In one of several, equally heart-rending and inspiring segments in Videoletters entitled Vlada and Ivica, Vlada and his father Zoran, a Serbian, finishes recording his videotaped message and begins to reflect pensively on their family’s inevitable estrangement from the intended videoletter recipient, Vlada’s childhood friend Ivica and his father Zeljko Krilcici, a colleague and long-time […]
The Cuckoo is an understated, yet enchanting comedy of errors on the human capacity for empathy and community amidst the chaos and senselessness of war. Set in September 1944 shortly before Finland’s withdrawal from World War II, the film lyrically recounts a fateful encounter between an injured, disillusioned Russian soldier named Ivan and a talkative, […]
Alternately humorous and heartbreaking in its candid and unflinching portrait of the exploited lives of low rate prostitutes living in the shantytown of La Línea in Guatemala City (an emblematic place of abject poverty built along the marginal buffer zones of railroad tracks that also evokes Ditsi Carolino’s Life on the Tracks), Chema Rodriguez’s The […]
A Kurdish-American man named Diyari travels to the village of Halabja, one of the targeted sites of the 1988 chemical and biological bombing of the Iraqi Kurdistan region by the Iraqi military (acting under Saddam Hussein’s Anfal genocide campaign against the Kurds), on a personal humanitarian effort to build a facility in order to accommodate […]
Poignant, humorous, and exquisitely realized, Randa Chahal-Sabbag’s The Kite follows the plight of a beautiful and carefree Lebanese girl named Lamia (Flavia Bechara) who, after recklessly tempting fate by briefly trespassing into the mined, Israeli-controlled heavily militarized buffer zone in order to retrieve her kite, is ruled by her village council to be prepared for […]
During the spring of 2004, as the Iraqi city of Falluja slowly metamorphosed from secondary, wartime infrastructure target to the emerging epicenter of an escalating (and increasingly emboldened) Iraqi insurgency, soldiers from a squadron of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stationed in the volatile city struggle to adjust to their amorphous, undefined, and intrinsically […]