Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts

Friday, November 19, 2010

Majid Majidi's Movies

An internationally acclaimed writer and director, Majid Majidi was born in Tehran in 1959. He studied at the Institute of Dramatic Art in Tehran. Baduk (1992) was his debut as a director and screenwriter. Below are trailers of some of my favorites.

The Children of Heaven - Bacheha-Ye aseman (1997)




The Color of Paradise - Rang-e khoda (1999)



The Willow Tree - Beed-e majnoon (2005)



The Song of Sparrows - Avaze gonjeshk-ha (2008)

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

"Waltz with Bashir" - Movie



Daring. Disturbing. A Powerful anti-war movie, depicting the horrors of war and political Zionism in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. A Must watch! (Rated 'R' - for strong sexual and violent content. Viewer discretion advised.) The movie perhaps also reflects the growing anti-war resistance within the state of Israel.



The start of the movie in the above clip.



A strong statement on the perversity of war with a touch of irony.

The Battle of Algiers - Movie



"I hadn't looked at The Battle of Algiers, that classic 1965 film about urban guerrilla warfare, for at least twenty years, but once seen it tends to linger undiminished in the mind's eye. Made by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, the film deals with the bitter struggle in the 1950s between French colonials and settlers and the Algerians they had colonized. The film has the grainy look of a documentary, but as the opening trailer proudly proclaims, not a foot of newsreel was actually used. Back in the 1960s, when it first came out, it was watched with romantic fascination by young American radicals, eager to absorb the experiences, a million miles distant from their own lives, of Third World revolutionaries. In the 1980s my husband used to show it in a political science class he taught about revolution. And now the Pentagon has recently shown it to its functionaries, even as our own troops are deeply mired in urban guerrilla warfare. I wondered what tips and instruction they were intended to glean from it, and so I slipped our copy into the VCR and watched it again..."

Full text: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons by Sheila Johnson
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0907-07.htm