Powerful Foreign Films that shatter previously held notions.

Yeh, and the thing is ... I work for an organisation that tries to get more [fill in] people in TV - tends to get confusing, sometimes. I make sure I get briefed ;-).

The 400 Blows

The coming of age film that is so potent and so well filmed that it's never been equaled. You really have to identify with the youngster's problems with his dysfunctional parents and his adventure in trying to break out on his own. The final scene caps of a cinematic masterpiece with a question, "Freedom! But now what?"

I don't watch much TV, but I am the taping queen. I have found many films in the wee hours that have never been put on during regular watching times. Right now I can't remember names, but there were so many delightful British and Irish ones. Derzu Usala - got that late one night.

I find, too, as I get older, I tend more and more to the ones that make me laugh - at least, partly. I do have tapes of most of the Alec Guinness films - Lavendar Hill Mob, Man in the White Flannel suit, more.

Remember "Z?"

Ooh. The other day saw a 2nd hand copy of "Z" and nearly got it (I need more movies like hole in head....) Should I? Maybe a little grim?

A film which,when I was much much younger, blew me away was Bertolucci's "Prima della rivoluzione" -- don't even know what its official title is in English. But since then I've heard nothing but bad opinions of it. What I remember is Bertolucci's (now more famous) visuals.

Ah youth! I also remember being virtually required to see every Bergmann film and then hang out in one or another coffee house in Cambridge and DISCUSS the movie. At length. Into the night. We thought we were such hot stuff, such innalexuals....

You discussed? We dissected. Of course, that's when I could drink coffee all night.

Z struck me hard. I was in Greece when the Colonels came in. Costa-Garvas did not make light stuff.

The movie with the rice paddies was Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice).

I also don't watch tv....

"Powerful Foreign Films that shatter previously held notions".

"Harlan County, USA", a documentary about a miners' strike in West Virginia.
Before that film I had the notion that American workers were relatively well off, and there was no class struggle.

There was just a commercial for "Wings of Desire" which is playing at a local (but not local enough) art house. Now that's a film which has knocked a few people over...

I mentioned on another thread the film on the Bosnian war as an instruction about how the U.N. was already involved in that conflic (which fell on dumb ears):

"No Man's Land," a very dark comedy about the war before NATO and the U.S. entered into it.

Very enlightening, illuminating and profound. And the 2002 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film.

Eh. Always missed that movie, even tho it was playing just around here for quite a while. Still on my list of to-see movies.

But a number of movies have amazingly changed my outlook on the countries of former Yugoslavia:

- Veillées d’Armes (The Troubles We’ve Seen) was an Ophuls documentary about war reporters in Bosnia, 3 hours long or so but continuously very gripping; and Perfect Circle (by Kenovic) was an intensely sad and touching movie set in the siege of Sarajevo. Together they hit home a sharp bit of the Bosnian war story.

- Before the Rain was a rather sentimental movie, set in Macedonia or Kosovo at the brink of war - I think it reached quite an international audience, in fact ... troubling one that. Troubling because it was a very moving film - I saw it in Budapest, and there were Yugoslavs in the audience who seemed moved as well ... yet it was also a movie that niftily recycled all kinds of Western stereotypes about the "Balkan" for effect, and could be deemed as much part of the problem as an analysis of it. (There was a good critique of the movie online, I must have it on disk somewhere if anyone is interested. A much worse example of the same kind of thing was this British movie called Beautiful People.)

- Marble Ass was a movie by Serbian director Zhelimir Zhilnik about the gritty nihilism of life away from the front in the cynical Milosevic war years; and Tri Letnja Dana (Three Summer Days) by Vukomanovic, was much in the same vein. They both moved me greatly, and they influenced me because, being set behind the fronts, they subtly (or not so subtly) showed how the logic and psychology of war infects all of society, every friendship, psyche and turn of events.

There was a short movie, too, that had the same effect within the ten or fifteen minutes it lasted, within a unity of time and space - basically, just people travelling on the tram - young thugs enter the tram, start harassing people - nobody acts, one by one they are terrorized - individual people react in fear, denial, isolation, try to flee - the short movie was Bosnian - 'nuff said about what it denoted. Very powerful. I think it might have been Sindrom, by Tanovic, but I dont know for sure if I'm coupling the right title to the memory.

(there was also Mondo Bobo, a Croatian movie of a few years later, which didn't explicitly refer to the wars anymore at all, I think - it was an action/suspense movie mostly - but it had the same powerful, grim, high-voltage tension about it)

- Zhilnik also made an impromptu report on the 96/97 Belgrade protests against Milosevic, Until the Eggs (Throwing Off the Yolks of Bondage) - exhilerating short little film! Another short movie that was a bit of a momentary eye-opener, simply because it said something important in the most flippant, detached way, was a Slovenian student film called Balkanski Revolverasi.

- One of the best, and most impact-ing opening scenes I've ever seen was the one of Serbie, Année Zéro, by Markovic, apparently a filmer of great fame and long standing in the 'old' Yugoslavia. Its kinda like a diary of the events in which the Milosevic regime unravelled, as breathlessly and exhileratingly "montaged" in its opening minutes as anywhere on celluloid. Its also a generational self-reflection, with the filmer asking himself and his friends difficult questions about what they had done, or how complicit their generation, even the dissidents, had been - and if he didnt ask those questions, his punk, "Otpor" son would - it brings up all kinds of things, playfully, wittily, without losing your attention, with the drastic events of the day as its backdrop.

- There were two Croatian comedies that changed my perception of the country, again, by respectively taking an unexpectedly light-minded, ironic angle at the war's sheer folly (How the War Started on My Island - hilarious) and by - not being about the war, at all (The Three Men of Melita Zganjer). Kinda like a, "hey, we're still living, and right now, we're feeling like fretting over love!", reality check ;-).

Another movie I missed was Kusturica's Underground, which is practically legendary I believe. I saw Black Cat, White Cat, and that was great fun.

(Your remark didnt so much "fall on deaf - or dumb - ears", btw, Lightwizard, but rather was bypassed simply because it was not relevant ...

You argued, in that other thread, that the US/NATO war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo was not "unilateral" the way the Iraq war was, because the UN had been "involved". That doesnt really work. The point about unilateralism is that in both wars, the US and allies acted without prior permission or approval of the UN. In Kosovo the gamble worked, and the UN added its approval to the military action afterwards, after all; in Iraq it didnt.

The fact that UN troops were deployed on the ground in another country altogether in the same region - i.e., Bosnia-Herzegovina - doesnt really make the Kosovo war any more, or any less unilateral. The "blue helmets" in Bosnia didnt imply any UN approval of military action over Kosovo, a few hundred miles south).

Nimh, I'm envious of you access to all these films...

And there's a fairly recent Spanish film called "Boca, Boca." which I liked.

I remember, once, sittiing in a cine with my daughter and husband in Madrid to watch "Annie Hall," in English with Spainsh sub-titles. It took us a while to realize we were the ony ones hysterical - there is a cultural difference.

Huh - not so easy .. I was pretty fanatic about it for a while! :-)

You really gotta depend on the festivals to see movies from countries like Croatia or Serbia. I mean, Kusturica's movies (Underground, Black Cat White Cat) played in the art house cinemas for a long time of course; Perfect Circle was in the local art house cinema, Before the Rain was, too; and the one LightWizard mentioned, No One's Land. I think thats about the sum total of (Ex-)Yugoslav films that played in any cinema here in Utrecht in the past ten years, more or less. :-(

But - festivals help. Annual film festival in Rotterdam, annual documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Usually dont have the money for 'em, but went often enough to pick up some stuff like this. Often feature short films and student films too. There was also a festival of Croatian films doing the rounds some four years back (hence those three movies), and the cultural/debate centre De Balie in Amsterdam had an Albanian festival after the Kosovo war. All in all it may sound like a lot, but we're talking a ten-year span here, and four cities. The two Zhilnik films I saw at the Central European University when I was an exchange student in Budapest.

You gotta take it where you can find it ... ;-)



Yeh, I had the same seeing Jackie Brown for the second time in Prague. They never laughed!

Oh, there's one more movie I've got to mention, even tho it wasnt from or about the former Yugoslavia, just nearby. It was a short film (just 25 mins), called "Intervista, quelques mots pour le dire". It's made by this young Albanian woman, who studies film in Paris, I believe - who's lived there, with her mother, for years - and who, one day, finds some film, some old footage. It shows her mother, in 1970s Albania - with Hoxha himself.

The woman uses this film to find out the whole story - kinda like with Frozen Stories, in my post above - except in this movie, the mother is still alive and well, an intelligent, lively woman - the prototype kind of woman that my mother and her friends were, in fact: modern, idealistic, enthusiastic, kind, ambitious - sane. And yet there was that bit of footage, and the whole scary idolatry and mass-indoctrination of perhaps the world's second most isolated and totalitarian communist system ever that went with it, and the stories of former colleagues who went to camps - and the daughter's implicit questions of why, and how, how could she have gotten into the position that would have gotten her onto that footage?

There's no confrontation between the two, though - just boundless curiosity of the daughter, and a kind of reticent giving in to self-reflection on the mother's part as the daughter, the filmmaker, returns from visits to Albania with interviews and stories. And you cant help but love them, both. What shocked me most about this movie - it's just 25 mins or so - was just how much that mother was like mine - - my mother could have been there, and done that - you know? It was closer to home than 99% of Dutch movies I've seen - and yet, this is about a country that 9 out of 10 Western reports succeed only in explaining from the "primitive Balkan mountain warrior people" perspective.

I found a place online to buy it, but its incredibly expensive ... I'm pretty sure I will never see it again :-(

I miss the old movie houses that ran older movies; I think they called them revival houses.

The Fox Venice used to show a different pair of films each night, for little money. If we went four nights in a row, of course we saw eight movies, many of them wonderful, and the pairings often very thoughtful.

That place in its heyday spoiled me for movie going in my new area now.

Some good choices here.
Personally, I've always loved "The Conformist". Bertolucci (sp? ) at his best. A tale of how small compromises can lead to much graver (political) ones. Great story, terrific acting & ravishing visually.

Another that I really liked was not really a "foreign" film, but more about the experience of another culture, very different to one's own, & how it can change you: Zorba The Greek. Brilliant in beautiful black & white!

Osso and Msolga -- San Antonio public radio and a local movie theater have joined forces to create a revival house with special deals for members of public radio. I haven't been (I listen to SA public radio, but the city itself is a ways off...), but it strikes me as a very nifty idea.

A list of good films, nimh, but unilaterial literally means one-sided. Even without U.N. approval, it's still stretching the meaning of unilateral. I was merely offering that film as other evidence that in some way the U.N. had always been involved there and still is. It's always going to be a debatable point.

And it's not that I think the Bush Administration had in any way a viable coalition of countries that weren't suckered into participation.