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Walesa. Czlowiek z nadziei (2013)
Documentary narrates the leader of Solidarity movement Walesa
WALESA: A MAN OF HOPE : A MISNOMER DOCUMENTARY
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India JURY MEMBER OF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India AND FRIGOURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWISS
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India, GOA, 2013
At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a documentary with false gusto called WALESA : A MAN OF HOPE. It is of 87 minute duration. The lead performance is done by Robert Wieckiewicz. It is said it's a biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałesa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, and finally wrong doer as his movement could not bring the golden age for the Socialist countries that he in association with CIA lobby uprooted. This is such a truth many would hate to be convinced. But it is true, very true and true again. Wałesa's defiance of Poland's Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałesa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. So is Lindsay Anderson, the angry unbritish British director, founder of FREE CINEMA
Wałesa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981) respectively. It discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow hints it. In retrospect, that the heroic "Man" of those first two films really was Wałesa all along, so said Peter Bradshaw, the right-winger critic of THE GUARDIAN. It starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdansk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda, armed with his skewed perception. idolizes Wałesa's luxuriant moustache that made him famous and recognizable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałesa was a key political beneficiary. It's an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down.
Winner of Nobel Peace Prize, Walesa in fact brought down socialism with a hope that his new State would bring golden age to those betrayed by the corrupt socialist regimes. Good. Good to that extent that hold some iota of substance. But after that??? The regime that he brought about for the betrayed people of Poland just failed to deliver goods as the hope of the big Capitalist Nations poured not an inch of financial succour to the hard-hit Poland. The common people who used to get free ration, food, milk and education are all gone for a burton, for ever. The current Poland is neither Socialist country nor a proud Capitalist country. It is in economic shamble.
What the great Wajda has done is to show the false side of the coin. We cannot accept such
We Came Home (2013)
Director Ariana Delwar;s American elegiac story about Muslims and Arabs
WE CAME HOME : VICTIMS OF RELIGIOUS SCARS BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India
JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India AND FRIBOURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWISS
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India, GOA, 2013.
It sounds quite engaging to know that one woman filmmaker from Afganisthan ARIANA DELWAR could pluck courage to make a film called We Came Home. Based on 9/11 happentance, Ariana had a roughshod memories about what could happen to Muslims and Arabs in America. WE CAME HOME tells the story of Afghanistan through Afghan American artist, Ariana Delawari. Born into a suburban Los Angeles home, the same year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Ariana's life subtly dovetails parallel to the ever-changing events of her father's homeland. Her parents name her after the ancient name of Afghanistan. This has mythic tinge. Her home is filled with refugee relatives, parties with live Afghan music, and her father's fierce dedication to his homeland, a cause the entire family is dedicated to.
While the narrative is in progress, her father, Noor, plans anti-Soviet peace protests and lobbies the United States Congress, Ariana and her sisters being delighted dance to Madonna and play with their cousins. The Delawari household is a place of both celebration and activism, full of humanism. With Noor's family attempting to recreate the Kabul in big America they came to know that they would be the targets of 9/11 out of suspicion though they are not part of it. Under duress and police surveillance they were forced to leave behind, before the tanks and the land mines. Incidentally, Ariana watches her father's efforts and she is painfully aware that nobody seems to care, and questions her father's commitment to a land most people cannot find on a map. She watches her father shout about the Soviets, the rise of the Taliban and warnings of Osama Bin Laden. All before 9/11
and but they all fell to deaf ears. September 11th changes the course of Ariana's family's lives. Her parents sell everything and move to Kabul to help reconstruct the country. Ariana finally sees Afghanistan for herself. This is juncture when Ariana had to plan how to document ten years of traveling between Los Angeles and Kabul. While documenting the land of her ancestry through photographs, film and music, she undergoes a bizarre change in her imagination thinking how to highlight before the world. America overdid things relating to Afghans and Muslim on the whole. Ariana believes she is witnessing the moment Afghanistan will finally be free. Her father thrives as he helps reconstruct Afghanistan's banking system. She narrated one day two planes flew into the World Trade Center and my life changed forever. She knew right away what she was going to be making a film about, and she knew why dhr cried so hard when that Moroccan man predicted her future. Her soul knew before her life had caught up with it. That year her parents sold everything they owned and moved back to Afghanistan to help rebuild the country. Afghanistan had been my father's cause for my entire life. She had never dreamed that he and her mother would be moving back there, or that she would have the chance to travel there in her lifetime. Just a few months after graduating from USC School of Cinematic Arts, she was on a plane headed to Kabul with a Canon GL2, a bunch of mini DV tapes, and an old manual Nikon camera. she didn't think she was making a film at that point. Ariana thought she was feeling out the situation to figure out which story she would eventually tell. With the Taliban resurgence, Ariana realizes that her currency is art, and that the opportunity to bridge the two halves of her existence would shatter soon. She rounds up her Los Angeles band-mates and sets out to record an album in Kabul with three Afghan Ustads, or master musicians. The recording is a glimpse into the challenges of building anything in Afghanistan after thirty years of war, but nothing can touch the universal language of music that unfolds between these LA hipsters and elder maestros. These young American artists learn firsthand what it means to risk everything for art. This is the life time experience for them all. Ariana names her album "Lion of Panjshir" and filmmaker David Lynch releases the album. Though Ariana receives international acclaim, she's heartbroken, because Afghanistan keeps getting worse. In 2011, her father was arrested by the very government he has worked so hard to build. Ariana must decide what to do when war and corruption threaten her father's life. Though terrified that her father could be wrongfully imprisoned, or worse, Ariana finally understands him. She too has a responsibility to the Afghans she has met along her journeys. Even with Noor's life threatened, he cannot abandon his people and Ariana cannot let them be forgotten.
La jalousie (2013)
An actor's life turns a cruel turn when his previous left him and the current ladylove desserts him.
JEALOUSY: FATE OF A MAN
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India, JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India
The specialist master Philippe Garrel is a leader of serious and sociological cinema where issues are raised for debates. His new film JEALOUSY, shown at IFFI, Goa, India 2013, highlights the exhilaration of love, the exaltation of art—funny pillars of the modern French psyche it is claimed. "Jealousy" is a cruel, ironic palimpsest that informs of Paris onto passions of past decades—and does so with a pat black-and-white palette by the seventy-nine-year-old cinematographer Willy Kurant ,the early highlight of whose remarkable career was the romantically threadbare, black-and-white Paris in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film "Masculine Feminine". The theme marked by clinical interpretation, puts on emphasis of choices that contemporary life renders all the more misunderstood psychic turmoil revealing the city's topical losses, as well as its gains. Interestingly Garrel plays Louis, a struggling actor with a role in a start-up stage production that he enjoys but that barely pays. He leaves his girlfriend, the pale office worker Clothilde, in a primal scene that Charlotte, their young daughter, sees through a keyhole. In a plain twist the film shows Louis's new lover is another actress, the impulsive and frogged voiced Claudia . The director films the early days of their new romance with a thrilling, manic vigor; one long tracking shot of a mercurial simplicity, showing Louis and Claudia striding through the street as the busy backdrop seems to sweep past them and captures a secret moment of paradise that tends never to end. The tight framing of that shot also filters out the rest of the world, which, nonetheless, quickly impinges on their idyll. The new couple live in a cramped garret in a raw corner of town. Despite leaving Charlotte's mother, Louis continues to see his daughter often and happily, even pinch-babysitting in Clothilde's apartment when she comes home late from work—but he hardly contributes to her upkeep, since he himself is barely getting by. Garrel told me that, in 1968, it was possible to survive in Paris on three or four francs a day. In "Regular Lovers," he suggested the emotional toll of the self-inflicted bohemian poverty of that era, and in "Jealousy" he returns to the subject with an even more blunt and bitter self-deprecation. A strange thing happens in the movie: the action seems to spiral downward, to settle toward a sodden stasis. As I watched the film, I sensed that the drama was losing energy; it turned out that the characters were losing energy, that the lack of money became a lack of energy. "You don't love someone in a void," Claudia says, but that's exactly what the couple have created around them—and, especially, what Louis imposes on her. In one painfully telling scene, Claudia arrives home and happily tells Louis that she has been offered a part-time job as a clerk in an archive. Louis tells her that she shouldn't abandon her acting career so soon, even though she hasn't been cast in a role in six years. He sees her choice as one between money and art; she longs for a more comfortable apartment and a less constrained daily life, but it is, above all, a dynamic principle that she lacks—the daily round of interactions and discussions, of busy-ness that arises in business. And, after following a downward slope in the movie's first half, Claudia rises again in the second as, despite Louis's injunction, she finds a way to reconnect with life. In short "Jealousy" is a story of generations. Olga Milshtein, who plays Charlotte, is an extraordinarily poised and dialectical child actor, and her scenes with Louis are filmed with a great grace of tenderness. We are given to understand Charlotte's father is an artist and the child is as conservative as any—dependent on order and stability, and aspiring to the normative and unified family that she lost—and, paradoxically. Garrel is a filmmaker of generations. It narrates about a 30 year old man's tragic life being betrayed by his present lover who means a lot to him. His earlier has left him and in his trial to face life with a chin high up. As a theatre actor the protagonist struggles hard his entire life to stand up to cruel situation and being frustrated tries a suicide. It fails him and he continues to change his pattern of life to a better scape of living. But is it a dream or a reality to be realized with gusto. Garrel's desire to spruce up the actor's life by giving the benefit of doubt stays. But the film end in a hospital with his sister by the cator's side. Thus the film is nothing but a fate of a man, an actor that stands smothered by social circumstance. A good film and won crowds at IFFI, Goa, India.
The Line-Up (2013)
The film shows ontological anxieties of downtrodden people of Nigeria.
THE LINE UP: PERILS OF POVERTY BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India The new Nigerian film THE LINE-UP directed by Folasakin Iwajomo probably tries to take sad look into darker social aspects of war-torn Nigeria. Here the film shown at Fribourg this year seems to have drawn rapt attention in a sense it ontologically probes Nigerian nasty milieu. The film is of 15 minute duration but quite strong and funky. The director stirs up a moral query!!! How far would you go to pay for your sister's life-saving operation? The film narrates how ten men in a taxi, strangers to each other, head to an unusual line-up, where they must strip and subject themselves to blindfolds and inspection by a mysterious woman and her charge. This is too bizarre but an ontological reality. In the process only seven men romp home that night, big money in their pockets. We are left confused to count as to what of the other three? Funnily, the mysterious ritual is replayed again and again, and the attrition continues. For one man, it is suggested, the rumours of how much 'the chosen' spurs him on as he is desperate for the money to pay for his sister's operation?? But what is the price of being chosen? Not much is answered on the issue. Only tragic reality!!! Iwajomo's loud, disturbing film confronts the perils of the poverty-trap and the abuse of the desperate, in an allegory for the exploited rank file and lowdown people of Nigeria. African cinema through such experiments confirm how the directors are fighting to keep their heads up!!