0856 – Sorstalanság / Fateless (2005)

timespace coordinates: World War II Hungary / Auschwitz / Buchenwald

Fateless (Hungarian: Sorstalanság) is a Hungarian film directed by Lajos Koltai, released in 2005. It is based on the semi-autobiographical novel Fatelessness by the Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertész, who also wrote the screenplay. It tells the story of a teenage boy who is sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The film’s music was composed by Ennio Morricone, and one of its songs was sung by Lisa Gerrard. The film is one of the most expensive movies ever produced in Hungary, with a cost of $12 million. (wiki)

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838 – BlacKkKlansman (2018)

timespace coordinates: 1972 Colorado Springs, Colorado

BlacKkKlansman is a 2018 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Spike Lee and written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, and Lee, based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. The film stars John David Washington as Stallworth, along with Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, and Topher Grace. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The film was theatrically released in the United States on August 10, 2018, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally. (wiki)

historical accuracy   /   Blaxploitation   /   imdb

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This film contains clips from D. W. Griffith‘s silent movie The Birth of a Nation. While Spike Lee was a student at NYU Film School, he was so outraged that his NYU Film School professors taught The Birth of a Nation (1915) with no mention of its racist message or role in the Klan’s twentieth-century rebirth that he made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) as a response. The film so offended many of his professors that Lee was nearly expelled from NYU. He was ultimately saved by a faculty vote. (read more: trivia)

1915

813 – American Pop (1981)

timespace coordinates: 1890s – 1970’s New York City – Kansas – California

American Pop is a 1981 American adult animated musical drama film starring Ron Thompson and produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi. It was the fourth animated feature film to be presented in Dolby sound. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music in the 20th century.

The majority of the film’s animation was completed through rotoscoping, a process in which live actors are filmed and the subsequent footage is used for animators to draw over. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media including water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage. (wiki)

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745 – Aferim! (2015)

timespace coordinates: 1835 Wallachia

Aferim! (English: Bravo!) is a 2015 Romanian drama/western film directed by Radu Jude. The film is set in Wallachia in the early 19th century, when a local gendarme, Costandin, is hired by Iordache, a boyar, to find Carfin, a Gypsy slave who had run away from the boyar’s estate after having an affair with his wife, Sultana. Aferim! (2015) is only the second Romanian film to address the Roma slavery, which existed in Wallachia for almost 500 years until 1856. (The first one was the silent film Fata tigani in dormitor (1923). It has apparently been lost, with only a few stills surviving.)

The story is fictional, but director Radu Jude said in the NY Times (Sept. 8, 2015) that he drew on the historical record. Before shooting began, he held a script reading with 20 historians and made adjustments in response to their input.Publication The Hollywood Reporter describes Radu Jude’s film as “a harsh lesson of history, relieved by overlooked humor and classic Western elements”. Variety magazine writes that Aferim! is “an exceptional and extremely intelligent insight into a crucial period of history, a film equally inspired and furious” (wiki)

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744 – Scarred Hearts / Inimi cicatrizate (2016)

timespace coordinates: 1937  Tekirghiol  Romania

“Scarred Hearts” is inspired by Romanian author Max Blecher‘s novel, which is set in 1937. It centers on Emanuel, a man in his early 20s, who spends his days at a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast, suffering from bone tuberculosis. Falling in love with another patient, he narrates his and his fellow patients’ attempts to live life to the full as their bodies slowly wither but their minds refuse to give in. Blecher wrote the text, hailed as a masterpiece on publication in Romania in 1939, as autobiographical notes before he died, after 10 years of suffering, at the age of 29.

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0740 – Mary Magdalene (2018)

timespace coordinates: Judea, 33 AD.

Mary Magdalene is a 2018 biblical drama film about the woman of the same name, written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett and directed by Garth Davis. It stars Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tahar Rahim. It is the last film score completed by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson before his death.

Mary Magdalene, starring Rooney Mara as the titular character, sought to reverse the centuries-old portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute, while also combating the conspiracy claims of her being Jesus’s wife or sexual partner. Instead, the film portrays her as Jesus’s closest disciple and the only one who truly understands his teachings. This portrayal is partially based on the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The film, which described as having a “strongly feminist bent”, was praised for its music score and cinematography, its surprising faithfulness to the Biblical narrative, and its acting, but was criticized as slow-moving, overwritten, and too solemn to be believable. 

imdb   /    liberation theology

0738 – 1945 (2017)

timespace coordinates: Hungarian village, 12 August 1945

1945 is a 2017 Hungarian drama film directed by Ferenc Török and co-written by Török and Gábor T. Szántó.

On a sweltering August day in 1945, villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk’s son. Meanwhile, two Orthodox Jews arrive at the village train station with mysterious boxes labeled “fragrances.” (rt)

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