Sunday, February 20, 2011

CIVIL WAR FILM WISH LIST

This list is inspired by Graiwoot :-)

1.EZRA (2007, Newton I. Aduaka)
It is inspired by the civil war in Sierra Leone, told through the conflicted testimonies of three witnesses.

2.PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (1996, Srdjan Dragojevic, Serbia)
"At the Belgrade army hospital, casualties of Bosnian civil war are treated. In the hospital they remember their youth and the war. Two young boys, Halil, a Muslim, and Milan, a Serb, have grown up together near a deserted tunnel linking the Yugoslav cities of Belgrade and Zagreb. They never dare go inside, as they believe an ogre resides there. Twelve years later, during the Bosnian civil war, Milan, who is trapped in the tunnel with his troop, and Halil, find themselves on opposing sides, fatefully heading toward confrontation"

3.THE RED AND THE WHITE (1968, Miklós Jancsó, Hungary)
"In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other. Captives are executed or sent running naked into the woods. Neither side has a plan, and characters the camera picks out soon die. A White Cossack officer kills a Hungarian and is executed by his own superiors when he tries to rape a milkmaid. At the hospital, White officers order nurses into the woods, dressed in finery, to waltz. A nurse aids the Reds, then they accuse her of treason for following White orders. Red soldiers walk willingly, singing, into an overwhelming force. War seems chaotic and arbitrary."

4.RED DAWN (1991, Jorge Fons, Mexico)
"October 2, 1968 in Mexico City. There's only ten days for the Olympic Games and a small student's revolt has turned into a major political turmoil. A meeting will be carry out that day in Tlatelolco (the largest housing complex in the city) and the situation is extremely tense. A typical middle-class mexican family (living in Tlatelolco) will be tragically involved in the events, when the meeting is brutally interrupted by the army and hundreds of people are killed in the square in front of their apartment building"

5.TESTAMENT (1988, John Akomfrah, UK, 88 min)
This experimental film is about Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president who was forced into exile by the military coup d'état of 1966. Reading about this film somehow reminds me of Pridi.

Akomfrah said about TESTAMENT: "We went to Ghana to try to make a film about Kwameh Nkrumah, but also about a movement and a body of ideas that simply don't exist anymore. They'd been swept away not just by the force of historical events but also by the attempts on the part of the successive governments after Nkrumah's to basically bury the man and all he stood for. There is something metaphorically significant in that act because so much of diasporic history rests precisely in that gap between history and myth."


FAVORITE FILMS ABOUT CIVIL WARS

1.THE PHOTOGRAPH (2001, Kazim Öz, Turkey, A+++++++++++++++)

2.THE SARI SOLDIERS (2008, Julie Bridgham, Nepal, A+++++++++++++++)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpGmHQUYxYo

3.LABAN: THE MEANING OF THE EDSA REVOLUTION (2007, Sally Jo Bellosillo, Philippines, A++++++++++)

4.THE WIND (1982, Souleymane Cissé, Mali, A+++++)

5.GARAGE OLIMPO (1999, Marco Bechis, Argentina, A+)

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