A thoughtful and powerful Canadian documentary about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The filmmaker, Simcha Jacobovici, is the son of Holocaust survivors, but he has tried very hard to make this film a nonpartisan overview of the conflict that shows some of the wisdom as well as some of the unreasoning hatred on both sidesand to an extent he has succeeded. Among the many people interviewed, my favorite is a pacifist, anarchist street performer in Tel Aviv with an Arab father and a Jewish mother who has fought at separate times on both sides. (Jacobovici’s view is wide enough to include other performing artists as well, among them an Israeli dance company and a Palestinian music ensemble.) One might question at times the use of techniques associated with fiction films (e.g., point-of-view shots and flashbacks) and the occasional tendency of the filmmakers to provoke the people they are filming, though the film is sufficiently up-front to suggest that camera crews sometimes help create the violence they record. But the overall portrait that emerges, of a society propelled by suffocating hatred and intolerance on both sides, is disquieting, intelligent, and hard to forget. 115 min. (JR) Read more
What’s best in such compilations is always debatable, but if you haven’t seen any of the International Tournees some pleasant surprises are in store for you. For the record, the 17 shorts from seven countries are: from the UK, Paul Vester’s Sunbeam (1980), Alison Snowden and David Fine’s Second Class Mail (1984), Nick Park’s Creature Comforts (1989), David Anderson’s Door (1990), and John Minnis’s Charade (1984); from the U.S., Bill Kroyer’s Technological Threat (1988), Brett Koth’s Happy Hour, Sally Cruikshank’s Face Like a Frog (1987), Gregory Grant’s Ode to G.I. Joe (1990), John Lasseter and William Reeves’s Tin Toy (1988), and John Kricfalusi’s Big House Blues; from Hungary, Ferenc Rofusz’s The Fly (1980) and Gyula Nagy’s Finger Wave (1988); from the former USSR, Mikhail Aldashin’s The Hunter (1991); from the Netherlands, Paul Driessen’s The Killing of an Egg (1977); from Germany, Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s Balance (1989); and from Canada, Cordell Barker’s The Cat Came Back (1988). (JR) Read more
An excellent documentary made in 1983 by Tunisian critic and filmmaker Ferid Boughedir (HalfaouineBoy of the Terraces, Arabian Camera) that offers an intelligent and useful survey of African cinema. All the major figures are interviewedincluding Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cisse, Djibril Diop Mambety, Med Hondo, Gaston Kabore, Dikongue Pipa, Safi Faye, Oumarou Ganda, and Ola Balogun. (JR) Read more
