The seventh feature by English filmmaker Sally Potter, who made the gorgeous Orlando (1992), The Tango Lesson is a brilliant musical. The film draws on three of Potter’s passions: humanity, film, and dance. With its self-reflexivity, as Sally the character goes about making a film which in effect becomes The Tango Lesson, the film recalls […]
Daily Archives: June 16, 2007
As in her earlier Do zan (Two Women, 1999), in Tahmineh Milani’s Vakonesh panjom Niki Karimi plays a woman named Fereshteh who represents socially and politically oppressed Iranian womanhood. This is a better film. Fereshteh has just been widowed. Her “first reaction,” then, is grief. The film opens with her at a restaurant with four […]
The Man by the Shore is about Haiti, where its maker, Raoul Peck, served briefly as Minister of Cultural Affairs until he resigned in 1997. Peck himself was born in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, in 1953, but he and his family, fleeing the dictatorship of François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier, moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic […]
Below is an old e-mail that I sent friends a few years back, retrieved for me by one of its recipients: Distracted by the unhappy news that that dreadful Crash is Oscar-bound, I forgot to do two things: wish you all a happy Friday the Thirteenth, with all the gore your dripping hearts desire, and […]
September 11. On that day in 1973, a violent coup d’état took place in Chile, backed by the pathological U.S. presidency of Richard Nixon and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and Allende, abandoned by Leftist supporters attending to their […]
Dennis Grunes 