The movie is based on true events that occured in Croatian city of Karlovac in 1941. In order to save the imprisoned high ranking member of the resistance movement, the group of Partizans are conducting daring raid in the very center of the enemy stronghold.Read More »
Mark Donskoy, the Russian filmmaker whose fame rests upon his brilliant “Gorky Trilogy” of the late 1930s, came up with another artistic triumph in 1944’s Rainbow (originally Raduga). With understandable creative rage, Donskoy depicts life in a Nazi-occupied village at the beginning of World War 2. The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olga (Nataliya Uzhviy), a Russian partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruellest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis. Eventually, the villagers rise up against their oppressors-but unexpectedly do not wipe them out, electing instead to force the surviving Nazis to stand trial for their atrocities in a post-war “people’s court.” (It is also implied that those who collaborated with the Germans will be dealt with in the same even-handed fashion). Brilliantly acted by virtually everyone in the cast, Rainbow is a remarkable achievement, one that deserves to be better known outside of Russia.Read More »
The film is set in the 1860s, during the Taiping Rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty in China. The story, based on an unresolved crime in 1870, tells of three sworn brothers (played by Andy Lau, Jet Li and Takeshi Kaneshiro) who are forced to turn against one another due to the harsh realities of war and political intrigue.Read More »
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This is a Iranian short film named “The Frozen Rose”. Its story is an excerpt from the movie Khodahafez Rafik meaning Goodbye my Friend (2003) which includes three mini stories. This story is about a young girl named Rukkayah and her deep desire to see her father again who had already been martyred on the frontlines during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). We see at the beginning that when the train which carries Iranian soldiers stops, this little girl is the only one who stands in the same position until the other children move away after having sold their flowers to the soldiers. Every morning she cuts flowers and offers them to the soldier who will be martyred without taking their worth in return. The end of this movie is very powerful and moving. In essence, the whole story relies on the fact that Rukkayah hasn’t accepted that her father has passed away 2 years ago.Read More »
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The story of Django Reinhardt, famous guitarist and composer, and his flight from German-occupied Paris in 1943.Read More »
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Like an eager frequent flyer, Western paternalism changes destinations but not its baggage. The Children of Huang Shi takes the good intentions and terrible methods of The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond and takes them to China, where another traumatizing upheaval is whittled down to window-dressing for the personal romance and redemption of a couple of chalky-white stars. Business as usual for Roger Spottiswoode, who in the 1983 thriller Under Fire envisioned the Nicaraguan revolution as mere scrim on which a hotshot American reporter could get his shit together. The adventure-seeking outsider this time around is real-life British journalist George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who arrives in late-1930s China as invading Japanese forces plow the land, slaughtering everyone in their way.Read More »
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The moral conundrum at the heart of Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters” is worthy of Kafka or Dostoevsky: What is the value of a single human life in the face of unspeakable evil? During World War II, one of Europe’s greatest counterfeiters decides, for a while, that his own survival is more important, until inevitably he learns that surrendering one’s soul and humanity may be worse than losing your life altogether.Read More »
German-Finnish coproduction documentary which has not been published before 1999. Film is an accurate description of the Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers from 1941 to 1943. Recruited in spring 1941, trained in Germany and all the way to the Caucasus. Narrated by a young TK man, front radio commentator Veikko Itkonen (1919-1990).Read More »
“Very sweet, wryly funny in spots, but always haunted by war (described sparingly but never shown). It was based on a stage play and betrays its theatrical roots in some of the pacing and staging. It’s slow, perhaps too slow for action film fans, but it’s not boring. Rather, it’s delicate and precise like tea ceremony.Read More »