Archive for January 2023
Land and Freedom (1995) – Powerful yet poignant
Films on World war 2 (WW2) are a dime a dozen ranging from the great to the abysmal. But films on WW2’s curtain raiser, The Spanish Civil War (SCW(, are very few or not well known. Ken Loach’s 1995 film remedies that by offering a powerful and insightful view of The Spanish Civil War, as…
Read MoreCarmen – No Man’s Woman
An Opera. Stage shows. Musicals. Multiple film versions, including a Flamenco-based film. Even a Bollywood Film. A story that continues to fascinate. About a free-spirited woman who can’t or won’t be subdued by any man. “No one tells Carmen’s eyes where to go but Carmen”. That line summarises her character. If she is fiery,…
Read MoreOperation Anthropoid – multiple versions of a grim story
Czechoslovakia was the first country to be occupied by the Germans before WW2 started. The Germans partly occupied it in 1938 and fully annexed all provinces into the “German Reich” in March 1939, six months before the official starting date of September 3, 1939. The Czechs thus had the longest history of Resistance against the…
Read MoreOn The Beach (1958) – Humanity loses.
The 1950s saw The Cold War take off spectacularly. The two sides kept staring at each other and made worldwide alliances based on ideology. For all its talk of “Democracy”, the US supported unpopular dictatorships with terrible Human Rights records (Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, Zaire, etc.). The Socialist Bloc wasn’t far off, often crushing democratic dissent…
Read More