is greeted in France by menial jobs in industry. In time, he opens a fruit market, finds a wife, fathers a child, and has it all come crashing down when he learns his mother is in danger back home. Upon his return to France, he finds his life in ruin.Read More »

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Things in Portugal weren’t what they are now. The story of this film is the story of bygone days when Portugal was hidden away from the rest of the world, when men were obliged to go to countries many Portuguese people could not point out on the map.
Men died and changed in these lands. Alex was only 10 years old, but he remembers, so its better for him to tell the story.Read More »

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It seems the lives of writers are hot movie properties these days. First Barton Fink, then Naked Lunch, and now Kafka. Whoever could have imagined such a thing? After the meteoric commercial success of Soderbergh’s debut feature sex, lies, and videotape, the director chose for his second effort this hypothetical presentation of the life of Franz Kafka. The movie is not so much a biography but rather, a speculative depiction of Kafka’s daily circumstances. While not untrue to the specific facts of Kafka’s life, the movie focuses more on the environment of 1919 Prague that so influenced the author. In large part, the things at which the movie excels are precisely the things that also make Kafka’s work so enduringly vivid — the absurdity anchored by an exacting realism, the incomprehensibility coupled with utmost lucidity, the looming sense of paradox, futility, labyrinthine logic and impenetrable pressures.Read More »

“Liv Ullmann’s directorial debut is a beguiling and bittersweet tale about the yearning to be free… “

Synopsis:
Copenhagen at the end of the nineteenth century. Sofie is a beautiful and cultured 28-year-old who lives at home with her parents Frederikke and Semmy. They only want the best for her and worry that she will end up an old maid like her three aunts with whom they share the weekly Sabbath meal…Read More »

Plot: Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.Read More »

The second film to be made from Woody Allen’s successful stage comedy (following a 1969 feature starring Jackie Gleason), Don’t Drink the Water is a made-for-television adaptation directed by and starring Allen himself. The fish-out-of-water premise remains the same: Allen plays Walter Hollander, a caterer from New Jersey who takes his family on vacation to a fictional Eastern European country. The trip turns sour when, thanks to a series of misunderstandings involving some inopportune snapshots, they are accused of espionage. The family goes on the run, taking refuge in the American Embassy. There, with the help of a wily young diplomat, they try to figure out a way to return to America without sparking an international incident. Though this version is set 25 years later than the original film, the changes are mostly cosmetic: the visual style is hand-held and more frantic, and the script replaces numerous references to the Cold War with a few glancing nods to present-day politics. Another notable change, the addition of an opening montage parodying newsreels, was reportedly the result of network pressure after Allen’s initial cut proved too short for the planned time slot.Read More »