0317 – Sunshine (1999)

spacetime coordinates:  late 19th century > mid-20th century Hungary

Sunshine is a 1999 historical drama film directed by István Szabó and written by Israel Horovitz and Szabó. It follows five generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, originally named Sonnenschein (German: “sunshine”), later changed to Sors (Hungarian: “fate”), during changes in Hungary, focusing mostly on the three generations from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. The family story traverses the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through to the period after the 1956 Revolution, while the characters are forced to surrender much of their identity and endure family conflict. The central male protagonist of all three generations is portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. The film’s stars include Rachel Weisz and John Neville, with the real-life daughter and mother team of Jennifer Ehle and Rosemary Harris playing the same character across a six-decade storyline.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145503/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(1999_film)

315 – Hannah Arendt (2012)

spacetime coordinates: 1961 New York // Israel

Hannah Arendt is a 2012 German-Luxembourgish-French biographical drama film directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa. The film centers in the life of German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. The film centers on Arendt’s response to the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered for The New Yorker. Her writing on the trial became controversial for its depiction of both Eichmann and the Jewish councils, and for its introduction of Arendt’s now-famous concept of “the banality of evil“.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1674773/

295 – Vals Im Bashir (2008)

spacetime coordinates: 1982 Lebanon War

Waltz with Bashir (Hebrew: ואלס עם באשיר‎‎, translit. Vals Im Bashir) is a 2008 Israeli animated war documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.

Artist David Polonsky is right handed, but did most of the illustration for this film with his left hand, as he felt that his original drawing were ‘too pretty. The comics medium, in particular Joe Sacco, the novels Catch-22, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, and Slaughterhouse-Five, and painter Otto Dix were mentioned by Folman and art director David Polonsky as influences on the film. The film itself was adapted into a graphic novel in 2009.

The original soundtrack was composed by minimalist electronic musician Max Richter

The film is officially banned in Lebanon.

In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old IDF infantry soldier. In 2006, he meets with a friend from that period, who tells him of the nightmares he’s having connected to his experiences from the Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find that he recalls nothing from that period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the reality of which he is unable to clearly recall. In his memory, he and his soldier comrades are bathing at night by the seaside in Beirut under the light of flares descending over the city…

imdb       wikipedia

205 – The Physician (2013)

spacetime coordinates: 11th-century England >  Persia

The Physician (German: Der Medicus) is a 2013 German adventure film based on the novel of the same name by Noah Gordon. The film focuses on an orphan from an 11th-century English town whose mother died of a mysterious illness. The boy vows to study medicine and decides to travel to Persia.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2101473/

147 – The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 1939 – 1945 Warsaw, Poland

The Zookeeper’s Wife is a 2017 war drama film directed by Niki Caro and written by Angela Workman, based on Diane Ackerman’s non-fiction book The Zookeeper’s Wife, (which relied heavily on the diaries of Antonina Żabińska, published in Poland as Ludzie i zwierzęta translated as: People and Animals 1968)., recounting the rescue of Jews from the Nazi invasion. The film stars Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Michael McElhatton and Daniel Brühl.

wiki, imdb

0109 – Europa (1991)

spacetime coordinates: 1940’s  US-occupied Germany

Europa (known as Zentropa in North America) is a 1991 Danish art drama film directed by Lars von Trier. It is von Trier’s third theatrical feature film and the final film in his Europa trilogy following The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987). Europa was influenced by Franz Kafka‘s Amerika, and the title was chosen “as an echo” of that novel.

A young, idealistic American hopes to “show some kindness” to the German people soon after the end of World War II. In US-occupied Germany, he takes on work as a sleeping car conductor for the Zentropa railway network, falls in love with a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a pro-Nazi terrorist conspiracy.

Europa employs an experimental style of cinema, combining largely black and white visuals with occasional intrusions of colour having actors interact with rear-projected footage, and layering different images over one another to surreal effect. The voice-over narration uses an unconventional second-person narrative imitative of a hypnotist

The film’s characters, music, dialogue, and plot are self-consciously melodramatic and ironically imitative of film noir conventions.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101829/

070 – In Darkness (2011)

spacetime coordinates: June 1943 – July 1944  Lwów city, Poland

(DISTURBING CONTENT)

In Darkness (Polish: W ciemności) is a 2011 Polish drama film directed by Agnieszka Holland. Dedicated to Marek Edelman, the film is a Polish-German-Canadian coproduction, with a screenplay by Canadian writer David F. Shamoon. In Darkness is based on the book In the Sewers of Lvov (1990) by Robert Marshall. The only living survivor of the group, Krystyna Chiger, has written a memoir of her experience, The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow (2008), which was published too late to be a source

Based on true events during German occupation of Poland, the film tells a story of Leopold Socha, a sewer worker in the then Polish city of Lwów (taken after World War II by the Soviet Union, and now part of Ukraine), who used his knowledge of the city’s sewer system to shelter a group of Jews escaped from Lwów’s ghetto during the German extermination of Jewish people.

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imdb

wiki

“‘These were terrible times’: the true story behind In Darkness”