games

1821 – Gorogoa (2017 video game)

Gorogoa is an elegant evolution of the puzzle genre, told through a beautifully hand-drawn story designed and illustrated by Jason Roberts. Winner of Debut Game at the 2018 BAFTA Games Awards, as well as Best Mobile Game and the Innovation Award at the GDC 2018 Choice Awards.



Gorogoa has the player manipulate images placed in a two-by-two grid, exploring within each image as well as placing or stacking images relative to others, to solve puzzles. Through the puzzles, the player guides a boy as they encounter a strange monster among a landscape that becomes war-ravaged and then rebuilt. The boy grows older and ends up as an old man reflecting on his past. The game, solely developed by Roberts, started as a failed attempt at an interactive graphic novel, and took nearly six years to complete.

Roberts cites David RobertsGustave DoréChristopher Manson, and Chris Ware as influences to his art style. Roberts also stated that his was indirectly influenced by Byzantine art, due to travels to Istanbul and other similar locations. Roberts found such two-dimensional art challenged him of how to explore that within three dimensional spaces within his puzzles.  (wiki)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (Windows, MINIMUM): OS: Windows XP SP2, Processor: 1 GHz, Memory: 512 MB RAM, Graphics: GeForce 6 or Radeon X1000, DirectX: Version 9.0c, Storage: 680 MB available space


series

1818 – Fargo, season 4 (2020)

timespace coordinates: 1950 – 1951,  Kansas City, Missouri

The fourth season of Fargo, an American anthology black comedy–crime drama television series created by Noah Hawley, premiered on September 27, 2020, on FX and concluded on November 29, 2020. It consisted of 11 episodes.

As an anthology, each Fargo season possesses its own self-contained narrative, following a disparate set of characters in various settings and eras, albeit in a connected shared universe centered on the Midwestern United States and the titular city of Fargo, North Dakota.

The fourth season is set in November 1950 in Kansas City, Missouri and follows two crime syndicates as they vie for control. The cast is led by Chris Rock, who plays Loy Cannon, the head of a crime syndicate made up of black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South who have a contentious relationship with a fictionalized portrayal of the Kansas City mafia. Other cast members include Jessie BuckleyJason SchwartzmanBen Whishaw, and Jack Huston. (wiki)

imdb   /   rt  /   ‘Outlaws’|Teaser


<< 0997 – Fargo (1996)   /   0996 – Fargo (TV Series 2014– )

documentary, movies

1762 – The Dig (2021)

timespace coordinates: Suffolk, in the east of England, 1939 – excavation of Sutton Hoo

The Dig (stylized as the DIG) is a drama film directed by Simon Stone, based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, It stars Carey MulliganRalph FiennesLily JamesJohnny FlynnBen ChaplinKen Stott, Archie Barnes and Monica Dolan

Edith May Pretty was an English landowner on whose land the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered after she hired Basil Brown, a local archaeologist, to find out if anything lay beneath the mounds on her property. 

imdb   /  wiki   /   archive footage   /   Sutton Hoo – BBC Documentary (youtube)   /  Smarthistory

animation, movies, Uncategorized

1747 – Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

timespace coordinates: August 1943 Auckland, New Zealand > Samoa

Shadow in the Cloud is a 2020 American-New Zealand fantasy adventure action film directed by Roseanne Liang, from a screenplay by Liang and Max Landis. It stars Chloë Grace MoretzTaylor John SmithNick RobinsonBeulah Koale and Callan Mulvey. Its plot deals with a World War II air force service woman who is on a mysterious mission, only to have a gremlin attack the bomber she is riding on. (wiki)

imdb   /   rottentomatoes


The animated segment at the beginning of the film is based on Private Snafu, a series of adult-oriented instructional shorts meant to educate enlisted personnel on army discretion, hygiene, combat readiness and daily life. They were produced between 1943 and 1945, and given they were not meant to be public, were free from censorship restrictions. The title character, parodied in the film, come from the military acronym “Situation Normal All Fucked Up”.


documentary, Uncategorized

1723 – Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018)

Stanisław Szukalski (13 December 1893 – 19 May 1987) was a Polish (self-taught) sculptor and painter who became a part of the Chicago Renaissance. In 1930s Poland he enjoyed fame as a nationalist sculptor. He also developed the pseudoscientifichistorical theory of Zermatism, positing that all human culture was derived from post-deluge Easter Island and that humankind was locked in an eternal struggle with the Sons of Yeti (“Yetinsyny”), the offspring of Yeti and humans.

Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski is a 2018 documentary film directed by Irek Dobrowolski, written by Stephen Cooper and Irek Dobrowolski and starring Stanislav Szukalski, Glenn Bray and Robert Williams. (wiki)

imdb

documentary, Uncategorized

1693 – סטאלגים Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel (2008 documentary)

2008 documentary film produced by Barak Heymann and directed by Ari Libsker.

Stalag (Hebrew: סטאלג‎) was a short-lived genre of Nazi exploitation Holocaust pornography in Israel that flourished in the 1950s and early 1960s, and stopped after the time of the Eichmann Trial, because of a ban by the Israeli government.[1] These books did not include Jews to avoid taboos. They are no longer available for a reading today in terms of traditional publication, although the advent of the Internet has allowed for peer-to-peer file sharing.

The books emerged from the culture of silence that surrounded the Holocaust, especially in Israel, until the Eichmann trial. Many young people lived in the shadow of these events, but could find no answers to their inevitable questions, whether from their parents or their teachers. For most of adolescents, the only[dubious – discuss] answers they could find were in the book House of Dolls (1955) a novella by K. Tzetnik, a then-anonymous survivor of Auschwitz who wrote about women prisoners forced into prostitution by the Nazi guards. Although published as fiction, the book has been considered a partially truthful account based upon the experiences of the author’s sister. (Wikipedia entry on Stalags)

In 2003, the genre re-entered public debate in Israel with the research of popular culture analyst Eli Eshed

Thanks to Robert Schilling for recommending.

movies

1680 – Sobibor (2018)

timespace coordinates: The film is based on a real story that happened in 1943 in the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. The main character of the movie is the Jewish-Soviet soldier Alexander Pechersky, who at that time was serving in the Red Army as a lieutenant. In October 1943, he was captured by the Nazis and deported to the Sobibor death camp, where Jews were being exterminated in gas chambers. In just three weeks, Pechersky was able to plan an international uprising of prisoners from Poland and Western Europe. This uprising led to the largest escape of prisoners from a Nazi death camp.

Sobibor (Russian: Собибор) is a 2018 Russian war drama film co-written, directed by and starring Konstantin Khabensky. The picture also stars Christopher Lambert and was released on 3 May 2018 in Russia. (wiki)

The uprising   /  Aftermath   /  imdb