CLASS Connections Template

Cinema Across Cultures
59.374

Tentative list of films to be screened:

1. Sept 5: Kolya
2. Sept 12: Divided We Fall
3. Sept 19: Nowhere in Africa
4. Sept 26: Lamerica
5. Oct 3: Before the Rain
6. Oct 17: Prisoner of the Mountains
7. Oct 24: No Man's Land
8. Oct 31: Dirty Pretty Things
9. Nov 7: East is East
10. Nov 14: Times of the Gypsies
11. Nov. 21: Journey of Hope
12. Nov. 28: In America
13. Dec. 5: L'Auberge espagnole
December 12: Final Take-Home

Mapping the European Mind

The spirit of Europe, or the European mind, has become quite a fashionable topic lately. What is it? Does such a thing even exist, or is it a fiction, like one of those ideal objects Russell was trying to get rid of in philosophy ? the present king of France, or the president of Great Britain - descriptions that denote nothing, and which therefore render any proposition that includes them false. What about the European mind? It seems to be present everywhere and yet invisible.

In 1993, the open unified market will be an irrefutable and incontrovertible reality. I teach in the United States, where people feel quite uneasy about that prospect, which will turn Europe into the largest consumers' market in the world. In France, when I returned in the summer of 1988, after the presidential elections and a campaign which had given rise to much discussion about Europe, it was easy to notice that everyone had suddenly become painfully aware of the 1993 deadline. We are all worried by the implications of the single market for our jobs and daily lives. Every profession is hastening to become more competitive, to modernise and rationalise: banks, insurance, as well as all the culture industry. One implication of this obvious and deep anxiety is that Europe, which has until now been consistently boring, seems to arouse passion. Europe had to do with agriculture, quotas, demonstrations in Brussels. Whenever the evening news in France came to a European topic, people would turn their TVs off. That was before zapping. What a bore! And how arcane! Now, and this is striking, Europe is a very concrete project, perhaps even too concrete, and will soon become a blunt reality. Monsieur Giscard d'Estaing said during the campaign for the European elections of 1989 that there was one chance out of three that Europe would fail in the next few years. You would not launch a rocket under such odds.

Let us assume Europe will exist in 1993. But what is it in our heads, our French, Greek, British heads? If the nation-states that originated during the Renaissance and reached their climax during the nineteenth century undoubtedly remain the fundamental reality, politically, historically, as well as culturally, what could we call 'Europeanity', or 'Europeanness'? I am sorry for the neologisms, which are meant to convey an idea of Europe, or some sort of European identity, common for instance to the countries which signed the Helsinki agreements in 1975, at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is as close as one can get to a political definition of Europe. The conference included the members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, neutral countries like Sweden and Austria, and even Switzerland, some miniature states like the Vatican, San Marino, Lichtenstein, as well as the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta. Only Albania and Andorra, it seems, were missing. Now, what could they have i common apart from the certitude that Europe would be the first region of the world to be obliterated in case of a nuclear war? This paper was prepared before the upheavals in Eastern Europe during the summer and fall of 1989, which might render the idea of the single market obsolete even before it is implemented. In any case, if no idea of Europe does exist, it is urgent to invent one, so that Europe, whatever it becomes, will not find itself against culture. You will note: (1) that my perspective is not limited to the Common Market, and (2) that, albeit sceptical, my standpoint on Europeanness is not nostalgic

Pierre Larousse, the founder of the publishing house, and the author of the well-known Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century, wrote under the entry Europe: 'Europe is something only as long as it is called France, England, Russia, Austria, Prussia, Spain, etc. Here the particular prevails over the general. It could not be the same with America, Asia, Africa, the South Sea Islands; there, the general prevails over the particular.' One will certainly be quick to react against Larousse, this enlightened Republican who wrote under the entry on Bonaparte in his dictionary: 'born on Ajaccio in 1769, died in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, on the 18th of Brumaire, year VIII of the French Republic, one and indivisible.' But his definition of Europe would be typical of the ethnocentrism and Europeo-centrism that served as the necessary ideological basis for the colonisation of those other continents devoid of particularities. What is this generality that reigns outside Europe but a tabula rasa waiting for civilization? That is not, however, the point I want to make, and the New York Times correspondent, Flora Lewis, in her recent book, Europe: A Tapestry of Nations, still sways between the two paths outlined by Larousse: 'I have tried to show', she says, 'that there is such a place as Europe, such a thing as European, even though the moment you approach to look more closely it breaks up into kaleidoscopic fragments.' She has spent many years in Europe, but her view should remain that of an outsider, and there is no doubt that for an outsider such a thing as a European unity, generality, or identity exists beyond the complexity of the cultures and the picturesque of the landscapes. Before the Second World War, Greeks travelling to Paris or Berlin said that they were going to Europe. And now o course Greece is paradoxically a member of the Common Market. The Jews of Morocco or Tunisia also used the phrase 'going to Europe when they left North Africa. And what about the trip through Europe any self-respecting American college kid will feel bound to take: London, Paris, Rome, Madrid in ten days? Will he get a sense of unity or complexity? Seen from abroad, from America, Asia, Africa, Australia, without its particularities being lost, Europe exists. As a matter o fact, it is most often in the 'Travel' section of the New York Times that Europe is mentioned, and seldom in the main one. But, and this is why I cited Larousse's standpoints on Europe and Napoléon, Europe is not a continent but a peninsula, the western tip of Eurasia and an archipelago of diversities, where all imperial dreams historically failed What can the culture of an archipelago be like? Europeans do not believe in Europe, but those who do not have it miss it and long for it - I hardly exaggerate. This sounds like the conventional definition of the object of desire that nobody ever possesses.

Europe, as I said, is that part of the world that would most likely disappear first in the event of a nuclear war. What would then be obliterated? Only particularities? Or a civilisation? A culture, in the German or English sense of a set of values, rituals, observances pertaining to a distinctive social community? What I called a spirit, a Geist, that is, a Europe of non-identity, altogether international and local, as opposed to a Europe of nationalities. The spirit of Europe as such, in the sense of a consciousness, cannot in any case be of long standing, but its late advent should not mask the simultaneity of an important number of major movements, in the political, economic religious, and intellectual orders, the European dimension of which is beyond all question. The French essayist Julien Benda, in his Discourse to the European Nation of 1933, mentioned the crusades and the revolutions, the colonisations, the Reformation, the advent of class struggle. But, as Benda concluded, “all these European movements did strictly nothing for the unity of Europe. Why? Because Europe, in achieving them, was not aware of them as European; because the people of Europe were subject to the community of their interests lived the identity of their feelings, but did not perceive them as such.” It is in part this failure to recognise the Europeanness of our past that ought to be overcome in order to appreciate what is the present state of the European consciousness and what future it can lay claim to.

My attempt at defining Europeanness is not antiquarian or archaeological. But I would like to be historical, as feel the need to rethink past and present phenomena in the terms of their European coincidence. It is also necessary to catch up with the most recent movements, in art and society. There is, however, an obvious trap one should avoid falling into: the danger that the mapping out of the idea of Europe will turn into an apology, in fact erecting its tombstone and burying it under the commonplaces of humanism. Is the European idea liberty, democracy, literacy, style? Europe invented the individual; it also invented the death of the individual. Europe invented humanism; it also invented crimes against humanity. We should not forget the vicious and nasty Europe that has been frozen by forty years of Cold War. But there is no reason either to take the blame for everything that went wrong. The European idea should lead to a survey of its problematical topoi, loci, or places, its conflicting, controversial, paradoxical haunts. Mapping out the spirit of Europe is also and by necessity doubting it.

In the following remarks, I will offer a brief survey of the loci of Europeanness. As with all classification, it has some arbitrariness, but it tries to invent objects that cross nationalities, and their conflicts and exchanges. Far from pulling out of the encyclopedia what could be labelled European, or praising a defunct Europe - the one, as I said, of liberty, progress, toleration, those belated icons - the challenge lies in conceiving some exemplary places of European consciousness in the 1990s, places that are grounded historically and have a modern or post-modern aura.

It seems to me - and I rely here on the work I have done with Jacques Seebacher for the preparation of a volume on European culture - that they can be searched for in three main fields, which I will briefly outline. (1) The major references, the historical and geographical landmarks that stand out in the present representation that Europeans have of Europe. In a word, the emblems which constitute the time and space of the Europeans. (2) The few concepts that contribute to a European mentality, be it political, economic, religious, social, etc. That is, the notions which describe the mind of Europe. (3) The aesthetic values that govern European taste. That is, the tastes that have shaped a European style in the arts. Of course, in all the above, there is some confusion between what is European culture and what pertains to Western civilisation at large. It also seems crucial to distinguish between what is European by its origins, and what can be presently called European. With all these implicit criticisms in mind, let me none the less proceed and give some examples of how a topic of Europe could be sketched.

With regard to the direction I mentioned first, that of the European representation of time and space, the aim would be to achieve neither a chronology nor an atlas, but a mapping out of major symbolic landmarks. Proceedin with a survey of the ten most important dates in that perspective, one would come up with a list. Without producing the distinctive entries, one could simply say that it would include definitions of borders between Europe and the East, like 1683, when the Turks were in Vienna, failures of empires, like 843, the treaty of Verdun and the partition of the Carolingian Empire, and diasporas. Those dates would deal with the relations of Europe with its neighhours, its borders, its invaders, as well as events whose supranational repercussion is undeniable. From the viewpoint of geography, the equivalent of those events would be axes of communication, for instance, rivers such as the Rhine, Volga, or Danube, to which the Italian writer Claudio Magris has recently dedicated a volume. Or the Channel, or the line Leipzig-Dresden-Cracow-Kiev, or the North/ South and East/West polarities, present in each nation and which are reproduced at the scale of Europe itself. But a spatio temporal topic should be undermined and include an imaginary dimension: it is clear that Elsinore, for instance, belongs to the European landmarks.

In connection with the European mentality, many recent and valuable historical works - influenced more or less by the Annales school founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Fèbvre - like the History of Private Life, or the History of the City, give us an idea of where to look for a transnational culture. Three orders ought to be taken into consideration, those of the sacred, the civic, and the domestic. The vision that Europe has of its others, and that which the others have of Europe, should be explored. In short, what needs to be done is some sort of anthropology of Europe. Let me just evoke some of those categories of myths that pertain to the European mentality. And why not begin with the body? To put it simply, is there a European body, past and present? Nudity, shame, chastity: what is the range of these taboos and values? Or the individual, already mentioned. Europe, as I said, both invented and abolished it. The individual, as conceived in terms of natural law, is but a moment in Western rationality and is now threatened by genetic engineering. Or otherness, which certainly is one of the crucial categories of the European mind. The Renaissance conception of otherness, in Montaigne and Shakespeare, precedes and prepares the formation of a modern Western consciousness, and already it is from the start filled with ambivalence. Montaigne, who opens himself to the other, is considered a forefather of modern ethnology before Rousseau, but he uses the other to deliver a lesson to his fellow Europeans.

Acknowledging and denying otherness belong to one and the same gesture, which I would tend to judge profoundly European. More generally, each category deemed to be European contains or implies its own negation: like progress, or humanism, or universality. At the root of those negations, doubt, it seems to me, might be the essential European faculty: not only Descartes's hyperbolic doubt, that is, the strength to make a tabula rasa of one's own reason, as has been achieved repeatedly in the history of Western thought and science, but also the doubt which I would call, with Hegel, the moment of 'unhappy consciousness'. We have most often retained from Hegel's Philosopby of Mind the concept of Aufhebung, or sublation, which is the glorification of linear progress and causal history. Few thinkers have insisted, like Nietzsche, on the unending and unbound negation to be found in Hegel, on consciousness as the 'consciousness of its own contradiction', on, so to speak, consciousness as the 'crisis of European consciousness'. As Georges Bataille put it: 'Scandal is the same thing as consciousness: a consciousness without scandal is alienated consciousness - a consciousness, as experience proves, of clear and distinct objects,intelligible, or thought to be so.' I see this acting out of doubt, for instance, in the particular form of European masochism or guilt which is the other side of colonialism and which now leads us to take the blame for everything that went wrong in the world, and to ignore or deny that colonialism was not only destructive. Baudelaire's Héautontimotouménos, or self-tormentor, after Terentius and Swinburne, is a great European figure, alongside Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust: torturing the other, he tortures himself as well. I see also this doubt in melancholy, spleen, ennui, present in all our cultures as the black angel of faith. But to conclude with the European mind on a less sombre note, I should mention civility, or courtliness. Here, I am speaking as a European who has been living for some time overseas, even though in New York, which is in many ways a European outpost somewhere between London or Paris and the Far West, though spiritually much closer to London and Paris. But even in New York, the lack of a courtly tradition is a major element of difference. As a matter of fact, those elements of the European mind that undermine the European mind - doubt, unhappy consciousness, nihilism, melancholy, etc. - can certainly not be found to the same extent in what could be called colonial or transplanted Europe, that is, places like North America, Australia, South Africa, Israel. I offer this as a hypothesis, and I do not mean that some more uncertainty would not be welcome here and there. Now, with courtly manners I feel more confident, as I have seen so many of my American friends radically baffled and put off by a conversation on the Old World, a ritual where one does not care as much about the topic as the talking itself. As Montaigne, a perfect cortegiano and honnête homme, put it, those who think that the pleasure of hunting is in the catch have understood nothing. With courtly life, it is snobbism, distinction, decorum, sprezzatura or désinvolture, which the English 'ease' renders insufficiently, like an unselfconsicous self-consciousness, the oxymoron incarnate, or he supreme dandy, it is all those terms which hardly makes sense outside Europe.

Moving to the third and last area I mentioned above, Europe' aesthetic identity, I can describe it of course in a very conventional ay: as comparative literature has traditionally been understood, that s, the study of cross-cultural influences or the analysis of Western myths. Thus numerous monographies have been devoted to the dissemination of the Gothic or the Enlightenment in Northern or Eastern Europe. I see here two possible escape routes: one would insist on heory, the other on reception. Let me limit the arguments to a few examples. By theory, I mean rhetoric, and I do not restrict it to the great Age of Eloquence. Many figures of a specifically European rhetoric could be evoked, but I shall mention only two which seem central: allegory and blasphemy. Allegory first: when the American critic Paul de Man argued a while ago that allegory was the central trope and topos of literature, he revived an ancient tradition, Greek as well as Judaic and Christian, best encapsulated in Saint Paul's 'The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.' Through allegory, we understand figurative sense, plurality of meaning, the essence itself of literature and art. One should add that allegory is the most general model of access to fiction as such. At its side stands blasphemy. It is the Salman Rushdie affair that made me see it as the guardian angel of allegory, I ean its double, its inseparable companion. In fact, allegory makes blasphemy acceptable. Blasphemy, transgression, satire and parody: from Boccaccio and Rabelais to Proust and Joyce, and probably to rock'n roll, it is the sacred fount of European art.

The second escape route would be reception, that is a history of taste. Here, across the Channel, the best example I can give is Francis Haskell's Rediscoveries in Art, a study of the redistribution and revaluation of the major art collections at the end of the eighteenth century, during the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars. The paintings of the Duke of Orléans, for instance, were sold in London and went to Berlin and Saint Petersburg. Italian and Spanish paintings enriched the Louvre. Haskell argues that this fascinating movement was not favourable to the modern. It remains, however, one of the major esthetic upheavals of European history, and the prelude to the international art market of capitalism. Other examples could be cited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or when the art market became international before the First World War, with cubism and abstraction, or, not to limit myself to a Europe of high culture, when the image was industrialised after the Second World War, or when the music market came global and ignored linguistic barriers. But I shall end here, resisting once again that though conscious of history - history, which I have not mentioned as perhaps the most perverse European invention - my overview is not historical. Europe is present everywhere and yet invisible; the circumference is everywhere and the centre nowhere. We should be wary of a definition that makes it akin to God. That is why I have tried to map out the idea of Europe in such a pedestrian fashion. (Author not recorded). This essay originally appeared in Critical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, Summer 1990.

1. Kolya (1996) - A film directed by Jan Sverak; written (in Czech, with English subtitles) by Zdenek Sverak, based on a story by Pavel Taussig.

Synopsis
When a financially strapped former symphony cellist, now making a meager living by playing at funerals, gets pressured into a paper marriage with a friend's single-mother niece, his roving-eye bachelor life is turned upside-down. The beautiful young woman immediately abandons her new husband and her five-year-old son, and the unlikely duo struggles to adjust to their new lives in Prague on the eve of 1989's Velvet Revolution.
Titbits
Co-produced by Biograf Jan Sverak Pictures (Prague), in association with Czech Television, Lucerna Film, CCV, and Cinemart.
Zdenek Sverak, who wrote and stars in this film, is the father of director Jan Sverak.

Two film reviews:
a) By Janet Maslin
What a Difference a Boy Makes

A charming Czech roue named Frantisek Louka (Zdenek Sverak) leads a life of quiet dissipation. His favorite pursuits are musicianship, skirt-chasing and looking after his elderly mother, not necessarily in that order. Louka's mother is very vocal in her political opinions. The year is 1988, and she thinks the Russian troops occupying her country are locusts.

Imagine how surprised Louka is, then, to find himself the custodian of an angelic little Russian boy. In the radiant ''Kolya,'' a gem of a Czech film directed by Jan Sverak, who is the leading man's son, Louka is wryly transformed by the experience of having to look after this child.

And in the distance he travels between, say, calling up a girlfriend for a tryst and asking the same woman to read a bedtime story in Russian, worlds are bridged with gentle pathos and disarming humor. ''Kolya,'' which is named for the child, is mercifully unsentimental in describing the subtle, bittersweet ways in which Louka's life is altered.

The senior Mr. Sverak, who has previously written screenplays for Jiri Menzel and others, envisions little Kolya with affection. But it is for himself that he has created the film's most beguiling role. Louka, a cellist, has fallen out of grace with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and is now reduced to playing music at funerals, but his nonchalance remains intact. Gruff and sly, a born seducer, he finds work or women wherever they are available without considering the consequences.

The film enjoys his company in the glowing, sophisticated backdrop of an invitingly photographed Prague. Libuse Safrankova, who plays one of Louka's lovers, is quoted as saying in production notes, ''I was happy to accept the part of Klara because I get great pleasure from spending time with pleasant and intelligent people.'' That captures the attractive and civilized tone of this enterprise.

''Kolya,'' a Golden Globe winner and an Academy Award entry, is set in motion when Louka is coaxed into a marriage of convenience. After all, he's a man who seeks out extra work restoring gold-leaf paint on gravestones, so he's open to any reasonable offer. The bride is the niece of his friend and she needs Czech papers, but there are some sticking points. For one thing, she's Russian; for another, she has a little son.

After staging the nuptials in the knowing, rueful style that makes ''Kolya'' so appealing, the younger Mr. Sverak leaves Louka with his new responsibilities. The wife vanishes almost immediately and the boy remains, an adorable little alien invader who brightens every time he sees a Russian soldier. It's hard to know which is more dismaying for Louka, trying to persuade his mother that the child is Yugoslav (she isn't fooled) or feeling a tiny hand clutching his as Kolya crosses the street. Louka appears proud to have no paternal instincts at all.

''Kolya,'' [..] indulges in light comedy when the little boy, played enchantingly by Andrej Chalimon, interrupts one of Louka's seductions, or when Louka denounces the child as an expansionist and scoundrel as he bends down to tie Kolya's shoes. In the midst of such mock hostility and blossoming affection, the film seems all set to celebrate a simplistic triumph of love over hard political realities. But ''Kolya,'' in its gentle way, is too wise and wordly for that. (Published January 24, 1997)

b) By Desson Howe, Washington Post Staff Writer

'Kolya': Czech Mates

"Kolya," the Czech Republic’s Academy Award entry for Best Foreign Picture, is a sweet, sentimental sodacarbonated almost exclusively for international audiences. It mixes its formula well, using all the tried-and-true staples we have come to expect in small European films. There are some assured visual touches, a staple of any Czech film. The story, about the newfound friendship between an aging cellist and a young Russian boy, is touching to the point of being over-endearing. It relies frequently on lush music and transitional shots of the beautiful Czech countryside. And naturally, the movie fuses the personal with the political.

On the eve of the Soviet collapse (although the characters have no inkling of this), Frantisek Louka (Zdenek Sverak, who also scripted the movie) is trying to eke out a living as a musician. The 55-year-old cellist, formerly with the August Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, now performs at funerals, mostly at the city crematorium. He’s strapped for cash, but he’s not hurting for part-time liaisons. The confirmed bachelor regularly fills his empty moments with married women.

Louka’s life changes when a friendly gravedigger called Mr. Broz (Ondrez Vetchy) makes him an illicit offer. Mr. Broz’s Russian niece, Nadezhda (Irena Livanova), needs a quickie marriage for political reasons. He’s prepared to pay Louka a decent sum. After some deliberation, Louka agrees to the union. He needs rent money. He’d like to buy a used car. And it doesn’t hurt that his aspiring bride is pretty. She speaks no Czech, he’s no good with Russian, but the couple goes through the motions: a wedding ceremony, with invited guests.

Without warning, Louka’s new wife (now carrying Czech papers) escapes to West Germany to be with her real lover. To fool the authorities, she leaves her 5-year-old son Kolya (Andrej Chalimon) in the care of his grandmother. But the old woman unexpectedly dies, leaving Louka with a shy boy who doesn’t know a word of his language.

Louka tries to maintain his old lifestyle, but Kolya (who shares Louka’s only bed) needs a full-time parent. Kolya, who needs schooling, feeding and his temperature taken when he’s sick, gradually takes over the cellist’s life. Louka is also plagued by the police who are very suspicious about his bogus marriage.

Predictably, the surrogate parent becomes attached to his charge -- right around the time local authorities are threatening to return the motherless boy to the Soviet Union. Louka, suddenly in trouble with the state, decides to take drastic measures.

"Kolya" isn’t a fantastic movie, by any stretch. But it’s appealing, thanks to Sverak’s subtle performance (he suggests a Central European Sean Connery) and some wonderful cinematic moments: There’s a beautiful opening shot high up in the clouds, taken from an airplane window, and a marvelous, semi-surrealistic moment when the sleeping boy imagines he can see a wooden top spinning on his bedroom ceiling. But screenwriter Sverak and his son Jan, who directed the picture, are clearly capable of deeper, more interesting subjects than this. Their movie, which ends with the Velvet Revolution of 1989, is designed to evoke tears, laughter and, the filmmakers hope, the Oscar. But it’s certainly not designed to break any new ground. (Published February 7, 1997)

A note on the "Velvet Revolution" - Radio Prague's History Online

During the second half of the 1980s, the general situation in Czechoslovakia became more easygoing, especially after the introduction of Perestroika reforms in the then-Soviet Union. But the Czechoslovak leadership - still headed by Gustav Husak, who had assumed power after the Soviet Invasion of 1968 - was leery of movements intended to "reform communism from within" and continued to toe a hard line in Czechoslovakia, much to the chagrin of Mikhail Gorbacev. But by 1988 there were organized demonstrations demanding change - and just about one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism in Czechoslovakia became a casualty as well.

The six-week period between November 17 and December 29, 1989, also known as the "Velvet Revolution" brought about the bloodless overthrow of the Czechoslovak communist regime. Almost immediately, rumors (which have never been proved) began to circulate that the impetus for the Velvet Revolution had come from a KGB provocateur sent by Gorbacev, who wanted reform rather than hardline communists in power. The theory goes that the popular demonstrations went farther than Gorbacev and the KGB had intended. In part because of this, the Czechs do not like the term "Velvet Revolution," preferring to call what happened "the November Events" or - sometimes - just "November". But we digress.

It all started on November 17, 1989 - fifty years to the day that Czech students had held a demonstration to protest the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. On this anniversary, students in the capital city of Prague were again protesting an oppressive regime.

The protest began as a legal rally to commemorate the death of Jan Opletal, but turned instead into a demonstration demanding democratic reforms. Riot police stopped the students (who were making their way from the Czech National Cemetery at Vysehrad to Wenceslas Square) halfway in their march, in Narodni trida. After a stand-off in which the students offered flowers to the riot police and showed no resistance, the police began beating the young demonstrators with night sticks. In all, at least 167 people were injured. One student was reportedly beaten to death, and - although this was later proved false - this rumor served to crystallize support for the students and their demands among the general public. In a severe blow to the communists' morale, a number of workers' unions immediately joined the students' cause.

From Saturday, November 18, until the general strike of November 27, mass demonstrations took place in Prague, Bratislava, and elsewhere - and public discussions instead of performances were held in Czechoslovakia' theaters. During one of these discussions, at the Cinoherni Klub theater on Sunday, November 19, the Civic Forum (OF) was established as the official "spokesgroup" for "the segment of the Czechoslovak public which is ever more critical of the policy of the present Czechoslovak leadership."

The Civic Forum, led by the then-dissident Vaclav Havel, demanded the resignation of the Communist government, the release of prisoners of conscience, and investigations into the November 17 police action. A similar initiative - the Public Against Violence (VPN) - was born in Slovakia on November 20, 1989. Both of them were joined en masse by Czechoslovak citizens - from university students and staff to workers in factories and employees of other institutions. It took about 2 weeks for the nation's media to begin broadcasting reports of what was really going on in Prague, and in the interim students travelled to cities and villages in the countryside to rally support outside the capital.

The leaders of the Communist regime were totally unprepared to deal with the popular unrest, even though communist regimes throughout the region had been wobbling and toppling around them for some time.

As the mass demonstrations continued - and more and more Czechoslovaks supported the general strikes that were called - an extraordinary session of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee was called. The Presidium of the Communist Party resigned, and a relatively unknown Party member, Karel Urbanek, was elected as the new Communist Party leader. The public rejected these cosmetic changes, which were intended to give the impression that the Communist Party was being reformed from within as it had been in 1968. The people's dissatisfaction increased.

Massive demonstrations of almost 750,000 people at Letna Park in Prague on November 25 and 26, and the general strike on the 27th were devastating for the communist regime. Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec was forced to hold talks with the Civic Forum, which was led by still- dissident (soon to be President) Vaclav Havel. The Civic Forum presented a list of political demands at their second meeting with Adamec, who agreed to form a new coalition government, and to delete three articles - guaranteeing a leading role in political life for the Czechoslovak Communist Party and for the National Front, and mandating Marxist-Leninist education - from the Constitution. These amendments were unanimously approved by the communist parliament the next day, on November 29, 1989.

Well, the old saying that 'if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile' held true, and the communist capitulation led to increased demands on the part of the demonstrators. A new government was formed by Marian Calfa; it included just nine members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (several of whom actively cooperated with the Civic Forum); two members of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party; two members of the Czechoslovak People's Party; and seven ministers with no party affiliation - all of latter were Civic Forum or Public Against Violence activists.

This new government was named by Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak on December 10. The same evening, he went on television to announce his resignation, and the Civic Forum cancelled a general strike which had been scheduled for the next day.

At the 19th joint session of the two houses of the Federal Assembly, Alexandr Dubcek - who had led the ill-fated Prague Spring movement in the 1960's - was elected Speaker of the Federal Assembly. One day later, the parliament elected the Civic Forum's leader, Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia.

Despite their many shortcomings - not the least of which were political inexperience and serious time pressures - the new government and parliament were able to fill in many of the most gaping gaps in the Czechoslovak legal framework - concentrating in particular on the areas of human rights and freedoms, private ownership, and business law. They were also able to lay the framework for the first free elections to be held in Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years.

The results of the 1990 local and parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, which were likened at the time to a referendum which posed the question "Communism, yes or no?" showed a sweeping victory for the soon to be extinct Civic Forum (OF) in the Czech Republic, and for the Public Against Violence (VPN) in Slovakia. In other words, "Communism, no thanks."

The turnout for the local elections was more than 73 percent, and for Parliamentary elections more than 96 percent of the population went to the polls! [...]Vaclav Havel was re-elected as the Czechoslovak President on July 5, 1990.

2. Divided We Fall (2001) - A film by Jan Hrebejk

Essential reading: Absurd Humanism : A Czech film explores human cruelty and the possibility of forgiveness.

By Alan Stone

Divided We Fall is a Czech film about life in a small Bohemian town during the Holocaust. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film—an award given this year to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was made in China but is, by any standard except its subtitles, a Hollywood production. An independent film, Divided We Fall had neither Lee's $15 million budget nor his Matrix-style special effects. It started instead in the trenches of Czech film festivals, made the rounds of the Eastern European festival circuit, and received the coveted invitation to Sundance where it found a commercial distributor.

Success for Divided We Fall was never a sure thing. Like so many film school graduates, the director could not overcome the fad for compulsive technical experimentation. Having limited means, he decided to film some of the night shots at twelve instead of twenty-four frames per second. David (Csongor Kassai) and Marie (Anna Siskova)

This was supposed "to convey a real (wartime) darkness in the street" but instead confused audiences and irked critics. There are other (glitch and kitsch) reasons one might find fault with this "homemade" film, but not only does it succeed as a work of art, it also offers a possibility of hope in times of terror.

Coming back from England where I had been marooned for the week after September 11, I was astonished by the palpable solidarity of the American people. William James, who witnessed the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, had described a similar group psychological phenomenon. But nothing I have lived through myself, not even Pearl Harbor, seemed to generate such a spontaneous collective outpouring of solidarity across the nation. This is not just some archetypal emotion welling up from the evolutionary past of the threatened group, but a new video-mediated ("I see" is the translation for the Latin "video") collective experience. We all saw the horror happen again and again, and came together as a nation.

President Bush announced the troubling side of this national unity: the rest of the world was either for us or against us. Group psychology contains countless demonstrations of how easy it is to divide people into "them against us," and countless historical cases demonstrate how difficult it is to reunite the severed parts. Erik Erickson, the psychologist, described what we do as pseudo-speciation. We make the other into a different species with whom no bond of common humanity can be found, and against whom no weapon is unjustified. As we rallied from the terrorist attack the alien other was defined: Bin Laden—think Hitler!—and the Taliban—think Nazis! —and the bombing of Afghanistan began. Against this backdrop, Divided We Fall offers a story about human frailty, the possibility of a healing aftermath—and, yes, forgiveness.

According to the distributor's publicity release, the film is "based on a true story." Nothing could be further from the truth. Jan Hrebejk and Petr Jarchovsky, friends since high school and classmates at the Prague Film Academy, know little about the Holocaust that is not common knowledge. Their film is based not on a true story but on something better, their Czech wit and imagination.

Hrebejk and Jarchovsky wrote the first script together but couldn't raise enough money to make the film. Jarchovsky then decided to turn it into a novel which has as its central conceit the Christ story with a Jewish Holocaust survivor as the "holy" father of "our Saviour"—a child who symbolizes forgiveness and a new beginning. This profanation may offend people of tradition, whether Jews or Christians. "What Jew wants Christ as the answer to the Holocaust?" asked an Israeli friend after she saw the film. And I very much doubt that the Pope will be inviting these Czechs to the Vatican for a private screening, as he did with Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful, that meretricious, feel-good exploitation of the Holocaust that was showered with awards by the Jerusalem Film Festival and Hollywood. Divided We Fall succeeds in every way that Benigni failed. It overcomes the stereotypes that Life is Beautiful only reinforces. But the Czech film is sacrilege to the true believers of the world. Like all secular humanism it puts its faith not in angels but in mortal, imperfect human beings.

The Christ story in Divided We Fall is not an imposition of some critical interpretation. The husband and wife are named Josef and Marie; the inseminating Jew is named David from whose line the Bible tells us will come the Messiah. Anna Siskova, the Slovakian actress who plays Marie, is repeatedly filmed in front of a painting of the Virgin Mary and in one scene she merges with her "Lady." Like many apocryphal versions of the Christ story, this one makes the husband, Josef (played by Bolek Polivka), incapable of fathering a child. One can understand how the young men had trouble selling the first version of the script.

But in writing the novel Jarchovsky had the opportunity to flesh out the characters and bring depth and nuance to his story. The novel found a publisher and the published novel found a film backer in the Czech State Fund for Cinematography.

Converting the novel back into a script, however, was not without difficulty. The film (originally made for Czech television) ran far too long and had to be cut. As a result, the beginning of the film leaps through time in a montage of scenes. The first shows a chauffeur-driven, vintage automobile (circa 1936) moving along a country road carrying Mr. Wiener, the wealthy Jewish industrialist, his son David (Csongor Kassai) and Josef, then prospering as head of the Wiener's sales division. The chauffeur, Horst (Jaroslav Dusek) will later become a Nazi collaborator. We then leap to 1939, and the Wieners are being evicted from their palatial home and into rooms with Josef and his young wife Marie. A Nazi officer, now in charge of the village, and his family take over the Wiener's home. The next shot is set in 1941 and we see the Wieners being rounded up to be sent to the infamous Theresienstadt camp. They console themselves and their friends with the rumor that the camp is not that bad. The International Red Cross in fact touted Theresienstadt to the world as a model detention camp in 1944, after the Nazis had cleaned it up and sent 40,000 people to the gas chambers in Auschwitz to remedy the overcrowding. Of the approximately 140,000 "unwanted" people sent to the Czech camp, over 120,000 would die. But Theresienstandt was not an Auschwitz death camp. There were many survivors—among them, Ivan Klima, the Czech novelist, who wrote about the experience.

But Divided We Fall is not really interested in telling its audience the historical truth about Theresienstadt or the experience of the Czech Jewish community that had produced Kafka and Mahler. It is not quasi-historical in the manner of last year's acclaimed Sunshine, which accurately describes the fate of the assimilating Jews of Hungary and featured Ralph Fiennes. It is less grand, has no recognizable actors, and in its own way is much more artful.

Divided We Fall is ultimately not about Jews dying in the Holocaust, but about Czechs surviving during the German occupation. It is about the Nazi who moved into the Weiner's home and gladly sent his sons off to be killed in Hitler's wars. It is about Horst, the former chauffeur, who prospered through his collaboration—acquiring Jewish property for the Nazis while his neighbors went without. And it is about Czechs like Josef, with a bad leg that kept him out of the military, and with not enough sperm to get his Marie pregnant—but still a man. Finally it is about decent Czechs who suffered through the war years claiming they hated the Nazis but were too cowardly to join an underground or to help Jews. And Divided We Fall is so artful that by the time it ends we have recognized all of them as human beings and have recognized ourselves in them.

They get the chance to demonstrate their humanity when David Wiener returns to the village emaciated, having escaped from the camps with a tattoo on his arm and no way to survive. His father, mother, and sister have died at Auschwitz. Sheltering him may mean death for you and your family, perhaps for everyone on your block, such is the scale of Nazi intimidation.

The dog-walking Czech who supposedly hates Nazis is the first to spot David in one of those night scenes shot at twelve-frames-a-minute. Without any hesitation he sounds the alarm "Jude." David eludes capture and almost by happenstance hides in Josef's apartment. He asks his father's former employee, whose rooms he once shared, to shelter him for one night. Will there be "room at the Inn"?

The secular humanist has as much trouble with heroes as with Gods and there are no heroes in Divided We Fall. Josef finds it difficult to say "yes," knowing the possible consequences, but his real test comes the next night when David's only possible escape alternative falls through. The situation is grim and we feel it, but from the first scene in which the vintage car stops so that one of the men can urinate to the last, the film mixes comedy—actually a kind of farce—with the grim reality.

Sometimes described as "absurd humanism," this genre draws on the literature of Mitteleuropa and the Czech theatrical convention of village farce. To cineastes it recalls the Czech New Wave tradition of pre-Hollywood Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde) and Jiri Menzell (Closely Watched Trains) before he disappeared into political and creative oblivion. For me the core of this absurd humanism is the question Milan Kundera asks in his best novels: how can one live a moral life in an immoral world? One answer, as in this film, is with laughter and forgiveness. Not that Josef, the Czech everyman, wants to live a moral life; he is decent enough, but considers his own best interests in deciding what to do about David. Pressed by the impulsively good Marie, he decides to hide the emaciated Jew in the attic pantry. But he really has no other choice; by then he is in too deep to explain his way out to the Nazis.

Bolek Polivka, who plays Josef, has had a long career in Czech theater and film and has his own television show. Everyone in Czechoslovakia knows his face, but American audiences will discover a wonderful new actor who is the master of his craft. Polivka is able to sustain the likeableness of Josef in scenes that threaten, mock, and humiliate him.

Ironically (the word can be applied to every twist in the film) Josef's concealment of the escaped Jew—which will last for two years, until the end of the war—forces him into collaboration with Horst. Swollen with his new Aryan importance, the little man has grown a Hitler-style toothbrush mustache, lords it over everyone, and lusts after Marie, whom he drops in on at odd hours. This lecherous visitor, bearing gifts for the terrified couple, creates the elements for a black farce. One night he comes banging on the door when David is out of his hiding place and giving Marie a French lesson. Marie jumps into her bed, pulls David under the quilt with her, and explains to Horst that she is sick. A wrestling match ensues as Horst tried to impose himself on her and the strange lumps under the quilt. He ends up holding on to David's hand before the struggle is over. Does he know whose hand it is? This is a scene from a classic bedroom farce—but with consequences undreamed of by traditional farceurs, like the great Feydau or the contemporary Aykborn. Marie is not hiding a lover in her bed and the consequences of David's discovery are too awful to contemplate. The wit and imagination that invented this absurd and strangely hilarious scene is what I meant by something better than a true story. Perhaps the despicable Horst knows whose hand it is and that he will use that knowledge to force Marie's submission. Perhaps Horst, with his Hitler mustache, is a decent man who would not want to see his friends and his former employer David murdered by the Nazis. He certainly is more than some simple stereotype, and Jaroslav Dusek, the actor who plays Horst, is equal to the demands of the part.

Horst does convince Marie to go on a picnic with him. When his amorous efforts are repelled he attempts to rape her. A kick in the groin leaves him curled up on the ground cursing. As revenge, Horst attempts to force a new boarder on Marie and Josef—a sick Nazi, who will complicate their living arrangements. Josef in fending him off says that his wife is pregnant and they will need any extra space for their new baby. Of course he is sterile, but the desperate Josef has an inspiration—David will impregnate his Marie. The two are appropriately shocked and loathe to proceed. Undaunted, Josef pushes them into bed together and gives his benediction. It is an innocent copulation, a violation of the Ten Commandments, but in this black farce it would be difficult to condemn it as a mortal sin. Marie's swelling belly holds off Horst until the Russians arrive.

During the passage of time until the war ends we watch the starched Nazi commandant in the Weiner's home wilt as he learns about the death of his sons at the front. He is slowly transformed before our eyes from the arrogant Nazi to the pathetic father who must send his last son, still a child, off to his death. We last see that broken man—humbled by a stroke, spit on by the Czechs he dominated—awaiting his execution by the partisans for whom justice is revenge. Divided We Fall wants us to pity the commandant and we do: even the Nazis are human beings in this film.

As the Bohemian village is freed, the farcical plot takes more absurd twists. Marie is finally ready to give birth, and Josef runs to get the only doctor but he is dead. The desperate husband remembers that Horst once boasted he had delivered one of his own children. He talks his way into the makeshift prison where the partisans and Soviets are holding their enemies—among them the Nazi commandant and Horst. Josef gambles everything, and to the partisans in charge, who do not know the villagers, he identifies Horst as the doctor. To Marie's horror, Horst turns up to deliver David's child. Horst, whose life has been spared, successfully delivers the child and Josef pronounces him a decent man.

The final scene was too much for some critics but was surely in the absurd-humanist spirit of the entire movie. Josef, a tall awkward man, is shown pushing a perambulator through still smoking ruins. People are already rebuilding their village. Off to one side in the middle distance Josef sees a group of people sitting around a table. It is the Wieners who died at Auschwitz and with them the youngest son of the Nazi commandant who died on the Eastern Front. Josef lifts up his Christ child to greet these dead souls and then ruefully shows them his hand on which the child has peed.

Divided We Fall is art that shows us in our common humanity the possibility of laughter and forgiveness. In the years ahead we can hope for more such films—the world will need them. Boston Review

a) Reviewed by George O. Singleton

The fallacy of Nazi logic: One German = 20 Slavs or 100 Jews

30 Second Bottom Line: During WWII a Czech couple harbors the Jewish son of a former employer, at great risk to themselves, the young man and their neighbors.

Story Line: Based upon a true story, "Divided We Fall" tells the story of Josef and Marie Cizek, a childless couple trying to go along to get along with the German occupiers of their village. The Nazi's have stolen the property of the Jews living in the area and sent them off to death camps. A close friend of theirs is Horst Prohazka, a fellow Slav who works for the Germans. The relationship is complicated by the fact that Horst has fallen out of love with his German wife and is sexually attracted to Marie.

Josef and Marie decide to hide David Weiner, the son of Josef's former employer and a friend, when Josef finds him wandering the streets of the village after his escape from a concentration camp. He is concealed in a secret storage room and they become paranoid when Horst begins to make unannounced visits.

After Marie vehemently rebuffs Horst's sexual advances, he seeks revenge by having them provide a room for a Nazi officer who is distraught after the death of his son in the war. Marie says that is not possible because she is pregnant and they need the room for the new baby. Josef, however, has just returned from a clinic where it was confirmed that the reason Marie has never become pregnant is because he is sterile. Josef decides that the only way out of their predicament is to find a way for Marie to become pregnant.

Under the watchful eye of the neighbor Libuse, Josef and Marie fall out of favor in the area because of visits to their home by Horst and an SS Officer being friendly to Josef. Will they be able to keep their secrets and if Marie is to have a baby, who will be the father?

"Divided We Fall" reminds me of other strong films about persecution in Europe, such as Sunshine and East-West. Those films are more epic in the scope of things but this movie is more personal, in that it focuses on the life of a family with viewpoints that we've not seen before. Jewish persecution during WWII is usually seen from their point of view. Here, we see that in addition to stories of others caught up in that time and place. They might be German Nazis, or Slavic collaborators who side with the Germans rather than the Jews because that is what they feel they must to do to survive.

We see the human side of an SS Officer when Josef first helps him repair his car at a remote roadside and later when the officer makes a joke when Josef is at a clinic to have his sperm count tested. The SS Officer was human but still a devil when it came to his views of Jews.

To encourage the Slavs to cooperate and not protect Jews, if one person is caught helping a Jew, the entire neighborhood is punished; their children are shot. On one hand, the Slavs work with the Germans but on the other, it's a fertile setting to begin an underground resistance.

The personal nature of the film makes for a riveting story that commands your attention. The ending of the movie is powerful because it is frightening and joyful at the same time. Those were awful times and it was not that long ago. If we are to have peace in the world, we must continue to be reminded of our history so we do not become complacent and let the forces of evil come anywhere close to repeating events of this nature. The concept of all men being created equal is fundamental to one group or race never being able to conclude that others deserve to be treated any way other than as they expect to be treated. This Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is one that should not be missed.

b) a second review
By A. O. Scot

'Divided We Fall': Scrambling the Stereotypes of Abnormal Times

When while aiming to confront modern audiences with the unimaginable horror of the recent past, many movies about the Nazi period also tend to offer the comfort of clear moral distinctions, dividing the world into innocent victims, monstrous villains, cowardly collaborators and heroes of resistance. Of course, life is never so simple, and one of the many virtues of "Divided We Fall," a new film by the 33-year-old Czech director Jan Hrebejk, is that it scrambles such facile categories almost beyond recognition.

By all outward appearances, Josef Cizek (Boleslav Polivka), an ordinary Czech living under German occupation, is the opposite of a hero. In addition to being somewhat cowardly - soiling himself at a moment of danger - he is lazy, depressive and opportunistic, though not as venal as his friend Horst Prohazka (Jaroslav Dusek), who sports a Nazi lapel pin and a toothbrush mustache and who fawns over Josef's wife, Marie (Anna Siskova).

But to his neighbors, in particular Mr. and Mrs. Simacek (Jiri Pecha and Simona Stasova) across the way, Josef is a collaborating swine. He joins Horst and the local German grandee, Mr. Kepke (Martin Huba), in confiscating property from dispossessed Jews, and he seems to be on friendly terms with a Nazi officer.

"You wouldn't believe what abnormal times do to normal people," Josef remarks; it's an observation that seems to have guided Mr. Hrebejk and Petr Jarchovsky, who adapted the screenplay for "Divided We Fall" from his novel of the same title. Josef's normal human failings - his sloth, his moodiness, his sarcasm - are hard to distinguish from his virtues. His grumpy, sardonic temperament inoculates him against ideological fervor. When Horst tries to teach him the deadpan facial expression that the Germans will mistake for resolute loyalty, the best Josef can manage is a look that suggests chronic gas pain.

He is, in his melancholy way, a decent and tolerant man, and when David Wiener (Csongor Kassai), the only surviving member of the Jewish family who once employed him, shows up seeking a place to hide, Josef gives him shelter, doing the right thing in part because he can't think of anything else to do.

This act of simple, unreflecting bravery ensnares Josef, Marie and everyone around them in a series of paradoxes as comical as they are horrifying. Josef, who had rebuffed Horst's efforts to join his self-interested collusion with the Germans, finally goes along to deflect suspicion from himself. Mr. Simacek, a self- righteous Czech patriot, is in some ways Josef's mirror image. When David first appeals to him for help, Mr. Simacek, out for a walk with his beloved terrier, tries to flag down a passing patrol to turn him in.

Mr. Hrebejk and Mr. Jarchovsky, working in the rich Czech tradition of absurdist humanism, construct a universe booby-trapped with impossible choices and ethical puzzles. "Divided We Fall" ultimately resolves into a hopeful parable, but its unlikely glow of forgiveness is well earned. It's a parable that, for most of its duration, feels like a novel. The characters are too richly peculiar to be allegorical marionettes, and the cast - especially the ungainly, dough-faced Mr. Polivka - performs with such subtlety and ingenuity that all sense of narrative artifice vanishes.

Or almost. Mr. Hrebejk resorts to a few cinematic tricks: superimposing Marie's face on her cherished portrait of the Virgin Mary, conjuring the occasional ghost and shooting especially dramatic scenes at 20 frames a second, rather than the usual 24. Sometimes this stop-motion effect amplifies the intensity; at other times it's distracting. But for the most part, his stylistic verve serves the material well. The film's climax is a crescendo of mortal suspense that also includes elements of farce. Unlike the meretricious "Life Is Beautiful," "Divided We Fall" is pervaded with humor that serves not to sentimentalize or sugarcoat the monstrosity of Nazism, but to explain it. The filmmakers explore not only the banality of evil, but also the banality of goodness, and the ridiculousness, as well as the tragedy, of their collision.

Even while aiming to confront modern audiences with the unimaginable horror of the recent past, many movies about the Nazi period also tend to offer the comfort of clear moral distinctions, dividing the world into innocent victims, monstrous villains, cowardly collaborators and heroes of resistance. Of course, life is never so simple, and one of the many virtues of "Divided We Fall," a new film by the 33-year-old Czech director Jan Hrebejk, is that it scrambles such facile categories almost beyond recognition.

3. Nowhere in Africa (2001) - A film by Caroline Link

Plot Summary

A Jewish family in Germany emigrate short before the Second World War. They move to Kenya to start running a farm, but not all members of the family come to an arrangement with their new life. Shortly after their departure, things are changing in Germany very quickly, and a turning back seems impossible. So everyone has to arrange himself with the new life in a new continent.

Two reviews

a) By Stephen Holden

A Shallow Snob Transformed by Exile to Africa

"Nowhere in Africa," the leisurely warmhearted chronicle of an upper-class Jewish family that flees Nazi Germany to start life over in Kenya, gives you the agreeable sensation of riding a slow train on an unsettled afternoon through a landscape of the past.

The story of Walter and Jettel Redlich (Merab Ninidze and Juliane Köhler), a successful lawyer and his beautiful, elegant wife whose lives are transformed once they relocate to Africa with their young daughter, Regina (Lea Kurka), is too rambling to cohere as a historical epic, and it lacks the romantic heft of a film like "Out of Africa." But despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing. As its events pass before your eyes, the movie suggests an episodic diorama whose attractive, complicated characters are held discreetly at arm's length.

Adapted by Caroline Link (who directed and wrote the screenplay) from Stefanie Zweig's autobiographical novel, the film has been nominated for an Oscar this year as best foreign language movie. (Ms. Link's film "Beyond Silence" competed in the same category in 1997.) It also recently won five Lolas, the German equivalent of the Oscar, including best picture and director.

The Redlichs' odyssey, which involves jarring cultural and economic shocks, domestic strife and the pain of exile, is painted as an almost warm and fuzzy series of learning experiences. Although the problems faced by the exiled family include a disastrous drought and an invasion of locusts (thrown in late in the movie as a dramatic afterthought), the sense of hardship and struggle conveyed by the film remains muted.

"Nowhere in Africa" is narrated by Regina (Karoline Eckertz plays her as a teenager) but focuses on Jettel, a vain, spoiled snob who eventually emerges as a self-reliant citizen of the world. By the end of the film, she has developed a deep attachment to her new land and extols the value of cultural differences. Ms. Köhler's delicate performance captures Jettel's vanity and shallowness without rubbing your face in them, and her metamorphosis into a more solidly grounded woman is subtle but convincing. Because the events are filtered through a young person's memory, the messier adult passions are tinged with a nostalgic glow.

The native Kenyans, especially the saintly Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), who becomes the loyal family cook, fit a little too snugly into a stock National Geographic stereotype of gentle, noble tribespeople living harmoniously with nature and viewing the European arrivals with an affectionate amusement. Kenya was a British colony until 1963, but the movie conveys not the tiniest hint of resistance to European colonialism.

At the start of the film, in 1938, Walter is already living in Kenya, where he manages the farm of a gruff, short-tempered British colonial. When Walter summons his wife and daughter to leave their luxurious life in Breslau, they assume their visit will be a short one and that the Nazis will soon be ousted from power.

Walter instructs his wife to bring a refrigerator, but she fritters away the money on a fancy evening dress. Her frivolity precipitates the first of many domestic clashes that seriously strain the Redlichs' marriage. Jettel initially hates her new life and treats the natives like servants. She embarrasses Owuor by asking him to carry water, a task only the women in his tribe perform. She even looks down on her husband, now that he's a humble farmer no longer practicing law.

Regina eagerly embraces her new circumstances and befriends the native children her own age and learns their language, and the scenes of the girl frolicking with her African peers evoke an idyllic cultural merger.

Although the news arriving from Germany is dire (Jettel's surviving family members are deported), the movie doesn't dwell on the Holocaust. Once the war breaks out, the Redlichs are rounded up by the British and interned with other expatriate Germans in Nairobi, with the men separated from the women. Just when the future is looking the bleakest, Jettel has a convenient fling with a German-speaking British officer who arranges for Walter to manage another farm. But the incident, and Walter's lurking sexual jealousy, are treated cursorily.

Even in Africa, anti-Semitism is palpable. At school, Regina is one of a handful of Jewish children instructed to leave their desks and stand at the side of the classroom while the other students say the Lord's Prayer. The film follows the Redlichs until the end of the war, by which time the couple's attitudes about Germany have reversed. Walter, offered a judicial post in Hesse, is eager to return, while Jettel has no desire to go back.

"Nowhere in Africa" is a handsome film that lends both the landscape and the colonial life the elegance of a coffee-table picture book. Niki Reiser's African-flavored symphonic music (similar in style to Hans Zimmer's film scores) underlines the visual sweep. This is a movie that basks in the illusion that the past was so much prettier than the present.

b) By Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer

A family drifts apart far from its home

At the heart of "Nowhere in Africa," the recent Oscar winner as best foreign-language film, is a lovely relationship between Regina, a transplanted German girl, and Owuor, the lanky African who cooks for her immigrant parents and regards them with wise, benign detachment.

While Regina's parents struggle with homesickness, displacement and the mystifying differentness of African tribal culture, Regina opens herself to discovery -- sneaking off to observe native rituals, learning firsthand the tribesmen's ways.

While the mother, Jettel (Juliane Kohler), is unpacking her patterned china and ordering Owuor to speak German, Regina is slowly becoming something of an honorary African. Home and identity, the film suggests, aren't so easily defined.

Regina, played at first by 9-year-old Lea Kurka and then as a teenager by Karoline Eckertz -- both fine, understated performers -- is the film's narrator and should remain its focus. But writer-director Caroline Link ("Beyond Silence") falters in emphasizing the parents' turbulent, up-and-down relationship: the frictions of adapting to an alien culture, the costs of Jettel's flings with a British officer and a fellow German (Matthias Habich). The charming, tender byplay of Regina and Owuor, played with an effortless dignity by Sidede Onyulo, takes a backseat.

Based on an autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, "Nowhere in Africa" was filmed on location in western Kenya -- the same remote area where Zweig's father, a lawyer, and mother, a spoiled daughter of privilege, fled in 1938 to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews.

Their new home is a cattle farm where Walter (Merab Ninidze), refined and educated and a tad precious, is employed by a crude British colonial. In Africa, nothing works as it does in Germany. The ground is hard and dry and resistant to planting. The eggs-and-cornmeal diet drives Jettel mad, and the limited contact with home -- combined with the guilt of leaving their families and the need to find a new farm when Walter is dismissed for being German -- drives a wedge between the couple.

Adjustment is especially daunting for Jettel, a slice of flaky German pastry who, when told by her husband that he's applied for repatriation, looks puzzled and says, "For what?" Jettel is so self-involved that it takes her years to learn that Owuor, the man who cooks her meals, has three wives and six children.

Then why has he left his wives and followed the Redlich family to a second farm? "White women are helpless," Owuor casually explains. "Black women are not."

With time, expectations evaporate and the parents, even dim and superficial Jettel, develop a resourcefulness and acceptance that was previously beyond their grasp. When Walter is relocated by the British army, Jettel even manages the farm without him.

"Nowhere in Africa" approaches enchantment when it's focused on Regina, Owuor and on Regina's other tribal friend, Jogona. Otherwise it's fairly standard: a well-acted, exquisitely photographed, plot-jammed movie that sinks into melodrama and reveals too little about the African culture and landscape in which it's set.

Link, a better director than writer, lets her story go on too long -- at two hours and 18 minutes, it could lose a half hour -- but stages the many chapters of her epic with a sharp eye and strong sense of rhythm. When war breaks out, Walter is interned by Kenya's British government, while Jettel and Regina are detained at a posh Nairobi hotel complete with sumptuous buffets, liveried staff and well-maintained lawns.

It's a big dose, this tale of displacement: Jettel's indiscretions, the looming horror of news from Germany, Regina's enrollment in a British school in Nairobi. There's even a swarm of locusts to threaten the maize crop -- a bit hokey and old-time-MGM, and phony looking with obvious digital enhancement.

Link has a romantic's approach to this material and likes to indulge the occasional grand flourish. She's especially fond of crane shots that lift toward the sky while the music swells, all the better to underscore a transition point or significant passage in the family saga.

She doesn't lose the consistent thread in her tale: the question of home and belonging, and how they're determined. Even after nine years in Africa, even with the memory of the Holocaust so cruel and so vivid, Walter considers a return to Germany.

"This country saved our lives," he tells Jettel, "but it isn't our country." (Friday, April 4, 2003)

4. Lamerica (1994) - A film by Gianni Amelio

After nearly half a century of communist rule, a poverty stricken Albania falls subject to the invasion of two exploitative capitalists looking to prosper within thte changing economy. As Albania’s people try desperately to flee destitution, Gino and Fiore arrive from Italy with plans to use a makeshift manufacturing plant to front their next scam. Forced to name an Albanian citizen as their company’s acting “chairman,” Gino and Fiore turn to Spiro ? a prisoner of war for over fifty years, Spiro emerges as the perfect pawn. However when Spiro suddenly disappears, Gino finds himself on a journey that will ultimately reshape the integrity of his soul

Three reviews

a) By Barbara Shulgasser, Examiner Movie Critic

"LAMERICA" is set just a few years ago in Albania, a country that has not yet recovered from its bout with exported Italian fascism of the 1930s. (It's 70 miles off the Italian coast.) After World War II, an exceptionally repressive Communist government took over and further battered what was left of society.

When the dictatorship fell in 1991, the economy was in ruins. New policies allowed foreigners to enter the formerly closed Soviet satellite, making the early '90s a good time for shady, go-go entrepreneurs from Italy to execute scams in Albania for big profits. Gianni Amelio ( "Stolen Children" ) sets "Lamerica" against this roiling backdrop.

Fiore (Michele Placido) and Gino (Enrico Lo Verso) are scam artist-businessmen trying to set up a dummy corporation in Albania. They're promising to open a factory and provide jobs, but their true aim is to produce nothing but ill-gotten money in their own pockets.

To achieve this, they must find an Albanian national to serve as chairman of their enterprise. They've engaged a middleman, Selimi (Piro Milkani), who introduces them to some prospects. One turns out to be a "distant" cousin of Selimi. The scam artists, of course, don't like being scammed, so they settle on their own man, Spiro (Carmelo di Mazzarelli), a 70ish recently-released political prisoner who is a little confused; he thinks it's still some time in the 1940s.

Once he's signed the necessary papers, Gino and Fiore park him in an orphanage for safekeeping, but he wanders off. Fiore has returned to Rome, leaving Gino, the less experienced business partner, on a quest to find their "chairman."

This journey gives Gino a look at the extent of Albanian poverty. The people are out of work, hungry and without prospects. There are no roads. When Gino leaves his fancy car alone for five minutes, he returns to find all the tires stolen.

Gino catches up with Spiro, but in the process is slowly stripped of his privilege and money, leaving him, in the end, no different from the struggling Albanians he sought to rook when the movie started.

As you might expect, the callous Gino discovers the humanity of addled old Spiro, but you never really forget what a sleazy customer Gino is. The sympathy writer-director Gianni Amelio assumes we'll feel for Gino, when he is as broke, unshaven and disenfranchised as Spiro, is difficult to summon. I know that the film won the 1994 best director award at the Venice Film Festival and was the Italian best foreign film entry for the 1995 Oscars. Obviously, it moved some people. But as I watched, I just kept feeling that I wasn't measuring up to the director's expectations. I must work harder on that. (Friday, May 10, 1996)

b) By Michael Fox, Movie Magazine International

We think of road movies as a purely American invention, but in fact the Europeans often steer the genre into more interesting terrain than we do. A case in point is "Lamerica," the riveting new film from Gianni Amelio, the gifted Italian director of "Open Doors" and "Stolen Children." Set in the chaotic back roads of Albania, of all places, "Lamerica" is a beautifully photographed yet shattering fable of innocence lost.

The set-up is truly inspired: A pair of terrific Italian actors, the silver-haired Michele Placido and the young, sharp-featured Enrico Lo Verso, play corporate sharks on a slimy mission to the formerly Communist Albania. Their goal is to invent a sham shoe factory in order to qualify for a development grant from the Italian government. They have no intention of actually operating a factory, of course; they'll just take the money and run.

The partners discover that the law requires an Albanian citizen to head the new enterprise. So they find a figurehead, a broken old man and former political prisoner, to sign the papers. Then they dump him in some crumbling institution, only to find out that they need him for an essential meeting with government officials. The younger partner, Gino, sets out to find the codger, who's now escaped and hit the road.

In desperate pursuit, Gino tracks his elderly quarry into the countryside. But Gino is the ultimate fish out of water--a handsome hunk in yuppie clothes, driving a tricked-out Jeep in the middle of total poverty. Welcome to Albania, post-Iron Curtain, a Third World country with dangerously fractured social structures and nonexistent infrastructure. Although he catches up with the elderly man, Gino loses his Jeep, the nice clothes and, eventually, his identity.

This is strong stuff, but "Lamerica" is more than an anti-capitalist polemic or anti-imperialist warning. Along the way, Gino rediscovers his capacity to empathize, to see people as something other than profit centers or marks for his financial schemes. "Lamerica" takes Gino deep into the dark night of the soul, in a Kafkaesque kind of way, and he's a different man when he emerges. The real power of "Lamerica" is that we share Gino's nightmarish journey. In case you haven't been paying attention, economic insecurity, poverty, refugees and corruption are as rampant here as they are in the Eastern Bloc countries. © 1996 Michael Fox, Movie Magazine International

c) By paul2001sw-1 (paul2001sw@yahoo.co.uk)
Saffron Walden, UK (12 June 2004)

The last "silent" masterpiece?

I first saw 'Lamerica' at its British premiere at the Edinburgh film festival. After the screening, director Gianni Ameilo, a wonderful man in love with his own film, gave an effusive talk about how it had been made: how he had wanted for years to make a film about his father's emigration from post-war Italy to America, but chose, at the time of the Albanian refugee crisis in Italy in the 1990s, to tell the tale allegorically instead; how he cast amateurs in almost all the roles; how he plucked the amazing Carmelo de Mazzarelli from a Scicilian street to play the role of Michele because he to liked his face; and how he directed him, never showing him the full script but merely telling him what was required from each individual scene. This may be an unconventional style of film-making, but the result is triumphant.

'Lamerica' is both epic and comic, some elements bring to mind David Lean and others Mike Leigh (a feat otherwise only managed, in my opinion, by the films of Emil Kusturica). The acting is superb, the comedy dry, laced with sad irony (even the occasional Albanian mis-translation of Italian is inspired). At the centre of this film is a conventional road-movie, a story of an odd couple who bond; but it's put into a wider context by the extraordinary scenes, set in Tirana, that top and tail the movie: this film is political as well as personal, addressing not just the contemporary Albanian reality but also wider questions, such as racism and the relationship of the affluent west to the poorer world. But what stands out most of all is the remarkable visuals, both of the stunning Albanian landscape and also of the people: few directors make as much use of the widescreen format as Amelio, and the way he creates landscapes from faces so expressive they are almost fluourescent is in a class of its own. In some ways, he is almost too effective in doing so: the film feels manipulative because of the power of the images in making its point (and one wonders, can life in Albania really have been this bad?). This is a film that might almost be silent, the pictures tell the story. When, for example, Enrico la Verso's character drinks the milk, the significance of this simple act hits home with the force of a sledgehammer.

Adddendum on Albania

Location: Southeastern Europe, bordering the Adriatic Sea and Ionian Sea, between Greece and Serbia and Montenegro
Area: total: 28,748 sq km
Area - comparative: slightly smaller than Maryland
Land boundaries: border countries: Greece 282 km, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 151 km, Serbia and Montenegro 287 km Top of Page
Population: 3,544,808 (July 2004 est.)
Ethnic groups: Albanian 95%, Greek 3%, other 2% (Vlach, Roma (Gypsy), Serb, and Macedonian or Bulgarian) (1989 est.)
Religions: Muslim 70%, Albanian Orthodox 20%, Roman Catholic 10%
note: percentages are estimates; there are no available current statistics on religious affiliation; all mosques and churches were closed in 1967 and religious observances prohibited; in November 1990, Albania began allowing private religious practice
Languages: Albanian (official - Tosk is the official dialect), Greek

Background:
Between 1990 and 1992 Albania ended 46 years of xenophobic Communist rule and established a multiparty democracy. The transition has proven difficult as successive governments have tried to deal with high unemployment, widespread corruption, a dilapidated infrastructure, powerful organized crime networks with links to high government officials, and disruptive political opponents. International observers judged parliamentary elections in 2001 to be acceptable and a step toward democratic development, but identified serious deficiencies. Some of these were addressed through reforms in the Albanian electoral code prior to the nationwide municipal elections in 2003.

From Fifty Years of Europe. By Jan Morris

“Mirëisevni në Shqipëri” what it said on the immigration forms when I arrived in Albania - welcome to Albania. They must have been printed after 1992, because until then Shqipëri was the most inflexibly, disagreeable, alarmingly and indeed insanely unwelcoming country in Europe. For most of my fifty European years I had contemplated it in bewilderment from outside. Its blue-gray coast looked back at me tantalizingly across the Strait of Corfu, inaccessible as a bank vault. I gazed upon its silent mass, as upon a morgue, from the mountains of Montenegro. As I pursued the tracks of the British Empire in the Ionian Islands, I remembered with a shudder the hired executioner who used to come over from Albania (no Greek would do the job) wearing a face-mask and a particolored costume like a jester. The case of the Corfu Straits, when Albanian mines sank two British destroyers with terrible loss of life, rumbled through my early years in journalism, and for decades I could hardly turn on my short-wave radio, wherever I was,without hearing the monotonous dogmatic voice of Radio Albania, telling us of Comrade Hoxha's latest achievements in revolutionizing chemical production, or eliminating religion. Comrade Hoxha - Friend Hoxha, as his subjects were supposed to call him! Of all the unhinged despots in the Europe of my time, Enver Hoxha was undoubtedly the most deranged. He was madder than Ceausescu. His people were cut off from all outside sources of information whatever, and for years they were conditioned to think of him as all but magical. He could cause the rain to come! Flowers blossomed in his footsteps! Many of his subjects really did believe that he had made Albania uniquely successful and enviable among all the nations of the world, whereas in fact it was uniquely unsuccessful and unenviable. Hoxha quarreled successively with the Western democracies, with Yugoslavia, with the Soviet Union, with Communist China, with God himself ("the only religion in Albania is being Albanian"), until in the end his country was all alone, friendless, destitute and paranoiacly nasty to everyone.

Hoxha lives!

Hoxha had been dead for six years when at last I reached Albania, and his irrational brand of communism had been rejected for four. Almost at once I made a pilgrimage to honor a far older champion, the warrior-chief Skanderbeg - Alexander Bey - who had famously held the predatory Turks at bay in the fifteenth century. For Albanians, Skanderbeg was undoubtedly the No. 1 Albanian of history, and he was the one Albanian who, with his heroic beard and his goat-horned helmet, had been known to me all my life as a face on a postage stamp. The scene of Skanderbeg's most celebrated exploit was the ruined fortress of Krujë, in central Albania, epically sited on a mountainside looking across a plain to the distant Adriatic. The place was fine, I thought. The view was tremendous, shimmering with heat haze down to the sea. The citadel was properly defiant in its wreckage. The bazaar down the hill sold fox skins. But even then, even in 1996, even in the presence of Skanderbeg himself, Enver Hoxha lived! For all across that wide landscape, and much the most compelling feature of it, were the thousands and thousands of concrete pillboxes, egg-shaped, like so many gray-white igloos, which the dictator had caused to be constructed throughout the length and breadth of his country. I was told there were 8oo,ooo altogether, big and small, and there seemed to be no strategic or even tactical pattern to them -they just popped up wherever you looked, sometimes in twos and threes, sometimes in dozens, and only now that Hoxha was dead were they beginning to crumble. Some had been broken, or upturned, or were used as houses or hay barns, and down on the holiday coast one or two had recently been turned into cafés.

The great release

When I asked who these defences had been to defend Albania against, they said "Everyone." Having spent much of his young manhood as a guerrilla partisan, Hoxha apparently feared invasion by the Americans, the Russians, the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, the Italians, and for all I know the Libyans too. One man I asked about the pillboxes in Krujë merely put his finger to the side of his head and twisted it. I don't know how persuaded most ordinary Albanians had been by Hoxha's persecution complex, but now that he had gone it was as though they were awakening from some awful nightmare, shaking their heads to be rid of the memory. His was a fearful tyranny. Scores of thousands of Albanians had been murdered or worked to death in his forty-eight prison camps - forty-eight of them, in a country the size of Wales or Maryland. Every kind of freedom had been abolished. Censorship had been absolute. Secret police and government informers were everywhere. Beards, blue jeans and rock music were forbidden. Just as nobody could enter the country, so nobody could leave either. Babies' names had to be chosen from an officially approved list, changed each year.

Six years after Hoxha's death, when his body had long been exhumed from its tomb of honor, the sense of release was still palpable, and infectious. Poverty was still cruel in Albania, industry was ramshackle, politics were corrupt. The usual post-Communist Mafia was rampant - Albanian gangs were a byword as far away as Germany. Nevertheless it seemed to me, in 1996, a remarkably exuberant country All the symptoms of capitalism were sprouting then - Western- financed hotels, Arab-financed tourist developments, Italian restaurants, backstreet boutiques, service stations, car washes, glossy propaganda magazines for visiting foreign executives. I went down to the coast one weekend, and the beaches around Durrës were jammed with cars and coaches, festive, noisy and sticky. All among the seaside pinewoods, full of picnickers, those pillboxes abjectly lurked.

In 1992, when the Albanian Communist regime came to an end, there were only fifty cars in the capital, Tirana, and pictures I had seen of Skanderbeg Square, the heart of the city, showed it all but empty, with only a few disciplined pedestrians crossing its enormous ceremonial space. By the time I got there 40,000 cars swarmed the Tirana streets (a third of them Mercedes, almost all of them secondhand, most of them stolen in Germany) and Skanderbeg Square was a sort of maelstrom. It contained a mosque, a clock tower, a museum, a cultural center, a functional modernist hotel, a national bank, a fountain or two, sundry Italianate government offices, dozens of street stalls, an equestrian statue of Skanderbeg, and two extremely noisy amusement parks. Countless men of all ages wandered around offering black-market exchange rates. Innumerable children rode the rides. Around the edges of the place scores of cafés were in a perpetual kind of frenzy, and at the back an immense street market pullulated in a welter of fish stalls, butcheries, vegetable carts and stacks of old bicycles. It was rather as though the great square at Marrakech had been worked over successively by Atatürk, Mussolini and Stalin, and then handed over to the management of the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

In the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight passegiata, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling around the amusement parks, wandering haphazardly across highways apparently under the impression that there were still only fifty cars in the city. The noise seemed to me then a supremely Albanian noise - the hooting horns of a thousand newly acquired and uncertainly driven automobiles, the whistles of distraught traffic cops and the deafening beat of mingled rock, rap and Balkan folk music. [....] Sometimes I felt a small dry kiss on my arm, and turned to find a Gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash. When I testily shooed off a young man in a T-shirt and jeans, supposing him to be yet another currency tout, he shyly introduced himself as one of the president's bodyguards, trying to warn me away from the presidential front gate. I walked one night into the huge pyramidical structure that had been designed to be a museum of Enver Hoxha - in his own lifetime! - and was now converted to more secular uses. It was strikingly illuminated after dark, and swarmed all around by numberless crowds of idlers, up and down its ceremonial steps, in and out of its basement café, eating ice creams and loudly talking. Irrepressible urchins climbed its smooth concrete buttresses in order to slide down again. What should I find in the main hall of this tumultuous building, this hilariously discredited monument of egotism, but four young people exquisitely performing Ravel's string quartet?

5. Before the Rain (1995) - A film by Milcho Manchevski (Macedonia)

Plot summary

Shot in Macedonia and London, "Before the Rain" is a haunting study of war and its tragic consequences -- especially when the fighting occurs between neighbors. Divided into three sections, the connection between seemingly disparate events and people only becomes clear at the film's end. In "Words," a pure and innocent Macedonian monk breaks his vows in order to hide an Albanian girl accused of murder. "Faces" dramatizes an Englishwoman's struggle to choose between her husband and her lover, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer who is about to return to his native Macedonia. And "Pictures," the final segment, follows the photographer as he tries to comprehend the violence and bloodshed that have so transformed his nation's landscape and turned one-time friends into bitter enemies.

IMDb user comments for Before the Rain
Berlin, Germany Date: 11 February 2004

Summary: Perfect Definition & Explanation of the Macedonian Problem

This film by Milcho Manchevski is the ideal when talking about explaining and defining the Macedonian problem. I am Macedonian but I live in Germany. So I think I have an overview so that I am able to criticize. The problem between the ethnic groups in Macedonia go around in circles. But in the end it turns out that the circle goes round like a ferry wheel. Everything is happening again and again. The circle is not round though. In every end there is a change. A change which always makes the new beginning worse. In a way it is like a spiral. And Manchevski is smartly telling three stories. They are not linear, but in a way they come close to what the problem really is like. With the last episode he connects the three stories, and you can feel the message - his message.

Unfortunately this film was quite popular only in Europe and I think even in the US, but in Macedonia it was rarely seen by the people. I think if every single Macedonian Citizen had seen and understood this movie, it would be much easier to solve the Macedonian problem today. Because what it says is that we ourselves kill each other. Because of hatred and ethnic principles we force ourselves to fight against each other. And that is exactly why it is leading to nowhere. Because it is a circle...and the circle is not round. And one day, when the spiral is at its end, it's going to be too late.

Addendum on former Yugoslavia

From Fifty Years of Europe

It is sad to think that I once thought it might be Yugoslavity. Absolutely my favorite road in all Europe used to be the coastal highway that ran down the coast of Dalmatia from Trieste to Montenegro, because I saw it as a proclamation of unity, and hoped that, when cohesion was finally achieved, Yugoslavia's brutal postwar communism would mature into libertarian socialism. The road was fast and usually empty, and passing motorists would cheerfully warn you, with flashing lamps and hooting horns, if there was a speed trap around the corner. The glorious Dalmatian shoreline swept by panoramically, all creeks and inlets and islands and ships. Every now and then one came across a marvelous old Venetian town, with a gnarled cathedral in the center, winged lions of St. Mark all over it and snub-nosed Adriatic fishing boats nestling each other in the harbor. Sometimes I made a detou up the road to Mostar, where a lovely old Turkish bridge spanned the Neretva river in a high and graceful span.Sometimes I stopped off for a night or two under the golden walls of Dubrovnik, or in Split, whose inhabitants seemed to me to be the handsomest people in all Europe. The light, in my memory at least, was always brilliant. My BMW of the time always went beautifully. I played Bach, Mozart and Sinatra on my cassette player. Once I saw Marshal Tito, the dictatorial president of the Yugoslav federation, in a white uniform, speeding by in his limousine toward his retreat in the Brijuni islands.

The road started in the Istrian peninsula, which had once been Austrian, and then Italian, and was now part of the Slovene People's Republic. A little lower down it entered the Croatian Republic. For a few miles it passed through the Bosnian Republic. It skirted Dubrovnik, which had been for several centuries the independent Republic of Ragusa, then ran through a coastal strip of the Montenegrin People's Republic, until at last it stopped short at the frontier of Albania, in those days as frowardly unwelcoming as Tibet (the few travelers permitted to cross the border had to walk through a tank of disinfectant). Most of these territories had once been part ofthe Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some had been Roman. Some had been ruled by the Turks. Bits of them had been, until World War II, Italian. Some were chiefly Catholic, some Orthodox, some Muslim. Now, thanks very largely to that portly white-jacketed grandee I saw in the back of his Mercedes (who had himself started life as a corporal in the Austro-Hungarian Army), they were all within the bounds of a single federal state, and long before the emergence of the European Union one could drive from one end of Yugoslavia to the other without producing a passport or changing currency.

I used to be happy and hopeful driving down the Dalmatia highway, supposing that all the tumultuous history of the country was reaching some well-surfaced serenity. More recently a magazine commissioned me to drive a new Alfa Romeo down it, picking up the car in Venice and returning it there at the end of the journey; but they could
find nobody to insure such a venture, in the Yugoslavia of 1994.

A different country

Next time I did make a journey through what we had by then learned to call "The Former Yugoslavia" there was no such abstraction as Yagoslavity. Perhaps there never had been. It seems extraordinary, in retrospect, that when we foreigners used to travel so blithely through the Yugoslav Federation we were seldom aware which constituent republic we were in. I generally did not think of the Yugoslavs who lived in the very outskirts of Trieste as anything but Yugoslavs, or just Slavs it seldom occurred to me to call them Slovenes. It is true that now and then my reporter's instinct warned me that something dangerous was brewing over there, but I never dreamed that in the 1990s the country would collapse in a struggle horribly reminiscent not so much of World War II, but of those indiscriminate, almost indefinable ethnic-religious-hereditary conflicts of the Middle Ages. Next time I went to Dubrovnik it was scarred with shellfire, and in the balconies of hotels there forlornly fluttered the washing of refugees. Next time I went to Split, convoys of armored trucks were lumbering out of the docks. The bridge at Mostar had been blown up. The frontier with Montenegro was closed. My next Yugoslav motor journey was not down that happy coastline but across the cruel mountains of Bosnia in the aftermath of the fighting, and it aroused in me sensations not of hope, but of despair or even self-reproach.

I had been in Sarajevo in the winter of 1996, and finding the airport snowed in, I took a night ride in a minibus down to the sea. The snow in Bosnia-Hercegovina was deep, the road was unpredictable, every now and then we were stopped at roadblocks in the middle of nowhere, and the awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us dark and dangerous. Sometimes we clattered across a temporary iron bridge, beside a blown-up original. Sometimes, shadowy in the night, an armored vehicle stood guard beside a road junction. The only other traffic on the road consisted of huge tanker trucks laboring up to Sarajevo from the coast, their headlights showing far, far away on mountain curves. And most disturbingly suggestive of all, ever and again I looked through my window to see scattered ruins passing dismally by outside-house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a melancholy fire burning in a brazier. I dozed uncomfortably off somewhere around Konjic, and when I woke up I looked out of the window again, into the gray dawn, to see the ruins passing still.

They were not the usual ruins of war-not compact villages knocked into general shambles by blanket bombing street fighting or concentrated artillery bombardment, like villages of France, Germany or Italy in World War II. They were generally strings of detached houses, well separated, each one of which had been individually and deliberately destroyed. In the same way Sarajevo did not look in the least like those cities of Europe which were bombed into desolation in the world war. It was not a wasteland of burned out shells and skeletonic blocks. But there was hardly a building in the city center that had not been specifically targeted, sometimes half-collapsed in a mess of beams and boulders, sometimes just pitted all over with shell fragments or snipers' bullets. All this gave me an impression of particular and personal hatred. It looked such a spiteful sort of destruction. Bosnia had been ravaged, it appeared, not by ignorant conscript armies clashing, but by groups of citizens expressing their true emotions. A.J.P. Taylor once wrote that the Great War had begun as the most popular of wars, but I had a feeling that the, War of the Yugoslav Succession was undertaken even more genuinely from the human heart. And what did that say, I could not help wondering as those shattered houses passed me in the dark, about the human heart?

There were four other passengers in the minibus that night-a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. We were all there to make money in one way or another. Behind us a second bus-load was following through the darkness. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snowdrifts. "What's happening?" said the Englishman in front of me. "What have we stopped for?" The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders and settled down to sleep again. "Who cares?" he said. But he may have been joking.

FILM REVIEWS

By JANET MASLIN

The Worst Can Happen, And Happen It Does

In a sedate London restaurant, two people meet to discuss their marital troubles. They agree that they need more time, not realizing that there is no time left. In the background, away from the main action, an unexplained argument has begun to brew, as a waiter is taunted by an increasingly wild-eyed stranger. "Sir, I didn't do anything," the waiter insists to his boss. He appears to be right. It doesn't matter.

We will never know what the stranger's grievance was, only that it proved the point of Milcho Manchevski's devastating "Before the Rain": that violence escalates organically and mysteriously, in ways that mean there can be no innocent bystanders in an explosive, hair-trigger world. In a film that unfolds unpredictably, with a Mobius-strip structure oddly like that of "Pulp Fiction," the one constant becomes an air of foreboding. The birth of a lamb, a pregnant woman in a cemetery, the sight of a small boy toying with a machine gun: any of these things may signal sudden disaster.

"War torn" is the preferred cliché for events occurring near Mr. Manchevski's native Macedonia, but this film takes a more intuitive view of violence than that. "War is a virus," suggests a doctor in the film, providing a suitably unruly model for the uncontrollable peril Mr. Manchevski explores. The rain of the title is the hard rain Bob Dylan described. And the Macedonian hilltop setting where much of the film unfolds is divided by such stubborn bitterness that different parts of the landscape experience different weather.

It's a red-letter occasion when two first-time directors with films as hugely effective as "Before the Rain" and Lee Tamahori's "Once Were Warriors" make their New York debuts on the same day. Of the two, Mr. Tamahori has the brute force, while Mr. Manchevski has the poetry. Working in a sophisticated, elliptical style, he joins film makers as disparate as Krzystof Kieslowski ("Red") and Atom Egoyan ("Exotica") in finding his story's deepest meaning in hauntingly oblique connections. Ideas that defy reason, like the immutability of hatred and violence, may be best approached this way.

"Before the Rain," opening today at Lincoln Plaza, begins with and returns to a remote Macedonian monastery, which might seem a safe haven from random bloodshed. It starts off peacefully, with the sight of Kiril (Gregoire Colin), a beatific-looking young priest, working in a vegetable garden. When he returns to his bedroom, he finds a surprise: Zamira (Labina Mitevska), an Albanian girl with oddly close-cropped hair, is hiding there. There would be a language barrier between these two anyway, and there is the added obstacle of Kiril's vow of silence.

As the monks meet for prayers, death makes its entrance: armed Macedonian villagers have arrived, demanding to search the monastery in their hunt for Zamira, who they say is a killer. So edgy that they wind up machine-gunning a cat, these intruders do not see in Kiril the purity that is apparent to the audience. They soon rob him of any refuge he may have known as a young monk, leaving him absolutely adrift when the episode is over. Mr. Manchevski needs no more terrible image of an uncertain, treacherous world than the sight of Kiril lost at the end of this episode.

This opening section of the film is called "Words." The next story that is told, "Faces," is seemingly separate and may or may not occur next in time. Set in London, it features Katrin Cartlidge (who was so memorable in "Naked," and is fine again here) as Anne, who works in a photo agency. When first seen, Anne is idly looking at two bare chests, one Madonna's, the other that of a hollow-eyed, starving man. "Before the Rain" uses such juxtapositions with chilling authority, to powerfully ironic effect.

Anne has been involved with Aleksandar (Rade Serbedzija), a rakish Pulitzer Prize-winning Macedonian photographer with a weary view of war. "Peace is an exception, not a rule," Alex maintains. Meanwhile, Anne's mother accuses her daughter, who is pregnant, of a different sort of nonchalance. "No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it," her mother says icily. In fact, "Before the Rain" proves an overwhelming argument for the opposite point of view.

Breaking off with Anne during the London sequence, Alex returns to his family for an episode called "Pictures." (Mr. Serbedzija, a formidably magnetic presence, seems much more at ease during the film's non-English-speaking segments.) Not having visited the place in 16 years, he finds his home half-destroyed and armed friends and relatives, who are Macedonian Christians, patrolling the tiny village. Nearby, at a neighboring settlement, Albanian Moslems are doing likewise.

Alex's former sweetheart, who could be Anne in a different life, lives in the Moslem village and barely dares speak to him. That is not Alex's only reason for sensing how absurd and dangerous these divisions have become. Casually, he takes a weapon away from a half-naked boy and finds that the child's uncle looks angry. It's not clear whether the uncle thinks the boy was endangered or is simply irritated to see him lose his gun.

Mr. Manchevski's taste for ambiguity sometimes leads "Before the Rain" into blatant paradoxes, so that it does not unravel with quite the satisfying completeness that "Pulp Fiction" did; after this film circles back to its denouement, a minor narrative thread involving photographs of Kiril and Zamira is left deliberately unexplained. Neither the presence of such loose ends nor the film's slight straining of its rain metaphor diminishes the final impact of an overwhelming vision.

Transfixed in horror, "Before the Rain" watches the promise of violence seep into every last aspect of its narrative. Mr. Manchevski tells his story elegantly and leaves his audience with a warning too strong to be ignored. (Published: February 24, 1995, Friday)

6. Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) - A film by Sergei Bodrov

Plot Summary for Kavkazskij plennik

Vanya is a raw recruit in the Soviet army, leaving behind his mother when sent to the Caucasus where Islamic separatists wage guerrilla war. Vanya's tank patrol is ambushed; he and a hard-bitten sergeant (Sacha) survive, kept alive because a village elder, Abdul Murat, wants to trade them for his son, a prisoner in a Russian stockade. The Russian commander lacks the nerve to make the exchange, so Murat has Vanya write to his mother, begging her to come and plead for the trade. Time is the enemy: Sacha seeks to escape, and the villagers urge Murat to execute the pair. Loyalties are complicated by their interactions with the mute jailer and with Murat's teenage daughter.

Based upon a short story by Leo Tolstoy, two Russian soldiers, Sacha and Vania, are ambushed by Muslim rebels in the grandly forbidding Caucasus and taken prisoner. Although complete understanding never fully emerges, their bittersweet ordeal reveals the human soul of two vastly different cultures

Two reviews

a) By Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

An old man, the Muslim patriarch of a mountain village, takes two Russian soldiers prisoner because he wants to trade them for his own son. The mother of one of his prisoners comes to see him, to make a trade to save her son. ``I know your son is a teacher,'' she tells him. ``I am a teacher, too.'' The old man shakes his head: ``It doesn't matter. We are enemies.''

Sergei Bodrov's ``Prisoner of the Mountains,'' a thoughtful and moving film about war, exists on the line between the individual and ``the enemy.'' Because we have seen similar stories before, we expect that eventually the two Russian soldiers will become the friends of their captors, who will begin to see them as human beings. It is not going to be that simple. The war that brings them together--a war between the Russian central government and Muslim rebels in the Caucasus Mountains--is based on a hatred so old and durable that this movie, set in the present day, is based on a short story written by Leo Tolstoy more than 150 years ago.

The soldiers are Sacha (Oleg Menshikov) and Vania (Sergei Bodrov Jr.). Sacha is older, more confident, dashing. Vania is an uncertain kid. They meet in training, go on a tank patrol, and are almost immediately captured by a free-lance rebel ambush headed by old Abdoul-Mourat (Jemal Sikharulidze), the tall, intimidating leader of a mountain village. Placed in shackles, they are kept prisoners and put to hard labor. Abdoul's sweet, dark-eyed daughter Dina (Susanna Mekhralieva), who is about 12, soon begins to like them, although she never questions their captivity. ``My dowry,'' she boasts complacently, ``will include two Russian slaves.''

This war zone seems so small that some of the participants know one another (in fact, Bodrov shot the whole movie within 20 miles of actual fighting). Abdoul sends off his ransom letter (learning that the mail delivery will take about 10 days). But Vania's mother simply goes to the front, confronts her son's former commander, and says she wants to deal directly with the rebels. The commander discourages her (``You can't trust anyone here. Soldiers traded grenades for hash, and kids threw the grenades back at them.''). The mother swings her purse at his head, and he ducks, apologizing, ``Mother, you don't understand. We have casualties every day.''

She sets off alone, for a rendezvous with Abdoul in a café. They are two parents negotiating for the lives of their sons. The difference is that the Russian woman places her son above ideology, and the patriarch believes in the value of a glorious death. Meanwhile, the two soldiers, chained together, sing songs, drink smuggled booze, and one night are taken out on a patrol by regular troops, who force them to look for land mines.

When they are not blown up as expected, we get a scene that shows the greater maturity of this film, as opposed to standard Hollywood war movies. The Muslim troops have gathered on a bleak hillside for a little entertainment: all-out fighting, starring their defending champion, who leaves his opponents broken and bloody. We watch while the fighter wins his latest bout, and then one of the prisoners is ordered to fight him. Frightened, trembling, he approaches the champion. In most Hollywood films, this scene would end with the good guy being beaten to a pulp, yes, but then staging a comeback and hammering the champion. ``Prisoner of the Mountains'' is wiser about human nature: The champion, who is a fighter but not a murderer, takes one look at his puny challenger and dismisses him with a laugh. It is a special moment.

The movie has an acute sense of place and the passage of time. The mountain village seems unchanged over the centuries (``The wind frightens the hearts of strangers here,'' the children say). When we hear Louis Armstrong on a radio, it is like a signal from space. Modern methods of warfare are meaningless here; the rebels know the mountain passes and fight with greater zeal. The little girl, who in a conventional film would befriend the soldiers, does befriend them, but after the style of her people: She promises them a proper burial. Because the film is about these specific characters and not about a formula with a happy ending, we are wrapped in the story: We have no way of knowing how it will turn out.

Movies can have a way of putting faces to headlines. I have been reading for years about the various obscure (to me) rebellions in the old Soviet Union, and now I can put faces to them, and see what they come down to: bureaucracy against zealotry, weary regular troops against fierce men who burn with conviction. When your enemy considers his death a victory, it is impossible to defeat him. In a way, this movie is about how the two prisoners come to terms with that realization.

b) by Desson Howe, Washington Post Writer

'Prisoner' of War

"Prisoner of the Mountains," a beautiful Russian film set in a stark, mountainous region of the Caucasus where life has continued unchanged for centuries, links the destinies of two Russian soldiers and their Muslim captors. It isn’t specifically about the Chechnyan rebellion, but that conflict is clearly applicable, and the movie reaps humanistic bounties from the cynical soil of all wars.

On a mission in the Caucasus mountains’ region of Dagestan, Russian soldiers are ambushed by Muslim rebels. After the gun battle, two Russians are left wounded -- a cocky, devil-may-care sergeant called Sacha (Oleg Menshikov) and Vania (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), a sweet-natured recruit.

Captured and led to a hideaway camp, they’re held as hostages. Abdoul-Mourat (Jemal Sikharulidze), an imposing leader, intends to exchange them for his son, who’s in a Russian jail. But an initial prisoner exchange is foiled by treachery on the Russian side. These soldiers’ lives, it seems, aren’t particularly valuable.

Ignoring the entreaties of his compatriots to kill the captives, Abdoul-Mourat orders Sacha and Vania to appeal to their mothers. Sacha’s letter gets no response, but Vania’s mother (Valentina Fedotova), a schoolteacher, attempts to save her son.

Sacha and Vania, bound to each other with leg shackles, become friends. They also become chummy with their silent sentry, whose tongue -- they find out -- was cut out by Russians.

Vania also strikes up a friendship with Dina (12-year-old Susanna Mekhralieva), Abdoul-Mourat’s young daughter, who feeds him and keeps him apprised of her father’s plans. With little hope of rescue or negotiation, death seems unavoidable. For the mountain rebels, passage into the afterlife is not nearly as alarming as it is for the Russians. The taking of lives is not a matter for too much agonizing.

Director Sergei Bodrov (father of the actor who plays Vania) lightens the impending doom with humanism, mythical elements and a little gallows humor. Sacha, who likes to scare his fellow prisoner, tells Vania that he’s probably going to be castrated. Has Vania slept with a woman? Sacha asks. Vania says he has.

"Don’t worry, then," says Sacha. "You’ve had your fun."

"Still," says the private, trying to put on a brave face, "it is too bad."

In "Prisoner of the Mountains," which Bodrov adapted from a Tolstoy short story with Arif Aliev and producer Boris Giller, such moments are rendered unforgettably amusing. Sacha and Vania are learning things about war -- and the people they’re fighting -- that transcend their quest for escape. The outcome of this movie isn’t exactly Hollywood material, but it stirs thoughts and feelings that outlast all too many American studio releases. (February 7, 1997)

Addendum on “Who are the Chechen?”

By Johanna Nichols, on Linguist list (13 January 1995)

Author's note: I have been doing linguistic field work on Chechen and its close relative Ingush for many years. Though I am not an ethnographer or historian, I have tried to bring together here some general information about the Chechen people and their language in order to increase public awareness of the people and their situation, and to put a human face on a people of great dignity, refinement, and courage who have paid heavily for their resistance to conquest and assimilation.

Introduction.

The Chechens and their western neighbors the Ingush are distinct ethnic groups with distinct languages, but so closely related and so similar that it is convenient to describe them together.

The term "Chechen" is a Russian ethnonym taken from the name of a lowlands Chechen village; "Chechnya" is derived from that. (Both words are accented on the last syllable in Russian.) This term evidently entered Russian from a Turkic language, probably Kumyk (spoken in the northern and eastern Caucasian plain). The Chechens call themselves Nokhchi (singular Nokhchuo). Similarly, "Ingush" is not the self-designation but a Russian ethnonym based on a village name; the Ingush call themselves Ghalghay.

Demography.

1989 census figures: 956, 879 Chechen; 237, 438 Ingush. The Chechens are the largest North Caucasian group and the second largest Caucasian group (after the Georgians).

Location, settlement.

The Chechen and Ingush lands lie just to the east of the principal road crossing the central Caucasus (via the Darial Pass), extending from the foothills and plains into alpine highlands. The lowlands enjoy fertile soil, ample rainfall, a long growing season, and a small oilfield. Neighbors to the east are the various peoples of Daghestan (many of them speaking languages related to Chechen); in the plains to the north, the Turkic-speaking Kumyk and (as of the last three centuries) Russians; to the west the Ingush and to their west the Ossetians, who speak a language of the Iranian branch of Indo-European; to the south (across the central Caucasus range) the southern Ossetians and the Georgians.

There are two true cities in Chechen and Ingush territory: Grozny (pop. about 400,000 until 1995), the modern Chechen capital founded as a Russian fort during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus; and Vladikavkaz (pop. about 300,000; known as Ordzhonikidze in Soviet times) in the Ingush highlands at the Ingush-Ossetic territorial boundary, also originally a Russian military fort and founded to control the Darial pass. Nazran in the Ingush lowlands was traditionally and is now a large and important market town. The cities had substantial Russian and other non-Chechen-Ingush population; Vladikavkaz was mixed Ingush and Ossetic with significant numbers of Russians and Georgians. (Groznyj has now been destroyed and mostly depopulated by Russian bombing. Vladikavkaz and the adjacent Ingush lands were ethnically cleansed of Ingush in late 1992.) All Russian governments -- czars, Soviets, post-Soviet Russia -- have used various means to remove Chechen and Ingush population from economically important areas and to encourage settlement there by Russians and Russian Cossacks; hence the mixed population of the cities and lowlands.

Language.

The Caucasus has been famed since antiquity for the sheer number and diversity of its languages and for the exotic grammatical structures of the language families indigenous there. This diversity testifies to millennia of generally peaceable relations among autonomous ethnic groups.

Chechen and Ingush, together with Batsbi or Tsova-Tush (a moribund minority language of Georgia) make up the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian, or Northeast Caucasian, language family. There are over 30 languages in the Northeast Caucasian family, most of them spoken in Daghestan just to the east of Chechnya. The split of the Nakh branch from the rest of the family took place about 5000-6000 years ago (thus the Nakh-Daghestanian family is comparable in age to Indo-European, the language family ancestral to English, French, Russian, Greek, Hindi, etc.), though the split of Chechen from Ingush probably dates back only to the middle ages. The entire family is indigenous to the Caucasus mountains and has no demonstrable relations to any language group either in or out of the Caucasus. Like most indigenous Caucasian languages Chechen has a wealth of consonants, including uvular and pharyngeal sounds like those of Arabic and glottalized or ejective consonants like those of many native American languages; and a large vowel system somewhat resembling that of Swedish or German. Like its sister languages Chechen has extensive inflectional morphology including a dozen nominal cases and several gender classes, and forms long and complex sentences by chaining participial clauses together. The case system is ergative, i.e. the subject of a transitive verb appears in an oblique case and the direct object is in the nominative, as is the subject of an intransitive verb (as in Basque); verbs take no person agreement, but some of them agree in gender with the direct object or intransitive subject.

97% or more of the Chechens claim Chechen as their first language, though most also speak Russian, generally quite fluently. Chechen and Ingush are so close to each other that with some practice a speaker of one has fair comprehension of the other, and where the two languages are in contact they are used together: a Chechen addresses an Ingush in Chechen, the Ingush replies in Ingush, and communication proceeds more or less smoothly.

Chechen was not traditionally a written language. An orthography using the Russian alphabet was created in the 1930's and is used for various kinds of publication, although for most Chechens the chief vehicle of literacy is Russian. Traditionally, as in most North Caucasian societies, many individuals were bilingual or multilingual, using an important lowlands language (e.g. Kumyk, spoken in market towns and prestigious as its speakers were early converts to Islam) for inter-ethnic communication; any literacy was in Arabic. Russian has now displaced both Kumyk and Arabic in these functions. Particularly if the Chechen and Ingush economies continue to be destroyed and unemployment and mass homelessness continue to undermine the social structure, there is danger that Chechen and Ingush will be functionally reduced to household languages and will then yield completely to Russian, with concomitant loss of much of the cultural heritage.

History.

The Chechens have evidently been in or near their present territory for some 6000 years and perhaps much longer; there is fairly seamless archeological continuity for the last 8000 years or more in central Daghestan, suggesting that the Nakh-Daghestanian language family is long indigenous. The Caucasian highlands were apparently relatively populous and prosperous in ancient times. From the late middle ages until the 19th century, a worldwide cooling phase known as the Little Ice Age caused glacial advances and shortened growing seasons in the alpine highlands, weakening the highland economies and triggering migrations to the lowlands and abandonment of some alpine villages. This period of economic hardship coincided with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus which lasted from the late 1500's to the mid-1800's.

In all of recorded history and inferable prehistory the Chechens (and for that matter the Ingush) have never undertaken battle except in defense. The Russian conquest of the Caucasus was difficult and bloody, and the Chechens and Ingush with their extensive lowlands territory and access to the central pass were prime targets and were among the most tenacious defenders. Russia destroyed lowlands villages and deported, exiled, or slaughtered civilian population, forcing capitulation of the highlands. Numerous refugees migrated or were deported to various Muslim countries of the middle east, and to this day there are Chechen populations in Jordan and Turkey. Since then there have been various Chechen rebellions against Russian and Soviet power, as well as resistance to collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, and Russification.

In 1944 the Chechens and Ingush, together with the Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities were deported en masse to Kazakhstan and Siberia, losing at least one-quarter and perhaps half of their population in transit. Though "rehabilitated" in 1956 and allowed to return in 1957, they lost land, economic resources, and civil rights; since then, under both Soviet and post-Soviet governments, they have been the objects of (official and unofficial) discrimination and discriminatory public discourse. In recent years, Russian media have depicted the Chechen nation and/or nationality as thugs and bandits responsible for organized crime and street violence in Russia.

In late 1992 Russian tanks and troops, sent to the north Caucasus ostensibly as peacekeepers in an ethnic dispute between Ingush and Ossetians over traditional Ingush lands politically incorporated into North Ossetia after the 1944 deportation, forcibly removed the Ingush population from North Ossetia and destroyed the Ingush villages there; there were many deaths and there are now said to be up to 60,000 refugees in Ingushetia (about one-quarter of the total Ingush population). In developments reminiscent of today's invasion of Chechnya, in the weeks leading up to the action the Ingush were depicted (inaccurately) in regional media as heavily armed and poised for a large-scale and organized attack on Ossetians, and the Russian military once deployed appears to have undertaken ethnic cleansing at least partly on its own initiative. (My only sources of information for this paragraph are Russian and western news reports. Helsinki Watch is preparing a report for publication in early 1995.)

The invasion of Chechnya presently underway has meant great human suffering for all residents of the Chechen lowlands, including Russians, but only the Chechens are at risk of ethnic cleansing, wholesale economic ruin, and loss of linguistic and cultural heritage.

Religion.

The Chechens and Ingush are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, having converted in the late 17th to early 19th centuries. Islam is now, as it has been since the conversion, moderate but strongly held and a central component of the culture and the ethnic identity.

Economy, customs. Traditionally, the lowlands Chechen were grain farmers and the highlanders raised sheep. At the time of Russian contact the lowlands were wealthy and produced a grain surplus, while the highlands were not self-sufficient in food and traded wool and eggs for lowlands grain.

Chechen social structure and ethnic identity rest on principles of family and clan honor, respect for and deference to one's elders, hospitality, formal and dignified relations between families and clans, and courteous and formal public and private behavior.

Kinship and clan structure are patriarchal, but women have full social and professional equality and prospects for financial independence equivalent to those of men.

Academics, writers, artists, and intellectuals in general are well versed in the cultures of both the European and the Islamic worlds, and the society as a whole can be said to regard both of these heritages as their own together with the indigenous north Caucasian artistic and intellectual tradition.

Social organization.

Until the Russian conquest the Chechens were an independent nation with their own language and territory but no formal political organization. Villages were autonomous, as were clans. Villages had mutual defense obligations in times of war, and clans had mutual support relations that linked them into larger clan confederations (which generally coincided with dialects). Each clan was headed by a respected elder. There were no social classes and no differences of rank apart from those of age, kinship, and earned social honor.

Select bibliography

Anonymous. 1992. Ethnic cleansing comes to Russia. The Economist, November 28, 1992, p. 60.
Blanch, Lesley. 1960. The Sabres of Paradise. New York: Viking.
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conquest, Robert. 1970. The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities. London: Macmillan.
Critchlow, James. 1991. "Punished peoples" of the Soviet Union: The continuing legacy of Stalin's deportations. Helsinki Watch Report. New York-Washington: Human Rights Watch.
Friedrich, Paul, and Norma Diamond, eds. 1994. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, vol. VI: Russia and Eurasia/China. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.
Gamkrelidze, T. V., and T. E. Gudava. [Various dates.] Caucasian languages. Encyclopedia Britannica (e.g. in 1979 edition, Macropedia, vol. 3, pp. 1011-15; in 1992 edition, vol. 22, pp. 736-40, under 'Languages of the world').
Nekrich, Aleksandr M. 1978. The Punished Peoples. New York: Norton.
Nichols, Johanna. 1994. Chechen. Ingush. In Rieks Smeets, ed., The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus, vol. 4: Northeast Caucasian Languages, pp. 1-77 (Chechen), 79-145 (Ingush). Delmar, NY: Caravan Books.
Wixman, Ronald. 1980. Language Aspects of Ethnic Pattern and Processes in the North Caucasus. (University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper no. 191.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

7. No Man's Land (Bosnia, 2001)

Written and directed by Danis Tanovic; in Bosnian, with English subtitles; produced by Frédérique Dumas-Zajdela, Marc Baschet and Cedomir Kolar; director of photography, Walther Vanden Ende; edited by Francesca Calvelli; music by Mr. Tanovic; production designer, Dusko Milavec; Running time: 97 minutes.

Plot Summary

After various skirmishes, two wounded soldiers, one Bosnian and one Serb, confront each other in a trench in the no man's land between their lines. They wait for dark, trading insults and even finding some common ground; sometimes one has the gun, sometimes the other, sometimes both. Things get complicated when another wounded Bosnian comes to, but can't move because a bouncing mine is beneath him. The two men cooperate to wave white flags, their lines call the UN (whose high command tries not to help), an English reporter shows up, a French sergeant shows courage, and the three men in no man's land may or may not find a way to all get along.

Two film reviews

a) By Harvey Karten (Film Critic at Compuserve)

I remember finding myself in possession of a Eurailpass one summer about 20 years ago, determined to get my money's worth by zipping through Europe at a pace which would put even the "If- It's-Tuesday-This Must-Be-Belgium" crowd in awe. Just for the fun of it I took a train up and down the length of Yugoslavia chatting with the locals in sign and sharing their yeasty bread. Aside from noting at one point a difference in the language on the signs, the letters changing from Latin to Cyrillic, the people looked about the same, talked what appeared to me the same tongue, and appeared friendly enough to one another. After Marshal Tito's death, the apparently artificial union of the Yugoslav people fell apart and suddenly its citziens looked at one another not as members of a national group but as people with ethnic hatreds--with hostilities that had long, long histories so far back that Americans, living in a country independent now for just 225 years, would think dated back to the Jurassic Age. In the early nineties, the Bosnian Serbs began a pogrom, which they justified on the grounds that a similar procedure of persecution was directed against them, oh I don't know, in 1399? 1458? Whatever. The mass killing of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs seemed to them perfectly justified and by 1993 full-scale war was in progress between the two groups. UN forces moved in to try to separate the two sides and enforce a peace.

But cease-fires and even peace treaties are only scraps of paper as we know from the Middle East situation today. While Bosnia appears relatively at peace today, such as not the case in 1993, the period covered by Danis Tanovic's noir comedy, an antiwar picture (has any recent movie been pro-war?) and one which makes its point with some solid M*A*S*H*-like dry humor rather than with the ineffectively impotent raillery as in last year's flop about the conflict in Northern Ireland, "An Everlasting Piece" and with only those explosions and that gunplay necessary to communicate to the audience the absurdity of the whole mess.

If wars are absurd in general, the Bosnian conflict must be one of the most ridiculous, because the groups who hate each other may have historical reasons for their enmity but given their common language and enjoyment of a country so beautiful that has for decades a mecca for tourism by jet-setters and sun- worshippers alike, they simply had no territorial or ideological rationale for conflict. In the principal situation set up by director Tanovic, a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Muslim (misidentified by a review I'm looking at now as "a Bosnian and a Serb" as though they came from two, separate independent states), Ciki (Brnko Djuric) is a Muslim and Nino (Rene Bitorajac) is a Serb who both become trapped with each other, stalemated by a balance of power, in a situation that could generate a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. Most of the black comedy of the film comes from the interaction of these two, and you can imagine the mine field (so to speak) of possibilities if you'll only imagine yourself trapped in a room for what could be days, maybe weeks, with a person you don't trust, with whom you try to communicate--even discover that you share a common friend--and yet dread the idea of falling asleep in his presence!

The story takes root when a small contingent of Muslims get separated from their unit in a thick fog. When all but two of them are gunned down and killed at the crack of dawn by a Serb unit, one Muslim, Ciki, hides in a cave while two Serbs, Nino and a fellow soldier, investigate the trench. They discover a Muslim, Cera (Filip Sovagovic), apparently dead and use him to arrange a booby trap. They lay his body across a small mine in such a way that if any moves him (or indeed if the "dead" Cera himself were to move), everyone within thirty meters would be killed.

After spending considerable time developing his principal characters as though they were part of an intimate, 3-person play, writer-director Tanovic broadens the palette to bring in a contingent of UN forces, notably a French Sergeant Marchant (Georges Siatidis) who is frustrated by the UN's policy of neutrality and enforced inaction; a British mid-level officer Soft (Simon Callow); an ambitious CNN-style journalist, Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge) and her cameraman (Primoz Ranik).

Eliciting an animated portrait of Keystone Kops, "No Man's Land" is a panorama of know-nothings and idiots, bumblers and stooges, higher-ups who appear to be putting in their time awaiting their pensions, and just two competent people who seem to care about the situation, the French sergeant and a German expert in mine-defusion. The ambitious journalist is looking out for her career, the English officer would rather be back at HQ playing chess with his leggy blonde assistant, and the Bosnian soldiers, well, they all seem like such cretins it's difficult to figure out just what they would rather do than sit in a trench.

This is a fresh movie loaded with twists and shifts in the balance of power between the Serb and the Muslim. Filmed largely in Slovenia, which is to the northwest of Bosnia, "No Man's Land," which won the best screenplay award at Cannes, drew an audience of 4,000 to an open-air presentation of the film at the recent Sarajevo Film Festival. It deserves to be widely seen elsewhere as well.

b) By Stephen Holden

In the End, It's About Who Has the Gun

Early in "No Man's Land" two wounded soldiers, one a Bosnian the other a Serb, trapped in a trench midway between opposing enemy lines, argue furiously about which side started the war. Like boys taunting each other in a schoolyard, they hurl mutual accusations until the Bosnian, Ciki (Branko Djuric), who is armed, forces the Serb, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), at gunpoint to say out loud that the Serbs were to blame. Ciki continues to give orders, and when Nino asks why, Ciki growls, "Because I have a gun and you don't."

Later in the film, the roles are reversed, and Nino, who now has the upper hand, parrots Ciki and forces him to admit that the Bosnians started the war. Those words, "Because I have a gun and you don't," which he repeats, say it all about the raw exercise of power in global affairs. Might does make right at least in the short term. And as the movie widens its scope to encompass the outside world's response to this schoolyard squabble, it casts a merciless eye on the studiously neutral, image-conscious role of United Nations forces dispensing humanitarian aid and on the meddlesome media's insatiable appetite for drama.

If Ciki and Nino's tit-for-tat power games suggest that "No Man's Land" is standard comic antiwar satire illustrating the familiar proposition that all men are little boys and all wars school yard quarrels, the movie isn't content to let us off with knowing smiles of comic recognition. "No Man's Land" has been called a comedy, but it is far from a light movie.

Written and directed by Danis Tanovic, a documentary filmmaker from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the movie presents a view of war that is so grimly, insistently realistic that its absurdism hits you in the stomach more than in the funny bone. The only laughter it's likely to evoke is a choked-back chortle of horrified recognition of the fact that in the real world of grown-up combat there are no wise peacemakers to step in and break up the playground fight.

"No Man's Land" uncoils like an elaborate moral riddle whose dimensions widen as the story opens up to bring in forces beyond the trench. Ciki and Nino's power struggle is complicated when Cera (Filip Sovagovic), a compatriot of Ciki's who was shot and presumed dead, unexpectedly stirs to life. His body was placed on an American-made "bouncing mine," a devilish device designed to explode a few feet off the ground and blow up everything in the vicinity.

If Cera is moved, Ciki and Nino will be killed along with him. Since Nino, a new recruit, has no idea of how to deactivate the mine, Cera's only hope is that somewhere, somehow an expert can be found and called to the scene. Until then, he must lie very still, groaning in agony.

Ciki and Nino's only hope of rescue lies in teamwork. At Ciki's instigation, they stagger out of the trench together waving white flags. The United Nations' humanitarian force is alerted, and a global television network, which has been secretly monitoring the United Nations radio communications, dispatches a video crew with instructions to interview the two. The wounded soldiers soon find themselves the helpless pawns of bureaucrats and media companies promoting their own agendas of spin and exploitation.

The director has won several awards for his documentaries and has filmed more than 300 hours of material on the front line at Sarajevo for a Bosnian army film archive. His background explains why "No Man's Land," which was filmed in Slovenia, seems so deeply and painfully authentic.

One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.

Certain performances have a sharper satirical edge than others. Simon Callow's portrayal of Colonel Soft, a supercilious United Nations official who cares only that the organization emerge from the crisis without blemish, is a savage portrait of nervous bureaucratic wheeling and dealing that has little regard for the lives being gambled. His performance is matched in acidic power by Katrin Cartlidge's portrayal of Jane Livingstone, a cold, snippy journalist whose anything-to-get-the- story attitude embodies the unquestioned sense of entitlement that so many television journalists bring to their work.

The trench in which much of the action takes place is situated in the middle of some beautiful rolling countryside. It is summertime. And the movie takes extra care to convey the lushness of nature. As the camera surveys the landscape and at one point looks up to catch the sun disappearing behind a fluffy white cloud, the contrast between this pastoral beauty and the deadly circus below seems grotesque. The sight of wounded, stressed-out human beings at loggerheads, oblivious to the beauty around them, is enough to make you throw up your hands and weep. (December 7, 2001)

8. Dirty Pretty Things (UK 2002) - A film by Steven Frears

Plot Summary
Okwe, a kind-hearted Nigerian doctor, and Senay, a Turkish chambermaid, work at the same West London hotel. The hotel is run by Senor Sneaky and is the sort of place where dirty business like drug dealing and prostitution takes place. However, when Okwe finds a human heart in one of the toilets, he uncovers something far more sinister than just a common crime.

IMDb user comments for Dirty Pretty Things
piers-11 - London, England

Summary: Thriller that makes you think

In the publicity that surrounded the release of this film, Stephen Frears expressed much embarrassment at the suggestion that he might possess any superior or special understanding to the plight of asylum seekers in Britain. After all, his chief role, as he himself has maintained in recent interviews, is not as politico or preacher, but as storyteller. As with the ostensibly 'political' films of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, any sense we might have of outrage at the injustices suffered by the downtrodden of society should be the result of, not the reason for, a story well told.

In Dirty Pretty Things, as with so many of his other films, Stephen Frears' interest lies in steering his audience through an often terrifying moral maze, where the ethical decisions made by his characters determine real, irreversible life changes. Surely it is this attention to the complexities of moral choice that is one of the key driving forces behind a gripping story; and Dirty Pretty Things is certainly that and much more besides.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is hypnotically good as the gentle herb chewing Nigerian illegal immigrant, Okwe, trying to make ends meet as a mini-cab driver by day and a hotel porter by night. Keeping sleepless vigil over his precarious position as a man with no rights, he shares a furtive existence with Turkish asylum seeker, Senay - a heart wrenching performance given by Audrey Tatou. Like Okwe, Senay has had to compromise her dignity for the promise of UK citizenship, working for a pittance as a cleaner at the same hotel.

Unable, in his position, to draw undue attention to himself, Okwe's strong sense of moral duty is seriously challenged when he is confronted with the grisly sight of a human heart blocking the toilets in one of the hotel rooms. His initial attempts to have the incident reported are quickly thwarted by the staggeringly villainous hotel manager, Mr Juan, played with oily precision by Sergi Lopez. How, indeed, can a man with no rights as a citizen go to the police? Driven by a powerful instinct to do good, though, Okwe is almost physically incapable of just standing by and watching. Ignoring the advice of his philosophical friend and chess partner, Guo Yi, that the way of the virtuous man is always beset with danger, he follows a path that leads him through unspeakable horrors to the uncovering of a gruesome and far-reaching underground racket in organ donation. As Okwe and Senay find their very lives come under threat, their relationship deepens into one of the more touching love stories in recent cinema history. One would honestly have to have a heart of stone not to blink at least one tear back as their story reaches its inevitable resolution.

Through a powerful, gripping and touching narrative, Dirty Pretty Things is a film which successfully and unassumingly champions those unseen figures who constitute the base economy that holds our society together ? as Okwe puts it: 'the ones who drive your cabs, who clean your toilets, who suck your dicks'. These are the people whose stories are worth telling - and Stephen Frears should be highly commended for achieving this as effectively as he has. Piers Nightingale (23 August 2004)

One review
By ELVIS MITCHELL

Amid the Luxury, Immigrants in Peril

With "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," the writer Steven Knight conjured up a television show with a rugged punch of a title. It encouraged the worst in contestants, daring them to keep their wits about them while competing in a Dutch-oven environment for the possibility of walking home with up to seven figures in newly disposable income.

By contrast, Mr. Knight's script for "Dirty Pretty Things," a swift, tangy drama with an equally terse title, pits London's illegal immigrants against the alluring hope of propriety. There's no lifeline that's a phone call away, either. The immigrants are expendable manpower in the war to man the mops, kitchens and bottom-drawer duties of the world of luxury hotels, where they are unnoticed by the public and underpaid and overworked by their employers.

This understated and sure film, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is set in a world of survivors, a forgotten group of people struggling to bring in enough income so that they don't become disposable. One of them — the Nigerian Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who drives a cab and also works as a hotel porter under the large thumb of a smooth-operating night manager named Sneaky (Sergi Lopez) — seems to be as haunted as he is obsessed.

Portraying Okwe's plight could help to absolve Mr. Knight of the flame-out success of "Millionaire," which placed a planet-sized karmic debt on the writer's shoulders for sparking the reality show glut. This movie is just the opportunity for Mr. Knight to square that account. It is an urban horror story rendered with grim intelligence by the man with the right tools for the job: the British director Stephen Frears.

Okwe, red-eyed and cruising on minimal energy because he works double shifts, is a doctor on the run from his homeland. The movie doesn't elaborate on the troubles that have sent him so far from home; all we really know is that he has left a wife and a daughter behind, and part of his pain comes from pining for them.

That lingering misery is what keeps him safely on the couch of his Turkish roommate, the virginal Senay (Audrey Tautou), refusing to act on the magnetism that keeps her gazing at him adoringly. He's capable of loyalty to the rest of his ad hoc family: Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), a mortuary attendant, and Juliette (Sophie Okonedo), the dangerously close-to-cliché, lovable hooker. The actress's clever portrayal brings shading and warmth to an otherwise stereotyped part.

"Dirty Pretty Things" suggests a demented sequel to Paul Mazursky's "Moscow on the Hudson," a dog-eared fairy tale in which industry and hard work could deliver refugees from evil, or at least into the middle classes. In "Dirty Pretty Things," diligence is not its own reward. The decent have to fight the treacherous undertow of their employers, as well as opportunistic and predatory immigration agents.

The tactful, adroit Mr. Frears, whose credits include "The Grifters," "High Fidelity" and "Dangerous Liaisons," doesn't overemphasize the acrid, fetid atmosphere of hard-working immigrants clambering from one job to the next to stay alive. The spartan, bleary-eyed plainness of the urban landscape of immigrant London makes the film all the more arresting. Mr. Frears's low-key curiosity toward what drives outsiders is a crucial element that lubricates the tough, noir melodramatics of the narrative engine. (It's good to see Mr. Frears reunited with the immensely gifted cinematographer Chris Menges, who adds a funereal grace to the film.)

As businesslike as the immigrants who work several jobs to stay afloat, "Dirty Pretty Things" grows grimier and more compelling as it builds a head of steam. The movie gets into gear when Okwe, summoned to clean up a blood-drenched hotel suite, fishes an unusual clog out of the room's toilet: a human heart. Eventually he finds a criminal ring that uses immigrants for body parts; they're organ meat in a butcher's window. And unlike the B-picture hysteria of films from the last few years like "The Harvest" (1993) that tried to wring drama from this idea yet underdramatized the surrounding circumstances, "Dirty Pretty Things" plays it straight and cool.

And though it has its share of earnest moments, the movie doesn't sink to gaudy moralizing. Mr. Knight's climactic story-beat achieves its purpose with a minimum of fuss, abetted by the elegant thoughtfulness of Mr. Frears and the no-nonsense charisma of Mr. Ejiofor. After watching Mr. Frears ply his refined skills in mainstream studio fare, it's enthralling to see him employ that jazziness to spark his ticking impatience with injustice. This is a return to the dancing sympathy that suffused Mr. Frears's "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985).

This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start. (Published July 18, 2003)

9. East is East (1999) - A film by Damien O’Donnell

Cultures clash in a most amusing and charming fashion when the British-born children of a traditional Pakistani father start to rebel. When they refuse to go along with arranged marriages, the old and modern worlds are primed for a household confrontation. Om Puri (My Son the Fanatic) gives a wonderful performance as the frustrated, unforgiving father. "Fresh, frank, impudent and self-mocking, it marks a giant leap over the threshold of multicultural casting and ethnic British cinema" (Alexander Walker, The Evening Standard). Damien O'Donnell, 1999 Great Britain - 96 mins.

"East is East" marks the feature-length directorial debut by Damien O'Donnell, and tells the story of the Khan family, a group of people living in 1970s Manchester, England and coping with the social and personal difficulties of biracial and interfaith marriage. George Khan (Om Puri) is a Pakistani immigrant married to Ella (Linda Bassett), a native Anglo. Their marriage and their children face racial prejudice and internal strife as they struggle to find a place for themselves somewhere between the their modern environment and the traditional, Islamic mandates of George's heritage.

The film deals with a very specific group during a very specific time period but, as O'Donnell relates in his description of audience reactions, its message extends beyond those boundaries: "We've had personal reactions from the word. We've had personal reactions from people we auditioned, people who read the script and said that that was their life. [We also had] someone call from a newspaper called the Jewish Exponent, who said, 'Thank you for making a very Jewish film.' It seems to have touched a lot of people — which is great. That's what you want to do, you want to make a film that affects people and that's what's happened."

Before it was affecting film audiences, "East is East " was garnering critical acclaim as a play, written by Ayub Khan Din. O'Donnell's role as director involved translating Din's original theatrical vision into a cinematic production. This process, he explains, allowed him to add depth and complexity to East is East' s characters, particularly George, the father. About the tyrannical yet tortured figure, O'Donnell says, "The problem about the play was that you didn't get an insight into his motivations. I felt it had to be more ambiguous than it was in the play; it had to be less clear-cut, because life is like that."

The film portrays its characters' ambiguities in part by oscillating between humor and dramatic action, creating a problem of labeling the project according to conventional film genres. O'Donnell says, "We're dealing with racism. We're dealing with the tension between Indian and Pakistani, but we do it in the film with humor because I think that's a great way to make a point. I wouldn't want to see a heavy film about these topics." Still, the director is quick to point out that humor is only a portion of the story-telling process involved in East is East: "It would be bad to describe this film as a comedy. I still don't know how to describe it." For O'Donnell, such elusiveness is precisely the point. Just as his characters resist racial classification, the film itself is hard to label. O'Donnell sees this as a positive aspect, saying, "Everyone's so familiar with the rules now, that you can break them and surprise people by it. I like films that play on people's expectations." While East is East challenges audiences with its combinations of generic conventions and racial identifications, O'Donnell also believes that it provides an entertaining, and revealing, depiction of a family at odds with its surroundings and with each other. If O'Donnell's film touches audiences, though, it is the result of staying true to the spirit of "East is East"'s original material. For O'Donnell, "Filmmaking is a small group of people working together as a team, following an idea and hoping that idea will appeal to people." He adds that any positive reaction (critical or popular) to East is East is not the result of any artistic compromise or sacrifice for ratings: "I don't believe in changing things to suit the public's taste."

At the same time, O'Donnell is acutely aware of how the viewers of his work will decide the success or failure of "East is East". For the director, the finished product lies entirely in the eyes of its beholders. A film, ultimately," the director holds, "is as much about the audience as it is about what's on the screen. If you don't have people watching it, it doesn't exist, and the less [people] you have watching it, the less of an impact it will make — cinema is about that communal environment." For the director, community is central to "East is East", both for the family it portrays and for the audience members who watch the film. As O'Donnell puts it, "I always say that once you make a film and show it, that becomes the property of the audience and your opinion doesn't count anymore." Judging from the positive reception of critics and popular audiences, Damien O'Donnell's "East is East" is in good hands.

Dubliner Damien O'Donnell's Unique Directions with "East is East"

By Aaron Krach (indieWIRE/4.17.2000)

"East is East" is equal parts comedy and drama, about a mixed-race family (Pakistani father, Om Puri and a white mother, Linda Bassett) trying to find a multi-cultural middle ground for their five children in a London suburb, circa 1972. The film began its life as a successful play written by Ayub Khan-Din, (star of Stephen Frears' "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid"), who also wrote the screenplay.

Irish and living in Dublin, O'Donnell wasn't the obvious choice to direct a film about South Asian immigrants. indieWIRE sat down with O'Donnell a week before the BAFTA Awards were given out to talk about the "East is East" phenomena.

indieWIRE: Did you ever wonder if you were the right person to direct this film?

Damien O'Donnell: Yes. At one stage I agreed to direct the film, but then started to worry. I worried about it being about an environment that was alien to me. I then became intimidated and had a confidence crisis. I wrote a letter declining, saying I didn't think I was right for the job. I put the fax in the machine and went to the pub. I felt a great weight lifted off of me and started to think about the film in a different way. I even started to regret sending that fax. But when I went back to the office the next day, the fax was still sitting in the machine 'cause it hadn't gone through. I decided to take that as a sign I should do the film.

iW: Judging by the six BAFTA nods, the British Academy loved your film. What was the public's reaction?

O'Donnell: It was no blockbuster, but it did very well. It opened on the same day as "The Sixth Sense." I remember so clearly because we were looking for dates and the distributor said, "We're going to open on November 5th because nothing is really opening that day, only some Bruce Willis action movie. Nobody is going to go see that." And well, "Sixth Sense" has gone on to become a complete phenomenon. But "East is East" stayed in the charts for like 16 weeks.

iW: Do you think the popularity represents an opening in British audience's minds to non-white films?

O'Donnell: Yeah. This would definitely be considered a crossover hit. Apart from "My Beautiful Laundrette," a lot of films with Asian subjects were flops. Even a film like, "My Son The Fanatic," which was a good film, flopped. We knew "East is East" would be a cross over because we actually did a test screening. The audience for which was about 15 percent Asian and the rest White. When we looked at the scorecards both groups liked it equally as much. They both 'got it.'

iW: Why do you think it crossed over, because it was a period piece? Because of the music being so catchy?

O'Donnell: I don't think it was the music, which I love. I think it was the humor. I think that is the real thing about it and that is also the trouble with this film. How do you market it? I hate the posters here [in the States] and I hated the posters in England. Here the poster is of one of the white girls blowing a bubble.

(Two examples of "Indesirable Otherness" : From Belgium
1. La Promesse (1996) - A film by Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne

Plot Summary
Igor and his father, Roger, are making a decent living renting apartments to illegal immigrants and sometimes working them illegally (among other scams). But when the building inspector pays a surprise visit and Amidou falls off a scaffold in his hurry to hide, things start to unravel, particularly when Igor makes a promise to the injured Amidou that ultimately exposes the different values of Igor and Roger, and of Amidou's wife, Assita.

Summary: A Belgian masterwork
The first ten minutes were not exactly promising! I remember thinking, another hand-held camera job, this time set in the back streets of a Belgian industrial city - yet another rite of passage tale - unprepossessing youth steals a pensioner's handbag from a car in the garage where he works, while his father, a squint-eyed, piggy-faced fatty, runs a racket fleecing illegal immigrants from the Balkans and Africa. However what is wholly remarkable about "La Promesse" is the way it slowly sucks the viewer into a realisation that this is not just a piece of documentary-style realism but an uncompromisingly honest study of character and conscience. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that no other film new to British TV last year moved or excited me as much. The performance by Jérémie Renier as the youth Igor is a tour-de-force. He is on screen for practically the entire film and it is his search for integrity after a dying African (one of his father's "clients") exacts from him a promise to assist his wife and baby, that forms the work's core. Igor has to come to terms with alienating his father, who, although a selfish and dishonest brute, has real affection for his son; parental/filial warmth is displayed when they drunkenly sing together in a café. But what the film finally says with such devastating certainly is that even integrity is something that can go unappreciated and ignored by the one towards whom it is intended. The ending speaks of a terrible price paid for redemption. (25 April 2002)

Four Reviews

a) By Kennth Turan Times Film Critic

Moral Rebellion at Heart of La Promesse

Morality is a given in the movies; everyone, even the worst of creatures, knows if they're bad or good. In "La Promesse," an exceptional film from Belgium, all of that is reversed as a sense of right and wrong struggles to emerge in a young man who never knew there was a difference. The conflicts involved are intense and absorbing, proving that compelling moral dilemmas make for the most dramatic cinema. An exciting discovery at both last year's Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, "La Promesse" makes being politically relevant and philosophically thoughtful so simple and involving that the story seems to be telling itself.

Written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, a pair of filmmaking brothers, it is made with such unobtrusive sureness that it's able to exert great power without forcing anything. Though relatively new to features, the Dardenne brothers have 20 years of documentary work in Belgium behind them, and their use of hand-held cameras and probing close-ups gives "La Promesse" the urgency and immediacy of total authenticity. Toss in unknown but persuasive actors and characters whose reality is unmistakable and you get an idea why this film is as bracing as it is. "La Promesse" is set on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Liège and centers on a 15-year-old apprentice auto mechanic named Igor . An opportunistic sneak thief and smooth liar, Igor is like a small animal with dirty blond hair, casually amoral because in his world the opposite has never been presented as an option.

Igor's universe is completely controlled by his father, Roger (Belgian stage actor Olivier Gourmet). A pudgy, bearded and petty despot, Roger has a lie or a threat or a beating for every occasion. Hot-tempered, violent, a master of casual betrayals, Roger puts together scams without end, but he also cares for his son and values their almost symbiotic relationship. Roger's business is dealing in illegal immigrants--Turks, Ghanaians, Romanians and Koreans--who sneak into Belgium looking for a better life. Roger hides them in a clandestine rooming house, charging them exorbitant fees for false identity papers while collaborating with the police when a raid is needed to satisfy the local politicians.

In all of this, Igor, made in his father's image and hardened by sharing his lifestyle, is a willing second-in-command. Part man, part boy, he spends the spare moment when he's not conniving with the old man putting together a go-kart with his young friends. Igor's life begins to change when Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her small child arrive from Burkina Faso to join husband and father Hamidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo) in Roger's boarding house. Assita's individuality intrigues Igor, and then a jolt of fate shoves their lives closer. Hamidou has an accident working illegally, Roger refuses to take him to the hospital, and he dies after making Igor agree to take care of his wife and child, the promise of the title. It's difficult to do justice to how subtly the film develops from here, how unflinching it depends on documentary-style realism and expressive faces to make its points. Though the question of romance never arises, Igor becomes increasingly protective of Assita, which puts him in conflict with his father, the only person who's ever cared about him. It's a predicament that is as difficult as it is compelling.

La Promesse's actors have differing levels of experience, with Jérémie Renier, an impressive natural, having the least and Assita Ouedraogo (whose first trip to Europe was to make this film) having appeared in three films of fellow countryman Idrissa Ouedraogo. But they all work so seamlessly here we feel we're eavesdropping on a moral rebellion that is being played out for the highest possible stakes. Among the many things it does right, "La Promesse" refuses to even consider glib solutions. This film understands that moral choices are a painful, troublesome business, that decisions to do the right thing are not simple to take and hardly make things easier. Nothing in life takes more courage, and no kind of filmmaking offers greater rewards.

b) By James Berardinelli

"La Promesse", a rare import from Belgium, indicates how grim the mood of a film can become when there's almost no comic relief. Excepting one or two moments of gallows humor, there's little to break the relentlessly bleak tone. Fortunately, the script is written with such intelligence and the characters are developed so believably that, irrespective of the downbeat approach (or, perhaps, because of it), it's difficult not to be moved by the plight of 15-year old Igor (an unforced performance by newcomer Jérémie Renier), who is trapped into choosing between his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), and the demands of his conscience.

When the film opens, Igor is already wise beyond his years. He's an active participant in his father's shady, "immigration service" business. Roger is one of those crooks who makes his money by preying onthe desperation of others. For exorbitant fees, he smuggles illegal immigrants into Belgium, forges false work permits for them, and sets them up in slum-like apartments (for which he charges unreasonably high rents). Many of the immigrants also work at Roger's construction site, where they are paid a pittance for hard, occasionally-dangerous work. Igor, who also works as an apprentice at a garage, serves as his father's assistant, and has learned to lie, cheat, and steal just as well as his old man.

In addition to being a criminal, Roger is also a bully. When his son does something to displease him, he beats him mercilessly. Despite all that, there's little doubt that he loves Igor, although he's unable to express his affection effectively. In addition, he has trained himself to objectify the men and women he smuggles into the country, adopting the same basic philosophy as the Belgian police: "Illegals don't exist." To Roger, the immigrants are a less-than-human source of income, and that is a philosophy he attempts to pass on. (This reminded me of a subplot in John Singleton's Rosewood in which a father taught racism to his son.)

Dad's lessons are leaving an impression upon Igor until an event occurs that forces him to re- evaluate what he has learned. One of Roger's workers, Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), falls from a scaffold and is critically injured. As he lies dying, he extracts a promise from Igor to care for his wife, Assita (played with quiet dignity by Assita Ouedraogo), and infant boy, both newly arrived from Bugina Faso. Rather than taking Amidou to a hospital (where all sorts of difficult questions would arise), Roger elects to let the man bleed to death, then buries him under a thick layer of cement. He encourages Igor to forget the incident, but the boy cannot, and his attempts to honor his promise to the dying Amidou generate friction between himself and his father. Worse still, Assita is often a grudging, if not openly unwilling, recipient of Igor's aid.

Essentially, La Promesse is a variation of that motion picture staple, the "coming of age" story. The difference here, however, is that the choices faced by Igor are more complex than is the norm. Becoming an adult does not mean, as his father asserts, learning how to drive and "getting laid" -- it means assessing the value of his word and heeding the call of his conscience, regardless of the price. No matter what Igor does, he will betray someone -- the crux of the matter for him is determining which betrayal he can live with. Although La Promesse presents a resolution, it makes it clear that there are no easy answers for Igor or for us.

As directed by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (who have been making documentaries in their native country for more than two decades), "La Promesse" has a "you are there" style that favors a cinéma-vérité approach to polished photography. In concert with a quartet of natural performances and a persuasive, insightful script, this method results in a film that one could easily accept as non-fiction. Indeed, while this particular story is an invention of the writer/directors, a host of universal truths can be found just beneath the surface.

"La Promesse" is designed to challenge an audience. There are numerous instances throughout when viewers will find themselves wondering what they would do in similar circumstances. On each of these occasions, the directors proceed in a logical, intelligent manner, and rarely stray into melodrama (although there are a few minor slips here and there). Despite being a low-key production, "La Promesse" speaks volumes about how we treat other human beings and what it means to truly grow up.

c) By Edwin Jahiel

Those whose Latin extends beyond "E Pluribus Unum" might just remember "homo homini lupus" (man is a wolf to man). That's what the first part of "La Promesse" tells us. But it is followed by "homo homini agnus" (man is a lamb to man). At least that's my reading of the third feature by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. The movie, premiered in a parallel section of the 1996 Cannes Festival, has been highly praised by American reviewers. It is mostly set in or near the city of Liège (Belgium). It is essentially a two plus two character drama. The first duo consists of young Igor and his father Roger. Igor is 15 -- as per information I gleaned in various documents. (The film proper is rather frustratingly vague about times, places and other factual information).

The boy, already a heavy smoker and beer guzzler, but still a virgin, is something of a Peeping Tom, works in a gas station as an apprentice mechanic. He swipes the customers' wallets and shows up at the station fitfully --which results in his dismissal. Igor is his father's main helper in an illegal operation of illegal immigrant workers, African, Eastern European, Korean, etc., whom the ring, for a high price, spirits into Belgium hidden inside automobiles carries on car-transport vehicles. Then Roger, charging outrageously again, gets the immigrants fake papers and houses them in stinking, disgusting hovels within decrepit buildings. The traffickers know no decency. When, for example, there is political pressure on the gang, the operators sacrifice some of the aliens by pretending they'll be sent to America (after due payment), but betray them to the authorities.

The story then focuses on an African couple (Amidou and Assita) and their baby. Amidou, working for Roger, falls off a scaffolding and dies, but not before exacting from Igor the promise that he will watch over Assita and her child. Since the body would cause an investigation, father and son dispose of it by burial in concrete. (It was unclear to me whether or not Amidou might have survived if taken to a hospital -- which Roger refused to do as unsafe for his business. So Amidou's death, may have to a killing by omission). The man's death is not revealed to his wife. She is told instead that Amidou had disappeared, run off perhaps to avoid paying debts. Roger now tries to get rid of Assita by sending her to nearby Cologne (Germany) where he would arrange for the woman to work as a prostitute.

About 40 minutes into the movie, Igor begins to feel pangs of guilt that keep increasing. He defies his father and attempts to come to the woman's help. The process of a rising conscience and consciousness takes up the rest of the film. It is intermingled with some local touches of racism and xenophobia. The entire process is filmed like a documentary, with a constantly mobile, moving and often handheld camera. There is obviously a desire by the filmmakers to keep a realistic look and tone, which is understandable and adds power to the movie. This technique is valid in principle. It distances the work from the smooth and slick Hollywood-type films. But it often goes overboard and could induce fatigue in the viewers. A modicum of using the Steadycam system might have helped. ( This gyroscope-like method, introduced in the mid-70s, puts a special harness on the operator and allows moving the machine without jiggling). The episodes are done with naturalness, economical dialogue and no traditional verbal elaboration. The burden is on telling details, on implications and on the facial expressions of the performers. Roger, and above all Igor, acquit themselves nicely, with the latter's gradual transformation following a credible development.

"La Promesse" is as far as one can go from commercial movies. It is well-meaning but also well-handled, never showing any traces of glop, sentimentalizing or romanticizing. Among its virtues is that if you imagine that this subject had been filmed in routine ways, it might have made of Assita a colorful --perhaps even wise -- character. Here, she is rather attractive but, like her drab surroundings, a sad figure. In a good touch, to find out if her husband is alive or dead, she consults the entrails of a chicken and later is taken by an older African lady to a witch doctor.

Both Assita and Amidou come from Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta), a small, poor country where, surprisingly, there is Africa's greatest ferment of movie-making, partly encouraged by the regular Pan African festivals in Ouagadougou, the capital. Director Idrissa Ouedraogo, a winner of major awards (e.g. at Cannes) is widely known internationally. Their real family names of Assita and Amidou are also Ouedraogo. It mustbe Burkina Faso's equivalent of Smith or Jones or else Idrissa's dozens of relatives have made it in cinema. A year or two ago, when Idrissa's latest film was shown at the Cannes Festival, the credits had such an unending list of Ouedraogos that at the press screening the critics kept bursting into laughter exponentially.

d) By Stephen Holden

Almost everyone should be able to identify with the wrenching moral quandary facing Igor (Jérémie Renier), the 15-year-old protagonist of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's casually devastating film 'La Promesse.' A skinny blond youth who has barely entered adolescence, Igor works for his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), in a construction business outside Antwerp, Belgium, that employs and ruthlessly exploits illegal immigrants.

The labor force that Roger supervises with an iron hand comes from all over the world. Once the workers have arrived at a building site, which also serves as their housing, they discover that their living expenses, including 'rent,' groceries and flimsy gas heating are deducted from their wages at gouging prices determined by Roger.

One day when government labor inspectors appear at the site, Hamidu (Rasmane Ouedraogo), an immigrant from Burkina Faso who has recently arrived with his wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), and their baby, tumbles from a scaffold and lies mortally injured. Coming upon him, Igor frantically drags Hamidu out of sight, and in his final words the dying man elicits a promise from the boy to look after his wife and baby.

When Igor begs his father to take Hamidu to the hospital, Roger, knowing that his business would be imperiled by an official investigation, forces his son to help him hide the body and then bury it in cement. From this moment, the conscience-stricken youth vacillates between loyalty to his father, who is loving but sometimes physically brutal to him, and the desire to carry out his promise to Hamidu.

'La Promesse,' casts a critical journalistic eye on European multiculturalism and the escalating hostility toward immigrants, especially Africans. What it sees is a Darwinian survival struggle.

As Roger goes to great lengths to cover up his crime, and Igor tries to salve his conscience by doing favors for Assita while keeping the truth from her, the dead man's wife finds herself besieged with lies. To get on Assita's good side, Roger secretly arranges her attempted rape, then breaks in just in time to save her. Later, he fakes a telegram to Assita from Hamidu instructing her to join him in Cologne.

When Assita consults an African spiritualist for news of her husband, the seer confuses her with information that conflicts with Roger's deceptions. Her confusion turns into panic when her baby comes down with a dangerously high fever. Eventually, Igor is forced to make a choice between the father who has encouraged him to lie and steal and assuaging his guilty conscience by continuing to help Assita, of whom he has grown fond. The scene in which he makes that choice is one of the saddest and scariest father-son confrontations ever filmed.

The movie's portrayal of racist xenophobia is all the more disturbing for its matter-of-factness. In one scene, the distraught Assita, her sick baby strapped to her back, waits under a bridge from which two men urinate on her. The portrayal of the immigrants is untainted by sentimentality. These are not plaintively wide-eyed peasants shivering helplessly in the cold, but tough, wily laborers who gamble and even sell their bodies to get ahead. They know exactly what they're up against. And their reactions to Roger's outrageous exploitation are angrily combative.

The integrity of the film, whose directorial team has collaborated on numerous Belgian documentaries, extends to its sad final moments, in which nothing is left neat and tidy. The moral choices we make, the movie suggests, don't result in orderly conclusions. They go on reverberating, setting off complicated chain reactions over which we have no control.(October 7, 1996).

2. From Spain: Letters from Alou (1990) - A film by Montxo Armendariz

Tells the story of Alou, an African immigrant, who works his way to Barcelona, where he is due to meet up with a friend. The exploitation and discrimination he faces are accurately documented. Spanish, French and Senegalese with English subtitles

“Racism examined in Letters from Alou “
by Lisa Flores

Racism seems to exist in all "civilized" countries yet unlike America countries such as Spain do not openly discuss the problem. Although topics such as drug addiction, homosexuality, violence and promiscuity are openly discussed and explored in modern Spanish film, racism has not been tackled by many cinematographers. One exemption that deserves considerable recognition is Montxo Armendariz and his movie Cartas de Alou, in English Letters from Alou.

This movie won the best film award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1990 for its realism in depicting the story of an African immigrant in Spain. Through the eyes of Alou we see blatant discrimination and racism is prevalent in Spain.

The movie "Letters from Alou" deals with a prevalent problem within Spanish society, racism. Although Spaniards think of themselves as liberal, racism is still widespread. Blacks are not readily accepted in modern Spanish society and this is apparent in Letters from Alou. Through the eyes of Alou we learn about the struggles of blacks in Spain.

Alou's character is an African immigrant who has illegally traveled to Spain in search of a better life. His goal is to save money and return to Africa with the means of improving his life. Spain offers opportunities for many Africans who struggle in their countries, unfortunately they are usually not aware of the opposition they will face in Spain. Alou is a decent hard working man without any devious intentions but this is not how he is perceived by Spaniards. Although he is willing to perform tasks that Spaniards would not do for such low pay, he is not seen as an asset but as a threat. African and Arab immigrants are only accepted in inferior positions and when they attempt to assert themselves they are confronted with the dim reality that success is limited for them. For instance Alou is initially accepted by the bar owner until he finds out that Alou is involved with his daughter. The bar owner is not only racist himself but he is dealing with the reality that Spanish society is more racist. He knows that his daughter will never be accepted if she is with a black man.

Alou is the essence of innocence and he experiences the pains that goes along with not being prejudice or bias. The game of checkers Alou plays with the bar owner symbolically represents the struggle between blacks and whites. Alou wins the game against the white owner which illustrates Alou's intelligence but this quality is not acknowledged in other areas. Despite his good qualities he struggles to be accepted as an individual and not simply as the "negro".

It is interesting that Alou easily befriends Arabs and other Africans. There is a sincere camaraderie between these men. They are all considered the outcasts or rejects of society and they decide to bond together in the struggle. Alou displays his good nature in prayers with his Arab friend and in his emotions towards his deceased African friend. His heart is gentle and perhaps more pure and loving than most of the Spaniards he encounters.

Letters from Alou gives us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in an African immigrants life from an unbiased perspective. Through his thoughts, experiences and letters home we come to think of his as a person not as a character and we can sympathize. His struggle to be accepted in society is real. Even when he is deported back to Africa he makes the long dangerous journey back to Spain and he is optimistic about his future there. He sees the pure beauty of Spain that is hidden behind the racism. Alou is the symbol of the new Spain, full of struggle and hope.

Interviews (Most of the below information has been translated.)

Maria (21 years old)
QWhat is your opinion concerning the situation of racism in Spain today?
A. I think it is obvious that racism exists in Spain. Perhaps it is not as bad in Madrid where I have lived but it is definitely a serious issue in the small towns. The only time you really see black people is when they are selling something on the street or maybe doing menial jobs. There are many Africans is Spain but those blacks who are "natives" have a rough time as well. It is still not really acceptable to have a black boyfriend at least not one that you can take home to your parents. I have lived in both Madrid and NYC and it is sad to have to admit that racism is more apparent in Spain. It is not really discussed but it is definitely felt.

Victor (late forties)
Q. Do you think there is a problem with racism in Spain?
A. I grew up during Franco's time when things were different. Spain is democratic now and things are crazy. I mean I partied when I was young but it is all too much now. Blacks are all over in Spain and they are with people and there is no problem. I don't think racism exists in Spain. Everyone has the same rights now. In Madrid you see many blacks everyday. I have no problem with them being there as long as my daughter doesn't come home with one. It is not like NYC where there is always some black person complaining of racism. Spaniards are good people, maybe they don't love blacks but that is not the same as racism.

Victoria (early seventies)
Q. Do you think blacks are accepted in Spain?
A. I’m not sure. I’ve heard people like my granddaughter say that there is racism here but I don't really believe so. There are "morros" and "negros" all over the place now. Spain lets so many of them in. You can't get on the metro or go to the plaza without seeing some selling some junk. Today you even see young girls with them. My daughter had an Arab boyfriend once and my husband was not happy about it but that is not really racism that is just a preference. Now Spain is so liberal I can't believe there could be racism. I mean you can see the homosexuals all the time and they are accepted so I guess the blacks are too. I don't know everything is so different now. Democracy has changed the Spain I used to know but luckily I am close to my end so this world is no longer mine it belongs to the young people.

Conclusion

It is obvious that the older generation is not in touch with Spain's problems. Nostalgia and denial are to blame. When I was in Spain I could sense the problem but I was not fully aware of it either because I am not black and did not experience any racial problems. African Americans who have traveled to Spain all say they experienced racism. Letters from Alou is a great movie because it shows us the problem. Spain has undergone many socio-political changes in a short period of time and democracy has not caught up to racism. The key is to raise awareness among the younger generation in hopes of eliminating racism for future generations. Academics in Spain do not really examine racism as it pertains to Spain but rather as it pertains to Europe but through literature and cinema there is awareness, confrontation, and discussion. Spain is a country that has proven it can undergo rapid change in a relevantly prosperous manner therefore the future looks bright when it comes to racism and other social issues in Spain.

“Xenophobia and Racism in Contemporary Spanish Cinema”

Ever since Spain embarked on the cultural voyage of rescuing its European condition, with 1992 as a symbol to mark this outward mission, most of the country's efforts have been directed toward its political, economic, social and intellectual integration into Western Europe. Spain's political move to the right in the 1900's with regard to immigration policy comes as no surprise, since it mirrors Europe's restrictive policies that began in the 1980's (Agap 1997:138). (1) In spite of recent declarations of good will toward illegal immigrants on the part of British and Spanish political leaders, Western Europe's supranational identity is becoming increasingly dependent on the cultural and racial barricade, or what is popularly referred to as "Fortress Europe." (2) "Spain has to protect its own borders," stated in 1998 Enrique Beaumud, a Spanish government representative in Melilla, adding: "And we also have a big responsibility towards Europe. We can't let Ceuta and Melilla become trampolines to get into Spain" (García-Zarza 2000).

Scholarly works show that immigration is not a pressing political or social problem in Spain, where foreign migrant workers only comprise a small percentage of the population (Mendoza 1997: 51, 71; Apap 1997: 147). (3) In spite of this, the media often conveys the distorted and frightful idea that Spain is undergoing a veritable invasion from the South. Telling metaphors in newspaper headlines such as: "Immigrants: the tide grows: Each year the Number of African who Try to Enter Europe Grows (Inmigrantes 1999)" suggests that there are hordes of unskilled, poor, black, Arab or Latin American immigrants who are destitute and desperate to reach the European Promised Land by way of Spain. Although exaggerated, the alarmist response found in press releases and also in isolated instances of anti-immigration violence in different parts of Spain is nonetheless indicative of a xenophobic mentality that has dangerous implications for Spaniards, for marginal groups within Spain, and for the immigrant population to which their country is host. There are at least forty different neo-nazi groups in Spain today, a fact that explains such fears as the one expressed by Esteban Ibarra, President of Youth Against Intolerance, when he states that "a new generation of extremists could resurface in Spain, boosted by the strengthening of the organized right in Europe (Qassim 1998)."

It is this same xenophobic attitude that several prominent Spanish filmmakers such as Montxo Armendáriz (Cartas de Alou, 1990), Imanol Uribe (Bwana, 1996), Carlos Saura (Taxi, 1996) and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (Cosas que dejé en La Habana, 1998) have sought to expose and combat. Focusing on Spain's conversion from an exporter to a receiver of migrant workers, these films function as a fictional mirror in which Spaniards can critically look at themselves face to face with the racial, economic, national, political, religious and gendered Other. Guillermo Gómez-Peña's (1993:47) observation regarding Hispanic immigrants in the United States applies to the Spain of the nineties: "Fear is the sign of the times...They are scared of us, the other, taking over their country, their jobs, their neighborhoods...To them, 'we' are a whole package." As we shall see, these films call first and foremost for acceptance of the migrant and the marginal subject on the part of the intended Spanish audience, and ultimately question the legitimacy of racial isolationism for the purpose of constructing an idealized supranational European identity. (4)

Winner of the San Sebastian Film Festival Golden Seashell award in 1996, Imanol Uribe's cinematic adaptation of Ignacio del Moral's 1992 play La mirada del hombre oscuro [The Look of the Dark Man] was hailed as a breakthrough for "its loud and clear criticism of xenophobia European-style (Bwana 2000:2)." The fact that Bwana was shot in Almería, in the extreme southeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, adds an important dimension to the film's treatment of xenophobia. Given its position, Almería constitutes one of the European frontiers with Africa and thus lends itself to the metaphorical border police function, which is inscribed in the film's theme.

In the film, Antonio, his wife Dori, and their children leave behind the city in search of a restful day on the beach. The family makes a stop at an isolated restaurant, where the owners begin to harass and poke fun at Antonio, a city dweller that they consider worthy of scorn, especially because he is a taxi driver. Antonio's first brush with danger is repeated when, believing that he has lost his way, he approaches a lone recreational vehicle in the middle of the wilderness. The occupants are a trio of skinheads, two Germans and a Spaniard, who use English as their common language. In what turns out to be the first of several encounters with this group, Antonio finds the trio engaged in strenuous physical exercise. Later on, the exercise takes the form of hand-to-hand combat, a second stage of physical training that will prepare the skinheads for their "police work."

Enforcers of racial codes and boundaries, the skinheads will punish the transgression of a white woman, swimming nude with a black man. The woman in question is Dori and her accomplice is Ombasi, an African immigrant who has had to complete the last leg of his illegal journey to Spain by swimming to shore. (5) Ombasi's partner, whose dead body lies on the beach, calls to mind the many immigrants who attempt to reach Spain and die in the process. The skinheads arrive at the scene of the "crime" on motorcycles, wearing helmets and equipped with clubs, all of which, on a visual level, reinforce their symbolic status as law enforcement agents. Their role is not limited to that of policeman; they are also jury and executioner. One of them asks, " What's the penalty for a fucking nigger swimming naked with a white girl?" to which another answers, "castration."

The intervention of the skinheads is foreshadowed on three separate occasions. When Antonio first encounters Ombasi, he says: "Get out of here or I'll call the police." In a later scene we hear him say, " When we find the police, this bastard will get what's coming to him." The call to law enforcement is reiterated by Antonio's wife, who states: "We'll have to tell the police [about Ombasi] when we see them." The desire of the couple is ironically and symbolically fulfilled by the skinheads who assume the role of the Spanish police.

It can be argued that Antonio and Dori never intend for Ombasi to be, more than likely, brutally castrated by the skinheads, but by abandoning him and refusing to rescue him from his ruthless pursuers, they are doing precisely that. The couple is fully aware of the fate that awaits Ombasi, and their failure to act thus takes on the meaning of a tacit approval of his complete elimination. This underlying desire is voiced by Dori earlier when, contemplating the negative turn of events, she focuses her attention on Ombasi. "It's all his fault," she says. " We were happy until he appeared. Why did he come?" Ombasi's fate also has implications for the spectators since, as Isabel Santaolalla (1999:122) observes, they identify with the Spanish family and thus "must share the responsibility for the black man's tragedy."

Ombasi presents a twofold threat. In a more obvious, and superficial way he has the potential of taking work away from Spaniards; but the more poignant danger he embodies has to do with sexuality. He is viewed as a rival of the white male, which includes not only the German and Spanish skinheads, but also, and just as importantly, Antonio himself. This becomes clear in Antonio's reaction to seeing his wife swimming with Ombasi. He discloses his feelings to his son, to whom he says, "what your mother is going to get is a good beating." Antonio's reaction betrays a racist mentality and situates him on the same level as the violent skinheads, who appear at the beach at this very point in the film. Later, as the couple makes their escape, Antonio's desire for punishment and retribution is fulfilled through the skinheads.

In the 1990 film Cartas de Alou, another winner of the Golden Seashell award, the message that director Montxo Armendáriz presents us is essentially the same. In this case, the xenophobic reaction is directed against the illegal African Muslim immigrants. Here, the Sengalese protagonist Alou falls in love with and has an affair with Carmen, the daughter of a Spanish bar owner. Disapproving of the relationship, the father issues a strong warning to Alou. After spending one of several clandestine Sundays with her black lover, Carmen announces that she will reveal the truth to her father. Alou, worried about the possible consequences of their secret meetings, counsels Carmen to be careful. Later, at the train station, while Alou waves to Carmen and watches the train leave, he is arrested by the police. It is worth noting that he is not apprehended by the police while engaged in illegal work such as peddling jewelry, picking fruit, or operating a sewing machine. (6) Although Alou is presumably arrested for not having an approved work contract, the film points to another reason why he must be deported. His arrest comes at the very point that his relationship with Carmen threatens to become visibly real, which has clear, racist implications.

In his last of a series of letters that function as a voice-over commentary throughout the film Alou writes: "I ask myself, why don't they accept me? Why do they treat me like a thief? They say Blacks sell drugs. If some do, that's no reason to accuse all of us. We trouble them, that's why they kick us out. They don't like us, but they won't tell us why." The course of events, as we have seen, provides the attentive viewer of the film with a concrete answer to Alou's poignant question, one that is based on the sexual threat that he poses. The film also offers a more general response: a reluctance on the part of Spanish society to give equal status to a person of a different color, language and religion. In this respect, the admonishment by Alou's landlady that "here we speak a Christian language," is revealing because it evokes the historical period of the Reconquest, with its emphasis on ousting all non-Christians in the name of racial and cultural purity. The Spanish xenophobic attitude towards Alou that results in open discrimination when Alou is refused service in a bar, is shown even more clearly in the scene of the fruit grove. Here, Alou is forbidden from consuming the very fruit that he and other migrant workers pick. "Hey you, Blackie! If you want to eat pears, take them from the ground," the Spanish grower tells him.

One of the most striking aspects of the film is the inability of the people with whom Alou comes into contact to call him by his name, which would signify acceptance. Throughout the film, Alou is referred to with the Spanish equivalents of "You," "Darkie," "Black," and "Baltasar." (7) An individual identity is also denied to Alou's compatriot Mulai in spite of the fact that he is a legal resident and has a Spanish wife. When Alou first meets up with Mulai, he is surprised to learn that his friend is known by Spaniards as "Johnny." Commenting on this, Mulai states: "People here know me by that name. Mulai is too difficult for them. Johnny is pretty and sounds good. They learn it [the name] easily." Revealingly, Mulai has not been given an easily pronounceable Spanish name such as "Juan" or "Juanito", which suggests that he is not completely accepted into Spanish society either. (8) The importance of identity and acceptance comes to the foreground earlier in the film, when we hear Alou reading a letter he had written to Mulai. The letter describes the reaction of Alou's mother upon hearing that her son is leaving for Spain. In voice-over, we hear Alou transcribe part of the dialogue between him and his mother: "Don't cry. I'm not your only son. The other six are staying here. She looked at me sadly and said: None of them have your voice or your name." (9) As the film shows, it is precisely a voice and a name that Alou is denied by a society intent on policing its borders and keeping out the feared Other.

Carlos Saura's Taxi, released in 1996, reflects a general concern with the racist and xenophobic agenda of modern European neo-fascism, but with a Spanish twist: a lingering fear of the Spanish far-right's potential rise to power. Following a thriller format, the film focuses on a band of taxi drivers with ideological ties to a Spanish far-right group (the Falange) that take it upon themselves to clear the streets of marginal characters whom they perceive as a threat to supposedly eternal Spanish values. These groups include homosexuals, drug addicts, poor foreigners and blacks. The night-time taxi drivers--three middle-aged men and one woman who call themselves "the family"--roam the streets of Madrid actively seeking out passengers whom they have classified as trash to be disposed of by way of murder. The "family" label their victims as either "mierda" (shit), "carne" (meat) or "pescado" (fish), code words for blacks, drug addicts and homosexuals. The band's grisly undertakings are explicitly shown in several scenes that confirm just how far hate towards the Other can go. Several graphically violent images of the group's endeavors assault the spectator from the onset and set the dark tone of the film. These images include a young woman plunging to her death from the so-called "bridge of Segovia," a downtown spot notorious for suicide attempts; the decomposing body of a transvestite hanging from a crane, significantly set up against a luminous Royal Palace; and the bleeding head of a dead man. Taxi's "in your face" display of brutality and low regard for human life as depicted in the actions of characters that are middle-aged Spanish men and women serves to shatter the popularly held opinion that Spaniards are not racist.

The film's political agenda is so powerful that it usurps the central love story plot. In this respect, Taxi has been criticized as being heavy handed in its crystal clear anti-fascist message (Jordan 1998:100; Cimmino 1999:2). Yet, it is precisely the film's emphatic denunciation of xenophobia and racism in the Spain of the nineties that gives the film its cultural importance. The racism is tellingly revealed in a sequence that describes Paz's discovery of the meaning of la familia, of which her father and boyfriend Dani are a part. A montage of images and scenes aptly convey the nightmarish quality of a dream that has disrupted the young woman's sleep. One of the images shows someone writing graffiti on a wall, which consists of the words Europa Blanca followed by a swastika.

Crucial to the understanding of the film's political message is the intergenerational transformation and assimilation of ultraconservative values. How these ultra-right-wing ideas are passed down to a new generation shows a Spanish intent on becoming European while trying to retain a unique Spanish character. The inevitable generation gap that exists between the twenty- year old characters (Paz and Dani) and their parents is tempered by a shared taste for flamenco, a musical form Francoist Spain has identified as quintessentially Spanish and that contemporary Spain has reclaimed and labeled as modern and hip. Whereas the middle-aged taxi drivers-turned-vigilantes sport a Francoist look of clean and decent middle-class Spanishness, complete with fascist eagle pins and "Arriba Espana!" salutes, their young counterparts look and dress like northern European skinheads. A birthday party given in honor of one of the taxi drivers (Paz's father) at which sevillanas are danced and flamenco songs are heard, poignantly shows the underlying traditional bond between the two generations.

Dani, Paz's love interest, personifies the link with the Francoist patriotic past craved by his elders. His status as a soldier has a dual meaning--albeit temporary--of the Spanish military and also a soldier of the family cause: the restoration of a unified and homogenous Spain. This is what the "family" is seeking to recapture as it engages in its crusade to eliminate the diverse groups that the city comprises. In the words of their leader, Calero, "all of Spain is a dung heap, imported garbage." The elimination of the foreign elements within the country will only partially satisfy the taxi drivers, who also yearn for a bygone political unity. It is for this reason that Calero--referring to the Spanish autonomías--berates the Spanish political leaders who, in his words, "have divided up Spain as if it were spoils."

The ending of the film, which highlights Dani's conversion, is suggestively set in Madrid's Retiro Park, with the monument to King Alfonso XII as the background. The conspicuous presence of the monument invites the viewer to consider aspects of Spanish history that are relevant to the theme of right-wing fanaticism presented in the film. In 1876 King Alfonso XII became known as "The Pacifier" of the nation (Palacio Atard 1991:208) after dealing the final blow to the Carlists, who viewed themselves as the sole defenders of Spain, order and religion (García de Cortázar 1994:429). The Carlists, as Gerald Brenan (1943:204) explains, sought to keep the "poison" of liberalism out of late nineteenth century Spain by taking up arms against it. (10) the metaphorical significance of this traditionalist group is further reinforced through their subsequent backing of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Knowing that she faces immanent danger (she has been targeted for elimination by the fanatical Calero), Paz wanders nervously through the Retiro Park, finally encountering the monument. As she climbs its stairs, she appears mesmerized and magnetically drawn to the statue that stands above. Her fascination is corroborated by the rather long reverse shot in which we see the statue of Alfonso from her point of view. In an effort to save Paz, Dani heroically intervenes on her behalf and stabs Calero after being shot by him. Then, before Calero can finish young Dani off, Paz recovers the older man's pistol and kills him. Modernity has triumphed over traditionalism--or, arguably, reason over fanaticism-- a process that is poetically reinforced by the monument and its historical connotation.

The script of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's Cosas que dejé en La Habana (1998) was written by the Spanish director himself and the Cuban writer Senel Paz. A commercial success in Spain, the film is a bittersweet comedy that focuses on the plight of Cuban illegal immigrants in Madrid. As in the previous films discussed, Spain is presented as a host country that exploits immigrants who, in turn, take advantage of their own kind, as evidenced by Mulai's treatment of Alou and other Africans.

We are first introduced to the two sets of Cuban immigrants whose stories are the focus of the film as they line up to go through customs at the Madrid airport. This scene portrays Spain as a paternalistic country that receives immigrants begrudgingly. The positioning of the camera behind the policemen allows the spectator to watch the immigrants come into the Promised Land from the privileged vantage point of an insider. When Nena, Rosa and Ludmila, three sisters who have come to Spain in search of a better life, smilingly present their documents to the policeman, he admonishes them to come up one at a time, muttering to himself: "These fucking Cubans." (11) In an exchange between Igor, a young Cuban man living in Madrid, and the recently arrived friend he has come to meet at the airport, the viewer is once again reminded that Spain's old allegiance with former American colonies has given way to a new pact with Europe. "This is not a foreign country; this is our motherland," says the friend, to which the savvy Igor replies: "The Motherland is now a bitch!"

The theme of non-acceptance of the Latin American immigrants by the Spaniards surfaces when the protagonists' aunt, an established emigré, enacts a scheme to gain legal status for one of her nieces. Her idea is to have Nena marry a Spanish man named Javier. The willingness of Javier's mother might lead one to think that she is accepting of Cubans, but that supposition quickly vanishes when the terms of the pre-nuptial agreement are laid before the niece. The mother insists that Nena renounce her rights to the son's property and to custodianship of any children produced by the marriage. It also becomes apparent that Javier's mother, knowing her son to be homosexual, is simply seeking the social respectability marriage would provide her own family.

The racist attitude of Javier's mother is repeated in Igor's relationship with his employer, a passport falsifier named Adolfo. When speaking to Igor, Adolfo does not refer to him by his name but as "cubanito" (Little Cuban), a paternalistic term that sets Igor apart from Spaniards. Adolfo's henchmen, the corrupt policemen who reap profit from the sale of illegal passports, are equally keen to make Igor feel like an outsider. They prohibit him from using any colloquial Cuban expressions when addressing them. As nothing more than a lowly servant, Igor, must sacrifice all signs of his identity and defer to the patriarchal order of the Spaniards, who beat him into submission when their direct order "don't speak to us in Cuban!" is not followed.

It is not by chance that Igor's merciless employer is named "Adolfo". This name constitutes an imbedded reference to Europe's fascist past while pointing to a desired transnational identity. As Stuart Hall (1999:39) observes, "New Europe" is "hastily cobbling together as a shield, not only against neighbors with whom they have peacefully dwelled for centuries, but also against Muslim, North African, Turkish and other migrants drawn to [it] from its peripheries." the "New Europe", however, is nothing more than a myth, a point that the Cuban aunt drives home in this way: "The only European ones here are the cows, the sheep and the chickens. People are still from the country where they were born. Look at the French, greedy and dirty, the English, a bit...weird, only the Germans are different...because Hitler educated them properly, even though they are trying to hide it now. But all of them are slowly becoming Belgian." She then instructs her newly arrived nieces to hurry up and become Spanish so they will be a step ahead in the race to become "Belgian", a code for the supranational identity that Spaniards are supposedly adopting.

Like Mulai in Cartas de Alou, the aunt is a perfect example of the "integrated" immigrant who is willing to sacrifice identity and take advantage of her compatriots to ensure success. As her nieces quickly notice, she has changed her speech habits to sound more like a Spaniard, while also abandoning Cuban dishes and eating habits in favor of those of her host country. In short, the aunt has internalized a set of values that leave no place for her Cuban identity. Using her nieces as clerks in her store and arranging for one of them to be married off to the Spanish friend's homosexual son, Javier, she ironically exploits her own kind as she attempts to make them belong to the new culture. Clearly, however, the Cuban immigrants are exploited mainly by Spaniards. In this respect, Cosas adds an ironic twist to the theme of Spain policing the borders of fortress Europe, since, as Igor points out, the police in the film are themselves part of a corrupt ring that exploits the illegal traffic of immigrants.

The precarious situation of Cuban immigrants in Cosas, and indeed of the host of other illegal residents portrayed in these four films, is poignantly conveyed in the scene in which Igor, trying to escape after stealing false passports for his Cuban friends, crosses from one building to the next by walking on a wooden beam dangerously suspended over the city of Madrid. Igor's escape is a visual metaphor of the plight of the immigrants, who, living in constant fear of deportation, are forced to walk a tight rope in order to survive in Spain. In the process, they are denied the most basic of human aspirations, summarized by Nena, in these terms: "All I want is a beautiful life." Nena's desire is a key thematic underpinning shared by all of the films. It is the desperate call of the outsider knocking at the Spanish/European border, as well as the voice of those who, like Nena's aunt in Cosas and Mulai in Cartas de Alou, are already inside but not fully accepted. It is also the voice of immigrants like Alou, who are not deterred by deportation and repeat their illegal entrance into Spain. This defiance of the law on the part of immigrants like Alou emphasizes the idea that the "problem" of immigration is not solved by expulsions. As Hall (1992:47) puts it: " This is an old European story--expelling the Moors at the front gate only to find them creeping in through the back."

As Santaolalla (1999:113) observes, contemporary Spanish society perceives and represents itself by a fundamental paradox: the historical awareness on the one hand of being the product of a unique fusion of cultures, races and religions, and the pervasive idea on the one hand that Spain is an ethnically homogenous nation. This group of films at the end of the millennium show a Spain struggling with the challenges that post-modernism and post-colonialism pose to the second part of the paradox. They offer reflections on the plight of non-European , non-white immigrants and marginal groups within Spanish society as they struggle to gain acceptance or merely to survive. The characters chosen to represent this plight, by virtue of their economic status, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference or nationality threaten the stability of a society intent on preserving a mythical, ethnically homogeneous quality even at the expense of becoming outright racist. These four films address issues associated with the formation of a heterogeneous, hybrid society that is the result of a new flux of migration, and in this sense they illustrate the renewed interest contemporary Spanish cinema has in representing "the exile" (Kinder 1993:286). Ultimately, these films fuel the question Homi K. Bhabha (1994:271) has identified as a key challenge today: "As the migrant and the refugee become the 'unhomely' inhabitants of the contemporary world, how do we rethink collective, communal concepts like homeland, the people, cultural exile, national cultures, interpretive communities?" Being cultural products, these films do not propose solutions, but rather invite the intended Spanish audience, as they become integrated into the larger European community, to take a critical look at themselves. In so doing the spectators are called to reassess Spain's role as the border police for a retreating group of nations with an imperialist past that are now tempted to enclose themselves in a backward-looking fortress called Europe. By Yolanda Molina Gavilán & Thomas J. Di Salvo Eckerd College

Notes

1 Joanna Apap (1997:138) notices that from 1980 Northern Europe began to tighten visa restrictions, and that factor, together with the new prosperity in Southern Europe, caused Italy and Spain to become receiving countries for new immigrants. Two recent scholarly works on the subject of immigration to Spain are: Antonio Izquierdo Escribano's (1996) La immigración inesperada: La población extrañjera en España (1991-1995), Madrid: Trotta; and Jesús Contrera's (1994) Los retratos de la inmigración: Racismo y Pluriculturalidad, Madrid: Talasa.
2 See http://www.fecl.org/
3 Cristóbal Mendoza's (1997:71) study concludes that "the total number of non-EU residents in Spain is still far lower than in Central or Northern Europe and new labor inflows have experienced a remarkable decline since 1992." Also, according to Joanna Apap (1997): "Spain's immigrant population accounts for less than 2 per cent of the country's total population and the immigrant proportion of the official labor force is even smaller (about 0.7 per cent-Colectivo IOE 1990, p. 123)."
4 Other films of the decade such as Gerardo Herrero's Malena es nombre de Tango and Icíar Bollaín's Hola, Estás sola? show white immigrants from Eastern Europe, but they are not portrayed as posing a threat to society. Danger is seen only in non-European , non-white immigrants such as African Arabs or blacks and Latin Americans. Gypsies, the traditional ethnic "other from within" in Spain are given a fresh look in Chus Gutiérrez's Alma Gitana, a film dealing with internal Spanish racism. Four recent films that share the motif of the "other from without" are Cecilia Bartolemé's Lejos de Africa, Eugenio Martín's La sal de la vida, Lorenc Soler's Said, and Icíar Bollaín's Flores de otro mundo.
5 As Santaolalla points out, the black man's repetition of the word "Ombasi" suggests this is his name, although the Spanish couple refer to him as "el negro" (116).
6 Alou's illegal status is exploited also by his own compatriots, most noticeably by his friend Mulai, a legal resident himself, who profits from Alou's work at the sweat shop and charges him rent. At one point, Mulai even tries to sell Alou the necessary documents at a high price.
7 "Tú", "Moreno", "Negro", and "Baltasar" in Spanish.
8 While the film focuses on the rejection, be it subtle or overt, that these black immigrants suffer, Cartas also points to the phenomenon of "mestizaje", or mixing of the races and melding of cultural backgrounds that is occurring as a result of marriages like that of Mulai and his white wife, Rosa. Several scenes show their baby mulato daughter, undoubtedly for that purpose.
9 Alou is the familiar, shortened form of Alioune, in the Wolof language of Senegal.
10 The traditionalist group had thrust the country into a series of civil wars when Alfonso's mother Isabella assumed the throne in 1833. For the Carlists, Liberalism was but "a second wave of the old Lutheran heresy for which spain in the past had given her life-blood." (Brenan 1943:204)
11 "Joder con los cubanos" in Spanish
By Yolanda Molina Gavilán & Thomas J. Di Salvo Eckerd College

Works cited:
•Apap, Joanna. "Citizenship Rights and Migration Policies: The Case of Maghrebi Migrants in Italy and Spain." Southern Europe and the New Immigrations. Eds. Russell king and Richard Black. Portland: Sussex Academic P, 1997. 138-157.
• Bhabha, Homi K. "Frontlines/Borderposts." Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Ed. Angelika Bammer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. 269-272.
• Brenan, Gerald. The Spanish Labyrinth, an Account on the Social and Political Background of the Civil War. Cambridge: The University Press, 1943.
• "Bwana." wysiwyg: http://filmfestivals.com/sanseb96/sfilmcl.htm. 23 May 2000.
• Cimmino, Carlo. "Taxi!".http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6557//ci_taxi.htm. 15 November 1999.
• Contrera, Jesús. Los retos de la inmigración: Racismo y Pluriculturalidad. Madrid: Talasa, 1994.
• García de Cortázar and José Manuel González Vesga. Breve historia de España. Madrid: Alianza, 1994.
• García-Zarza, Isabel. "Fearing Immigration, Spain builds its barbed wire Berlin Wall",13 May 2000.
• Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. Warrior for Gringostroika. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1993.
• Hall, Stuart. "Culture, Community, Nation." Representing the Nation: A Reader. Histories, Heritages and Museums. Eds. David Boswell and Jessica Evans. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 33-44.
•"European Cinema on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema. Ed. Duncan Petrie, London: The British Film Institute,1992. 45-53.
•."Inmigrantes: Crece la marea." http://www.elpais.es/p/d/19990809/espana/inmigra.htm. 22 November 1999.
• Izquierdo Escribano, Antonio. La inmigración inesperada: La población extranjera en España (1991-1995).   Madrid: Trotta, 1996.
• Jordan, Barry and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Contemporary Spanish Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.
• Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: the Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
•"La UE busca la forma de armonizar su política de inmigración y asilo." http://www.elpais.es/p/d/19991014/internac/asilo.htm. 2 December 1999
•Mendoza, Cristóbal. "Foreign Labour Immigration in High-Unemployment Spain: The Role of Agrican-Born Workers in the Girona Labour Market." Southern Europe and New Immigrations. Eds. Russell King and Richard Black. Portland: Sussex Academic P, 1997.   51-74.
•Palacio Atard, Vicente . Nosotros, los españoles: Una explicación de la España de ayer y de hoy como resultado histórico y proyecto de futuro. Barcelona: Planeta, 1991.
• Qassim, Ali. "Turning the Tide."   New Internationalist on Line, 305. September 1998: http://www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html. 12 May 2000.
Santaolalla, Isabel. "Close Encounters: Racial Otherness in Imanol Uribe's Bwana'." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 76(1999):111-122.)

10. Time of the Gypsies (Yugoslavia 1989) - A film of Emir Kusturica

An ironic commentary on migrancy and social and economic divisions in southern Europe, the film explores the issue of marginality and the plight of the Romany community in southern Europe.

Synopsis

Perhan, a teenage Gypsy with telekinetic powers, lives in a Yugoslav village with his grandmother Baba, his crippled younger sister Daca, and an indolent uncle, Merdzan. Perhan is in love with Azra, but her mother forbidsthe marriage. When Baba refuses to pay a gambling debt incurred in a card game with the visiting Ahmed Dzida, thevillage's richest Gypsy, Merdzan destroys their home in a fury, lifting off the roof and walls with a crane. Ahmed offers to pay for an operation to straighten Daca's leg after Baba's magic heals his own child. Perhan accompanies Daca to Ljubljana, promising to stay with her in hospital, but Ahmed forces him to join his conscripted army of thieves and beggars on the outskirts of Milan. Perhan rises to become Ahmed's chief aide, and assumes control once Ahmed suffers a stroke. Against Ahmed's advice, he makes a return to Yugoslavia, where he finds no trace of Daca at the hospital,and no sign of the mansion which Ahmed was supposed to be building for him in the village. Azra, he discovers, is pregnant; Perhan agrees to marry her, but only if the child is sold at birth. Azra dies during labour; Perhan disownsthe baby boy and returns, bitterly disillusioned, to Italy. Four years pass. Perhan hunts for his missing sister, and finds her in Rome, still crippled, begging for Ahmed, who is shortly to get married. He also discovers his own son among the urchins. After safely putting Daca and his son on a train to Yugoslavia, Perhan slips into Ahmed's wedding festivities and uses his telekinetic powers to kill him - only to be shot himself by Ahmed's enraged bride.At the funeral, gold coins are placed on Perhan's eyes; his son, true to his upbringing, creeps up and steals them. (MFB, April 1990)

A film review by Damian Cannon

An interesting if not entirely successful stroll through the Romany culture of Yugoslavia, "Time of the Gypsies" occasionally scales blissful heights. In the Skopje ghetto, Gypsy families are squashed close together in a subsistence level existence. Anyone who can get out does so, like the rich and influential Ahmed (Bora Todorovic). Having made a bundle in Italy, Ahmed returns surrounded by cohorts to gamble with men like Merdzan (Husnija Hasimovic). Since the latter inevitably loses, Merdzan's lime-baking family is especially poor. Only his mother (Ljubica Adzovic) keeps the wolf from the door; she uses her powers to heal sick locals.

With two rapidly growing children in the household, this can only be a temporary measure though. Perhan (Davor Dujmovic) teeters on the brink of maturity, old in body while innocent in spirit. Despite his unbecoming looks, he has already discovered a girlfriend in Azra (Sinolicka Trpkova). The problem is that Azra's mother worships her daughter, which means that she looks down on Perhan as a poor match for her princess. While this struggle for control drags on, Perhan cares for his sister Danira (Elvira Sali). Since she is mostly bed-ridden by a crippling leg injury, he serenades her with his accordion and shields her from the irrational mood-swings of Merdzan. They can't continue like this for much longer, yet where is change to spring from?

In tracing through Emir Kusturica's oeuvre, it seems that he has an affinity for stories that dive into the heart of complex, self-contained societies. Here he can weave his equality of fantasy and reality, a non-partisan approach essential to "Time of the Gypsies". Because Perhan and, to a much greater extent, his grandmother have some control over the supernatural, they act in some sense as conduits. When Perhan dreams, Kusturica ushers us across the divide and enables us to share the experience. Subtle clues alert us to the fact that we have left the waking world, but Kusturica handles these with new-born care; the characters recognise no significant difference between the two states, we don't have to either. It's a slightly magical angle that leads the film to some outstanding moments, scenes both strange and familiar.

If, however, you peek below this turbulent surface it's clear that "Time of the Gypsies" rests on an age-old story. Perhan, naive and ill prepared in the early stages of the film, must confront and overcome certain dilemmas. Here these are drawn from his basic moral code, one at odds with many of Perhan's fellow gypsies (like Ahmed). To win the hand of Azra he must prove his financial nous, yet if he can't prosper honestly then he'd rather not do it at all. In playing this role, Dujmovic does a fine job of showing how those close to him modify Perhan's character, in direct proportion to his changing circumstances. As he unwittingly gets sucked into Ahmed's petty crime syndicate, formed to fleece Italians, Perhan must decide whom he trusts the most. Either he sticks to the ideals of his grandmother or (perhaps without realising) he allows himself to become like those (Ahmed, Merdzan) he formerly detested.

This inner conflict is given weight by the emotional performances of the women in Perhan's life: Adzovic, Sali and Trpkova. Each has a welcome hook in Perhan, pulling him in several directions at once. As the grandmother, Adzovic has cared for these children since their mother died giving birth to Danira; she brings an earthy, mystical and deeply wise quality to the film. Though both Adzovic and Sali place their trust in Perhan, the former is investing a hope for the future, that he'll do the right thing, while the latter demands unconditional love, the knowledge that he won't abandon her. In the scarce time that Time of the Gypsies allots Sali, she does a grand job. It is from these central three that the few very moving scenes are generated, all involving the choking emotions of separation and reunion. On paper Trpkova should share in this bounty; yet her presence is too flimsy to kick up more than sparks.

In bringing the Gypsy experience to the screen, Kusturica demonstrates a great eye for visual detail and an appreciation of their musical heritage. "Time of the Gypsies" features some unusually beautiful scenes, as deep and plush as a goose-feather bed. In the act of viewing you can almost feel yourself sinking into Vilko Filac's photography, seeing through touch. Complementing this sensation, the score of Goran Bregovic is entirely wonderful. Transplanting actual Romany folk songs, with their accordion and horn contrasts, Bregovic's score sets the tone of the characters' world. The problem is that as much as the characters draw you to them, the film loses cohesion when it fails to sort itself out. Kusturica initiates numerous threads, then lets them conclude in a jumble, getting all mixed-up and tangled. It's a disorganised end to an intriguing film. Copyright © Movie Reviews UK 1998

Two additional comments

a) From “Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema”
by Ien Ang. Screening Europe, p 29

The Gypsies are one of the oldest cultural ‘others’ within Europe’s borders, a group of people whose inferior status has not changed for centuries, who have always been easily ostracized everywhere in Europe precisely because they do not form or belong to a ‘nation’. If anything, Europe’s treatment of the Gypsies only exemplifies the fundamental problems Europeans have with difference and otherness. In this sense, I am slightly concerned about the politics of Time of the Gypsies. To be sure, I found the film 'Impressive', but even to use this word to describe the film's effect already marks a certain distance, a certain objectification. Although the film deals with the inside world of Gypsy life and experience, the film's magic realist aesthetics, thoroughly within the accepted codes of art cinema, might only serve to reinforce (for European audiences at least) the absolute 'otherness' of Gypsy culture, totally wrapped up in its own concerns and frustrations, outside modernity, forever condemned to remain at the fringes of mainstream Europe.

b) About the interplay between the local and the international in Time of the Gypsies.
By Patrizia Lombardo, Screening Europe, p 82-83

This interplay also means the reconstitution of Europe, beyond national boundaries, as a map of regional subcultures. The term 'local', as I understand it, only has meaning in relation to the term 'International': it cannot be reduced to folklore, to a sort of native genuineness. The local indicates a physical space where history has accumulated with a multitude of memories and oblivions. Let me take the example of the film Time of the Gypsies. This had all the elements of a folkloristic film with its
turkeys, Gypsies, magic and superstitions. And yet it overcame simple folklore; the scene became international, moving from the outskirts of Ljubljana into Ljubljana itself and then on to Milan and Rome. The film both proposes marginality in the centre and explores the interplay of marginality and centre. The Gypsies from Ljubljana are seen at work in the centre of Milan, they meet in the Piazza Navona in Rome, or they hide their loot under an old stone of a very central street in old Milan. These are very powerful images for me.

I would also argue that Time of the Gypsies transcended folklore ] at the level of technique. The film moves from the apparently slow world of the Gypsy community on the outskirts of the city into the much quicker pace of metropolitan life, with the head Gypsy periodically returning to his village to recruit new labour. The community of wandering Gypsies inhabit a bizarre underworld, living in trailers in a devastated urban-suburban landscape of wasteground set against a backdrop of a highway bridge. The film combines images of the almost agrarian setting of the Gypsy village with those of an urban environment straight out of an American film. In narrative terms Time of the Gypsies echoes the chronology, centred around traditional rites of passage, of The Godfather. The scene towards the end of the wedding in Rome recalls the first scene in Coppola's film. The rhythm of the narrative is quick, the build-up in suspense prepares us for the final vendetta with its outbursts of blood and violence. How far removed this tragic climax is from the initial scenes in which we are introduced to the rhythms of daily life in the Gypsy settlement. Kusturica's film, therefore, is a generic hybrid of social documentary and the American crime film, successfully fusing modes of realism with the fantastic in in way which reminds me of Gabriel Garciá Márquez’z literary masperpiece of hybridity, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which fuses realism and surrealism, myth and history.

11. Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung,1990) ? A film by Xavier Koller

Synopsis: A low-income Turkish family leaves Turkey for a better life in Switzerland. Unfortunately, they are illegal immigrants and are preyed on by smugglers and other criminals on their trip. Their "journey of hope" turns into a desperate struggle for survival when they are abandoned in the Alps by a smuggler. - Switzerland (Turkish/German with English subtitles), 105 min.

Three reviews

a) by Thomas E. Billings

The story is centered on a poor farmer in Turkey, and his family. He has received a postcard from a relative who emigrated to Switzerland, telling him that Switzerland is sort of a "paradise over the mountain" (paraphrased). He is determined to go to Switzerland, to find a better life, at any cost. To this end, he sells his cattle, sheep, and land to get the money he needs for false passports and to pay the smugglers.

However, his wife insists on taking the children (they have seven). Reluctantly, the husband agrees to take only one child, the youngest. The rest will remain in Turkey with his parents. They begin their journey, and things go smoothly at first. However, problems arise when they get to Istanbul -- there are no tickets or passport for the child. The story continues as the smugglers hide the family in a cargo container for the journey to Milan, next stop on their journey.

This film won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, competing with such films as JU DOU and CYRANO DE BERGERAC. Although I feel that the film industry grants so many awards that most are meaningless, I really hoped that this film would be better than average. Unfortunately, the film is very ordinary, and did not live up to expectations.

The last part of the film is relatively exciting, and many viewers will react to it emotionally. However, the problem with the film is the first part, which you must endure to get to the last part. In the first part, you see the farmer behaving in a completely irrational way. He is not wealthy, but he is able to support seven children from his small farm. Unfortunately, he is primarily interested in money; he and his wife argue on this point when he tells her they must leave the children behind, for an indefinite period. Where is his fatherly concern for his children? Is going to Switzerland worth the destruction of a family of nine?

The problem with the film is that there is insufficient characterization, particularly for the farmer whose actions drive the film. You see his mistakes and (frequent) irrational behavior, but the motives for his actions have not been sufficiently established. Because of this, you might not be fully sympathetic with the characters when they get into trouble.

I think that people will react to this film in one of two ways -- the "mind" approach given above, in which case you might view the film as a case study in irresponsible behavior, or the "heart" approach. By "heart", I mean that you will fully identify with the characters, in which case you might think the film is pretty good.

Even though it is mediocre/average, the film does illustrate the refugee and illegal immigration issues that are major political topics of the day. Some might consider the film worth seeing simply because it dramatizes those issues.

Overall, I think the film is definitely over-rated, and is only average (first part is below average, second part above average). Your reaction to the film may vary according to your interpretation of the (rationality of the) farmer's actions.

b) By Rita Kempley - Washington Post Staff Writer

Swiss filmmaker Xavier Koller eloquently depicts an immigrant family's failed quest for a better life in the noble but arduous "Journey of Hope." Winner of the 1990 Best Foreign Film Oscar, the Turkish language film follows a naive Kurdish farmer, his wife and their 7-year-old son on a foolhardy trek from their poor dusty village to the rich Alpine pastures of Switzerland.

Necmettin Cobanoglu of "Yol" plays Haydar, a 35-year-old father of seven who is tormented by his inability to provide a good life for his family. Upon receiving an effusive postcard from a relative who stole into Switzerland, Haydar decides to sell the land and the livestock, leave the kids with their grandparents and join his cousin in this "paradise" of yogurt-giving goats. With difficulty, he persuades his more sensible wife, Meryem (Nur Surer), to come along so she too can make some money working in a chocolate factory.

At the last minute, the couple decide to bring their brightest child (Emin Sivas) along so that he might get a good education. Though the dangers increase disastrously, the little boy proves an asset. A cheerful scamp with huge candy kiss eyes, he easily makes friends with a burly Swiss truck driver who decides to drive them to their destination. But that would be too easy.

Koller's is a relentlessly tragic story of frightened people without resources or language, a loving nuclear family pitted against greedy Turkish smugglers and stiff Swiss immigration laws. While they encounter good Samaritans along the way, the three eventually face not only the worst in their fellow man, but in nature. Abandoned in the Italian Alps with a small band of like-minded Kurds, they are left to climb the last 3,000 feet to paradise in a snowstorm. All of Meryem's worst fears are realized during that treacherous flight, when Haydar's bad judgment costs them not only their remaining possessions but even hope itself.

Hauntingly photographed and caringly made, "Journey of Hope" addresses the immigrants' plight with plenty of compassion, yet has very little left over for its audiences. Less a drama than a list of grievances, Koller captures not hope but despair. (May 17, 1991)

c) Reise der Hoffnung (Journey of Hope)

Reviewed by Pedro Sena

One of the saddest, yet, one of the most poetic films I have seen.

It is a political film, which deplores the system to which many people are attached, and the fact that there isn't much which can really be done about it all, ... what some of us will do for a chance at a piece of a dream.

For south/central Americans, the dream land is America. For the many Kurdish peoples stranded, and stuck in the middle of three hostile countries, the dream land is either Germany or Switzerland, the richest countries in Europe. The price they pay to get to one of those places, is anything they can. The sad part of it all, is that so few of them actually succeed, and their lives are ruined, forever, with or without their family.

A Kurdish farmer makes a decision to get rid of his farm, and go for the dream land. He has received a letter from his cousin in Germany, who will soon get a job in a factory which has promised to hire him. He takes his wife and one of his seven children (the youngest boy ) with him, and the travels begin.

By the time his travels end, the film stops, leaving us to guess what, and how it will eventually turn out. All said and done, there was a cousin, or a relative of some sort who didn't really exist, and the letter was fabricated (the farmer had some money ) with the intent of having the money taken away by someone,... unclear weather it is Mafia like connections or simple people who prey on the misguided ones. Once the 'vision' of success and future have been aroused, there is little anyone can do for this man. He is gone.

He travels through Italy, with a fake passport, and goes through various places until he gets to the high Alps, the pass into Switzerland. Here, the people who have brought them this far are having problems agreeing with each other, and the crowd has to peddle their way on foot, in the snow, in the night, to get to 'freedom'.

I'll leave the rest to you.

It's the plight of all immigrants, and if you went to school in southern California like I did, and worked part time in restaurants to pay for the books and buses like I did, you found out that half of the dishwashers are Mexican and also very illegal. The same thing happens in Texas and New Mexico. They go through the same process, although, they have succeeded where 75% of them have failed. They know it. But the others don't. I even knew people who every once in a while would bring in one or two for a thousand dollars each ( I couldn't prove it, though the person drove a Cadillac and the border guards don't check out rich looking American blondes driving Cads ) and a few Mexicans who told me how much they paid, which they are usually told to keep secret or their friends and families will never come, for the privilege to come to this country. Believe you me, when all you have is hell, you will pay the price for a piece, even if a taste, of real freedom.

It's worth it . And hopefully something will work out in the future.

Funny what people will do for a dream, isn't it???

This film has incredible music. If you like European style jazz, listen to Norwegian TERJE RYPDAL's music ( from EOS ) and swede JAN GARBAREK's music from EVENTYR ) all over this film. It makes the mood of the film so rich in quality, that it is a bit overbearing. The cinematography, combined with this music, is really something to behold, and probably the main reason why this film won the OSCAR as the best foreign film of last year. I think all actors are Kurdish, and the director is a Kurd, who had a student visa to get to Europe,... which means he is from a better to do family.

12. In America (2003) Also known as: East of Harlem - A Film by Jim Sheridan

SYNOPSIS
From master storyteller Jim Sheridan, comes a deeply personal and emotionally raw tale of a family finding its soul IN AMERICA. Through the wide-open eyes of two young heroines, Sheridan transforms a devastating human tragedy into a riveting, humor-tinged story about memory, secrets, love, loss, coming together and starting over.

To begin all over again is a classic American dream. But it's remarkably hard to do, as Irish émigrés Johnny and Sarah (PADDY CONSIDINE and SAMANTHA MORTON) discover when they hit the streets of modern-day Manhattan, their two spunky young daughters in tow, and emerge into a realm as comical and adventure-filled as it is strange and terrifying. The family faces a dizzying new future ?- but first they must face down a past that haunts every single one of them.

With no cash to spare, Johnny and Sarah settle into a chaotic New York tenement populated by a colorful assortment of characters ? and attempt to turn a Gothic horror-movie setting into a true home. From dragging an iffy-looking air conditioner across Manhattan to finding make-do jobs, nothing comes without a fight for the couple. And yet, while they see America as rife with challenges, dangers and weirdness, their daughters see it as a magical place where anything can happen, a place that might release them all from the anguish of what has come before. Then, on Halloween, Christy and Ariel (sisters SARAH and EMMA BOLGER) dare to knock on the door of "the screaming man," a mysterious neighbor named Mateo (DJIMON HOUNSOU), and everything changes. As the family heads for a crisis, Mateo becomes their unlikely ally in the territory where hope, faith and even magic hold sway.

Based in part on Jim Sheridan's own autobiographical experiences coming to the United States, IN AMERICA is directed by Sheridan from a script by Sheridan and his two daughters, Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan.

Coming to Live IN AMERICA

"We looked all over Manhattan for a place to live, til we finally found the house of the man who screams."

Writer/Director Jim Sheridan's most famous films ? the Academy Award winners "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father"-- are set in Sheridan's native Ireland. But Sheridan himself left Ireland long before he made those films and headed to the U.S. to attempt to make it as a stage director in New York. His experiences coming to America, arriving flat broke in the sweltering heat of summer with a family of four, were as frenzied, comical and full of challenges as anything he had ever experienced. The period was seminal to Sheridan, but way too close to home to consider as fodder for creative material at the time. It wasn't until later, in 1989, when Sheridan was an Academy Award-nominee for his debut film, "My Left Foot," that he found himself looking back.

It all started when Sheridan was in Los Angeles for the Oscars®, and unexpectedly ran into an old apartment neighbor from those tumultuous days in Hell's Kitchen. After reminiscing about mutual friends who had survived and gone on to successful artistic careers, as well as those who hadn't, Sheridan's friend reminded him about the place they'd lived in earlier, "That house was blessed."

The line struck Sheridan, and he began to envision a movie about that extraordinary time and place, one during which his family learned first-hand how the terrible and the miraculous can co-exist in life. Merging his memories of coming to live in America with remembrances of a personal family tragedy (Sheridan's brother Frankie died of a brain tumor), Sheridan began to find a structure for his story. He created the characters not so much from actual life as from a merged-together amalgam of different family members and dozens of colorful people he met when he first arrived in New York.

To lend more authenticity to the project, he also invited his daughters ? Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan, who are both rising young writer/directors in their own right ? to add their creative input, especially to the scenes involving the family's two daughters. The result is IN AMERICA, Sheridan's most personal film to date, a film that celebrates the electricity and promise of New York even as it attempts to figure out the puzzle that is grief and the power that is love to spur people forward.

"A lot of what takes place in the film really happened to us," says Sheridan, "I really did drag an air conditioner across New York, I really did lose a lot of money trying to win an amusement park doll and we really did have a premature baby-- but I definitely changed and added a lot of things, including the time period. In fact, in some cases the truth was far too strange to work as fiction, and we wound up cutting out things that actually occurred because they seemed entirely too extraordinary."

Sheridan says it took him many years to write the film because he struggled with how to write about events so scarily close to real life, and to himself. He knew it was a risk. "In traditional screenplays, you're always trying to make everything work on some kind of intellectual, logical level but real lives don't do that," he explains. "Real life tends to have a deeper logic that we're not immediately aware of, that doesn't fit into the so-called perfect three-act structure. And then there was the issue of writing about myself, and wanting to avoid the idea that ‘well, he looked deep into himself and found nothing negative,' but also trying to make the character of Johnny more likeable perhaps than the real thing." (In the end, Sheridan sees the character of Johnny as partly based on himself, party based on his father and partly a creation of Paddy Considine).

At the same time, Sheridan wanted to reveal, as viscerally as emotion can be, that the true threat to the story's family came from inside rather than emerging from the mayhem of the city. "I always felt where we lived in New York was safe enough with the junkies and transvestites, but what is really dangerous is denial," says Sheridan. "Johnny has to face the idea that you can't protect your family from loss and uncertainty, certainly not by hiding. But you can love them, and love itself a kind of protection."

As Sheridan wrote, the film became much more than a typical memoir and took on a life of its own, bringing something new to Sheridan's work: an unabashed sense of magical realism, of the enchantment and mystery that lies just behind everyday reality. "To me, the film is ultimately about wonder," he says. "It's about trying to see the world with a kind of child-like, magical quality. It's a view of Manhattan as an island of dreams that helps a family rediscover their deep bonds. I also like to think of it as a love poem to my wife and kids."

To Sheridan, Johnny and Sarah are representative of a new wave of American immigrants. "As many Irish people before them did, they have left Ireland in desperation and come to a new land. But it isn't an economic or political desperation that brings them to America; it's an emotional desperation. They need a miracle, a real transformation," he explains. "They need to let the pain of the past go in order to find their future."

Johnny and Sarah, as well as their two daughters, are hoping to break the cycle of grief that keeps them from fully embracing their new life. With its own mysterious power, grief seems to literally haunt the family, like a spectre that is always in the room with them. Sheridan came up against his own feelings for his lost brother while working on the film. "I think Frankie's illness and death had a great effect on me," he says. "There was a real loss of faith; heaven kind of fell out of the sky. But if anything, it made me more focused on the authentic things in life."

Yet, in contrast to the film's heartbreaking emotional upheavals, Sheridan chose to pepper the script with lots of comic situations. "I felt it was necessary to balance the story's overwhelming drama with entirely equal amounts of humor," he says. "A lot of it is really a fish-out-of-water story about what it's like to experience things such as Halloween and New York weather for the first time."

Throughout the process of developing IN AMERICA, Sheridan worked with producer and long-time collaborator Arthur Lappin. When Lappin read the final script for IN AMERICA, he was struck by how Sheridan had taken his own experiences and forged from them an entirely universal tale of finding the strength to start over. "The story is very complex in how it uses Jim's personal history without becoming biographical," says Lappin. "As always with Jim, he wasn't afraid to adapt and change existing material in order to make a more convincing and involving story. In all his films, he has always been true to the spirit of the ‘reality' of the source ? whether that be Christy Brown in MY LEFT FOOT or Gerry Conlon in IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER-- while not being hidebound by the details."

Continues Lappin: "Ultimately, I find the story of IN AMERICA uplifting. It follows a journey that many people have gone through: out of grief and into a new life. What I like most about the film is that it contains a real sense of hope, which I think we need right now, a sense of a life beyond tragedy, of heading into a better future."

A Marriage On the Rocks IN AMERICA

"And then the summer came and with it the heat and a new word: humidity."

The heart and soul of IN AMERICA lies in the film's characters ? the newly arrived family of four and their mysterious neighbor, Mateo. From the beginning, Jim Sheridan knew he needed actors who could bring these characters to life with a naturalistic ease, who could embody Johnny, Sarah, Christy and Ariel as if they were a flesh and blood family facing a real-life crisis with humor, terror and sheer strength of will. As the heat rises in their New York tenement, Sheridan wanted the audience to feel the emotional temperature soaring as well.

With his own background in the theatre, Sheridan has always had an affinity for putting together a cast. Says producer Lappin: "Jim has become known for his ability to bring out the best in an actor, or to offer an actor the opportunity to bring out the best in themselves, and I think this film is no exception, especially in the performances of Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine, as well as the two absolutely extraordinary children."

To play Johnny, a young father who has become a living ghost searching Manhattan for signs of his old self in the wake of his son's death, Sheridan cast rising British actor Paddy Considine. Although Sheridan had been seeking an Irish actor, after seeing Considine in his acclaimed role as an obsessive loner in the British indie film "A Room for Romeo Brass," the director was sold. Relatively unknown in the U.S., Considine has been called British cinema's "best kept secret" and is on the rise, having been seen most recently in the critically praised "24 Hour Party People."

"I think Johnny is a very hard role," admits Sheridan. "He's not your normal hero because he's a man who has withdrawn from the world, who has lost his ability to be vulnerable, to play, to engage his imagination. But he also knows he can't let his family down, because he's brought them all this way to New York for a better life, and he still has some passion for that left. Paddy managed to keep that dilemma interesting throughout the film and show that the way out for Johnny can't be through action but can only come through something far deeper. Underneath it all, Paddy reveals a great emotional power and is also very humorous."

Considine was thrilled to get a chance to work with Jim Sheridan. "His films are always such big human stories, and I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity as an actor," he explains. "A film doesn't work for me unless it has characters you really care about, and this film was about people I recognized as being very true."

But more than that, Considine immediately gelled with Sheridan's conception of the character on a personal level. "When I read the script I understood Johnny right away," Considine continues. " I haven't lost a child or anything like that, but the way in which Johnny has lost faith was something I could identify with. I knew him. It's funny, because the film came to me at a time when I had lost faith in what I was doing as an actor. I felt that what I was doing was pointless and that was what really drew me to Johnny…and playing him has, in a way, really helped to restore faith in myself. Because that's what the film is about: it's about how you pick yourself up off the floor, get back on track and start believing again."

He adds: "It's also not just about survival in tough circumstances, but about people really coming to terms with each other, a family finding its strength. You know how it is in life: just when you think it can't get any worse, it does, but it's in those times when people really come together and, in a funny way, find out who they really are."

Considine worked hard to embody the Irish lilt of Jim Sheridan but never worried about the closeness of the character to his director's life. "From the beginning, Jim told me ‘Don't look at me to play the character, because he's not me,'" the actor recalls. "Anyway, I had my own ideas in my head for Johnny. Still, Jim and I had Johnny worked out so well, sometimes on the set it didn't even feel like I was acting. Jim has a way of clearing all the crap and getting to the most basic heart of a scene."

Joining the cast as Johnny's courageous wife Sarah is Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton. Sheridan was attracted to Morton's renowned quiet intensity, which she displayed in her Academy Award-nominated, near-silent role in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown" with Sean Penn. "Samantha is like emotional quicksilver," Sheridan says, "with an ability to go to amazing depths but also to stay grounded. I think she's one of the best performers of her generation, and that's why I picked her for Sarah."

Morton had a visceral reaction to the script, finding it an engaging treatment of issues almost everyone faces in life. "I like that it's about themes like mortality, faith, survival and love, things we all experience at one time or another, " she says. "But I like that it's light as well. It's a film that keeps you laughing as well as crying. And I really cared about every single character in the film. That's what made me want to be in it."

As a mother, Morton was able to closely identify with Sarah's struggles and also her overriding sense of joy at watching her children discover America. "I was able to see Sarah as the one who has the job of keeping the family together no matter what and that she takes that very seriously," Morton says. "But I also saw that even though Sarah seems very together on the surface, underneath she also hasn't quite gotten over the loss of her son and is very much in the process of healing. She and Johnny are going to have to come to terms with it together."

Also important to Morton was the fact that Sheridan's script offers a portrait of a marriage in all its human complexity and frailty. "I like that this film portrays the relationship between man and wife, and parents and children, in a very realistic way," she says. "It's not a sort of cutesy treatment. You see that Sarah and Johnny are going through a lot as a couple. They have been in love, felt they had fallen out of love, and now they're realizing all the love that's left between them ? and portraying that was very hard work for both me and Paddy."

Two Girls Enchanted by Life IN AMERICA

"Mom, Dad, Christy and Ariel all together in one happy family."

Both Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine say that their roles would never have come alive without the contributions of the two young actresses who play their on-screen daughters, savvy Christy and curious Ariel, with such authenticity and heart. The girls are central to the film's power, becoming the eyes through which the audience sees both the American landscape and the family's emotional collisions with a child's uninhibited humor and perceptiveness.

The filmmakers held extensive auditions to cast the roles, aware that it would be difficult to find children capable of being at once playful and mature, defiant and loving. It was during one such audition that Sheridan was won over by 6-year-old Emma Bolger and her unsinkable feistiness. "While Emma was auditioning, I decided I wanted to hear another actress try the same lines so I handed the script to her. Suddenly I feel this tug on my coat from behind, and this face looking up at me with great pity because I've obviously crossed a line of etiquette, and Emma says to me: ‘Does she get to read my part?' I knew right then that she was right for Ariel. She had that same wise quality of a girl who wasn't going to back down. Then she told me her sister Sarah was in the car. Aft first, I thought Sarah was too young to play Christy, or that I might have to rewrite some of the lines, but I was wrong. She was fully capable."

Says Samantha Morton of the two girls: "They contribute a real freshness, a real raw feeling, to the film. They're not experienced actors, but instead they convey a true love of life. You feel that when you see their faces, the world is a better place instantly." For Morton, the power of a child's view to reveal a richer, more wondrous world, was key to the film. "Children have an ability, one that most adults lose, to see the good in people, to see past whether someone's rich or happy or on the edge ? and get to their true spirit," she comments.

To keep their performances real and spontaneous, Jim Sheridan was careful to make the set as fun as possible for the Bolger sisters. "I think the emphasis with children has to be on play," he says. " You have to keep it light. If you start making it work, you can lose something. But these two girls were extraordinary, just amazing, almost miraculous in their naturalism. I wouldn't even call what they did performances, because they go beyond that. There really is a certain magic to them."

Indeed, for Sheridan, watching the girls embody his own daughters' pasts was even eerie at times. "My daughters say that the reason I liked working with the children so much in this film is that it was just like playing with my kids all over again -- except that this time they did what they were told! But that wasn't true," says Sheridan. "They conspired against me, just like in real life."

Djimon Hounsou, who plays the girls' unlikely new friend Mateo, was also touched by the girls' enchanted quality. "They are so full-spirited and wonderful they can make adult actors look quite useless," he says. "I think the film captures their beautiful spirits.'

Mateo was perhaps the most difficult character of all to cast. The character defied easy categorization and demanded a somewhat larger-than-life treatment. The filmmakers searched for the right actor. The answer came in the form of Djimon Hounsou, who had an immigrant story of his own, having been born in West Africa and transplanted to Paris before coming to Hollywood. Jim Sheridan recalls his powerful audition. "Djimon came in and just put a completely different spin on the character. I wasn't looking for someone like him, but I immediately realized how strong his spiritual presence was."

Hounsou worked closely with Sheridan to fine-tune the character's complex personality. "Jim really helped me to understand Mateo and create who he is," says Hounsou. "To me, Mateo's a very interesting man, one who has been rejected by his own family because of who he is, but then he finds a family with Johnny, Sarah and their girls at the last possible moment." Although Hounsou has worked on major Hollywood epics, he was impressed with this cast's emotional daring. "Paddy and Samantha were able to bring so much even out of the smallest scenes. It was beautiful working with them," he comments.

Throughout his work with the cast of IN AMERICA, Sheridan kept the focus on performances so genuine and relaxed as to have an almost vérité or documentary feeling to them. He says: "I'm always trying to capture that invisible thing, the thing that's in front of your face that you can't actually see in the moment, but is very powerful. I'm looking for the authentic, but it's hard to say exactly how you get to that. It's not something you can ‘direct' in the common sense of the word. You just have to keep the actors feeling like they're in charge of their lives and let it happen."
He continues: "In the end, working with the actors is always the most complex element for me, much more so than the visuals and the production design and the set dressings, because it all comes down to the human face, down to those 44 muscles that can be contorted into thousands of different expressions."

Producer Arthur Lappin notes that Sheridan works in a manner that's fairly unusual for most motion picture directors. "He has a very organic style," he explains. "He's not the type of director who has everything all mapped out precisely. Rather, he goes for a kind of honesty and truthfulness in each and every scene ? and of course because he's also the writer, he can deviate from the script at any time. So, what I try to do is build a structure around Jim that gives him maximum flexibility and freedom to let that magic happen as much as possible."

IN AMERICA's New York

"Sometimes it seemed like everyone in New York was an actor, even the stockbrokers."

Much of IN AMERICA is set in Johnny and Sarah's New York apartment building, a cavernous, graffiti-splashed building with endless flights of stairs and a Gothic sense of darkness. Despite their surroundings, the family nevertheless creates a home, and discovers a community, in the middle of urban chaos, learning to embrace the wild uncertainty and diversity of living in the heart of the city.

Ironically, Jim Sheridan and his design team created the family's tenement on a set in the middle of Ireland! For logistical purposes, the production shot for ten weeks in Ireland, mostly interiors, but also some exteriors, including the scenes at the festival where Johnny loses the family's rent money in his quest to win a doll.

"We realized it would have been hard to get the kind of flexibility we needed to shoot this film in a building in New York," says Arthur Lappin, "so we had production designer Mark Geraghty use his talent to re-create New York in Dublin."

Geraghty started with a massive old house ? which Jim Sheridan calls "the Irish Taj Mahal" ? and transformed its longs corridors and echoing rooms into a typical ghetto tenement, replete with the grit, grime and kinetic energy of New York. Not surprisingly, the set was rife with rumors that the house was haunted, but if so, the ghosts must have received quite a shock from watching their surroundings transform from an Irish sea-side mansion to a Hell's Kitchen hovel.

Says Jim Sheridan of Geraghty's sets, which were based in part on Sheridan's remembrances of furnishing and maintaining his family's home on pocket change and street-smarts: "I think places are a state of mind ? Dublin can be New York because it's all in your mind ? and Mark's set succeeded in bringing that place in my head fully to life."

After shooting in Ireland, the production headed to Manhattan to capture the ineffable rhythm and hue of New York's lower-class neighborhoods, shooting on the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem and grabbing the pivotal footage of Manhattan buried under fresh snow. The emphasis here was on reflecting New York as a kaleidoscope of different cultures and attitudes.

"We weren't looking for the New York of famous building and landmarks," notes Lappin. "This film is more about what's going on in the streets, in the lives of ordinary people making their way in the city, and we were looking for the chaos and grit, as well as the underlying sense of community."

In fact, IN AMERICA was one of the first productions to shoot in New York following the events of September 11, lending to the crew an even stronger sense of wanting to reveal the underlying soul of New York in the photography. To do this, Sheridan worked closely with award winning cinematographer Declan Quinn.

"It was fantastic working with Declan," says Sheridan. "It was the first time I've ever worked with an Irish cinematographer and we felt very at home together. He also moved from Ireland to America when he was a kid, so he has his own very personal perspective on the story."

Quinn and Sheridan agreed that the look of the film should be intensely intimate, with the camera essentially becoming caught up in the emotional turmoil of Johnny and his family. At the same time, Quinn went for an almost dreamy, heated look that evokes the magic at the heart of the film. "One thing about Declan is that he has a brilliant sense of color," says Sheridan. "He gave the film a kind of Spanish magical realism quality that turned out to be exactly the right visual tone for a story of this weight."

Shooting in New York brought the story full circle for Sheridan, as he traveled the city he had once come to as a cash-strapped immigrant. He says: "I never could have set IN AMERICA anywhere other than Manhattan ... it's a tough city but it is fundamental to this story. This is a hopeful, loving story about New York."

From the "People" Archives:

Jim Sheridan Gets Personal With "In America," Inspired By His Own Family
by Wendy Mitchell/indieWIRE

Director Jim Sheridan looked no further than his own house for inspiration for his latest film, "In America" (in theaters now from Fox Searchlight.) The film recounts the experiences -- both tragic and inspiring -- of a young Irish family that moves to New York. Sheridan and his own family lived in the Big Apple for eight years in the '80s, and many of the stories in the movie actually happened to him (spending too much money trying to win a doll for his daughters, hauling a huge air conditioner through traffic to cool the family's tenement apartment). Of course, not everything is autobiographical; for instance, the dead son Frankie in the film was actually Sheridan's dead brother, so the father character in the film is more of an amalgam of Sheridan and his own father.
The jovial Sheridan recently spoke to indieWIRE from his home in Dublin about the making of "In America," as well as what he's planning next.

indieWIRE: What was it like writing this script with your daughters Naomi and Kirsten?
Jim Sheridan: Of course they were disputing my version of events [laughs]. They wrote a little intro for the script that will be published, saying what I wouldn't let them put in the story! It was my first time working with them. I felt like I couldn't really do it without getting them to write their own versions. It was hard for me to know what it was like for them at school and stuff like that. But I think that's the most successful part of the film, the kids' perspective.
It's just taking the vanity out of it. It's not that I'm immune to vanity. I just thought it would make it look a bit better, and it would be funnier and it wouldn't seem so vain [if it wasn't from the father's perspective]. Although deep down I'm deeply vain.
iW: How does your wife feel about the film?
Sheridan: She loves it, but she's a little bit jealous of me and the kids in the film. My eldest daughter said, "Of course he prefers those kids over real kids, he can rewrite them!"
iW: After living in New York for eight years, why did you return to Ireland?
Sheridan: I went back to Ireland to make "My Left Foot." And then my wife wanted my kids to go to school in Ireland, so we stayed. But New York is a great city.
iW: And you went to film school while you were here in New York?
Sheridan: I went to NYU film school for six weeks. In a way that was good enough, either I learned everything, or I just knew enough to know that I knew nothing [laughs].
iW: Let's talk a bit about the casting...I think American audiences already know how great Samantha Morton is, but Paddy Considine is mostly unknown here.
Sheridan: The performances are amazing. I saw Paddy in "Romeo Brass" and I loved him. I just wanted to cast him from seeing that really. He's very, very good. Then I met him and just cast him. I didn't do any auditions. The first audition I did for the kids, I got those two sisters (Emma and Sarah Bolger). They're beyond good. Martin Sheen went to see it and he said he thought the kids' performances were the best kids' performances he'd ever seen.
iW: What's your attitude in working with children? Do you change your approach?
Sheridan: I think that's what I exactly don't do is change the way I'm working when kids are involved. I keep going like a bumbling fool. The difficulty is treating the kids just as adults -- giving them the same respect. I get angry when kids aren't treated with respect. The opening line of the film once was "this is a coming of age story. Unfortunately for me, it's my parents who are coming of age." Which is a good line. That's kind of my belief, that we start out perfect and the upbringing fucks us up a bit.
I was trying to uncover the innocence in the kids. It's not easy to direct kids, cause you just want to tell them what to do, and you don't want to give them the freedom. And those kids were fantastic to work with, but once the little one got tired, that was it. Once they reach the threshold there's nothing left to give. It's not like working with adults.
iW: Do you miss your own acting days?
Sheridan: I did a little part with not a bad actor recently, a guy named Robert DeNiro. He's okay [laughs]. He was a bit nervous working with me, but he got over it.
iW: How do you prepare your actors?
Sheridan: I don't do a lot of actor prep. I give them a lot of freedom, but I'm very controlling at the same time. I've already worked out in my head all the different ways it can possibly go. I've improvised, and then I let them have their head and I know where it's going. I don't believe you can get actors to imitate or do something they don't have intrinsically.
iW: So how did you cast Emma and Sarah Bolger?
Sheridan: There was an open audition and Emma was the very first girl. I got Emma to read, and I thought she was a bit too good, so I went to get another girl, and Emma pulled my coat really hard, and I looked 'round and she just looked at me with pity, as if I'd crossed the line of etiquette, and she said, "Is she reading my part?" I waited and looked in her eyes, and she didn't back down, so I said, "No, Emma, nobody's reading your part. She said, "Good, my sister's in the car." I said, "What age?" She said, "10," but I thought that was too young [the older sister was supposed to be 13 or 14]. She said, "Well, see her anyway." And I went down and cast her after three minutes. So that was the first two kids out of 300, and I never saw any others.
iW: Why the break between directing 1998's "The Boxer" and directing this?
Sheridan: "The Boxer" was hard work, I found it really hard. It won't be as long next time.
iW: What are you working on next?
Sheridan: I'm doing a film about an American family who are involved in politics -- which is not the Kennedys. I'm writing that and I'm writing a story about growing up as a child in inner-city Dublin, which I think will be very funny.

13. L'Auberge espagnole (2001),directed and written by Cédric Klapisch, demonstrates that Europeans indeed enjoy their "melting pot" differences and are happy to be in a single political home.

The film focuses on a group of postgraduate students in their early twenties who share an apartment in Barcelona and become intimately acquainted with one another's eccentricities. Most attention is directed to Xavier (played by Romain Duris), whose friend’s father, who is a high-ranking civil servant in the French Ministry of Economics, informs him early in the film that there is a job for him if he becomes expert in the economics of Spain.

Accordingly, he applies for an Erasmus Scholarship, says goodbye to his mother (played by Lise Lamétrie) and sweetheart Martine (played by Audrey Tautou), and becomes a student at the University of Barcelona. On the airplane from Paris, a newlywed couple, neurologist Jean-Michel (played by Xavier de Guillobon) and his wife Anne-Sophie (played by Judith Godrèche), notices him holding back tears, and they befriend him as they leave the airport. Although his mother arranges Xavier's lodging with a relative, that accommodation proves unacceptable, so he soon begs Jean-Michel for a place to stay for a few nights while he looks for an apartment; alas, Barcelona is a city with few vacancies in his price range. He applies to live in an apartment with several other Erasmus students and is ecstatic when they accept him.

All the students arrived with some knowledge of Spanish, only to learn that lectures will be in Catalán, the language spoken in Barcelona, so attending class is not a priority. The fun begins as he gets acquainted with his new roommates, including a fastidious English gal, a sloppy Italian, a studious German, a quiet Dane and his Spanish girlfriend, a guitar-playing American, and a Lesbian Walloonian [from the French-speaking part of Belgium]. Fluent in two or more languages, the students often communicate in English or whatever language is spoken in common by those present in each scene, suggesting that a new European language might be developing in a manner similar to the Creoles around the world. (However, the "out" Lesbian, admits that her Walloonian identity is in the closet when visiting the Flemish-speaking part of her country.)

The film milks subplots for maximum humor, with each character living somewhat up to the stereotypes of the country. For example, the English student, Wendy (played by Kelly Reilly), insists on a clean apartment, objecting to hair left in the bathtub by the Italian, Alessandro (played by Federico D'Anna). Wendy's silly brother William (played by Kevin Bishop), who visits for a couple of weeks, goes too far in teasing the German about his penchant for "order." In part because of Xavier's absence from Paris and his failure to honor her birthday, Martine finds another boyfriend. Meanwhile, Jean-Michel asks Xavier to take his wife on excursions, as she stays home a lot and is bored in a city that is much more exciting than the focus on white slavery in Barcelona that was depicted in "A Tricky Life" (2002). Eventually, the two carry on an affair, but only after the Lesbian, Isabelle (played by Cécile de France), instructs Xavier on how to seduce a woman. Eventually, Anne-Sophie tells Jean-Michel about the affair, and Xavier is dumped for a second time. One day, Wendy starts carrying on with the American, but when her boyfriend Alistair (played by Iddo Goldberg) suddenly arrives in town, all her roommates rush home to assist her. Her brother William saves the day by pretending to be having a homosexual encounter with the American in her room while she hides out under the bed. Eventually, the year ends for Xavier. He returns home to Paris, meets Martine for the last time, and gets the promised job in the Ministry of Economics, including an office of his very own. Presumably, he will be a success in view of the many contacts that he made while in Spain. Then he decides that he would prefer doing something else after all.

"L'Auberge Espagnole" pokes fun at bureaucracy, at adult conformity, at the pressures on college students, and at differences between the unspoiled Europeans who all the same get along very well. Those living in a college dorm or frathouse in the United States may take notice of the delights both of going abroad and of receiving exchange students. For those in Europe, where the Spanish call the film "La casa de locos". "L'Auberge espagnole" (Spanish Hostel) could be the pilot for a very successful television series. MH Political Society Film Review

Two more reviews

a) By A. O. SCOTT

Euro-Youths Enjoy a Pajama Party

Much of the action in "L'Auberge Espagnole" takes place in a communal flat in Barcelona populated by a mix-and-match assortment of attractive young Europeans. The film's digital video look, its jumpy editing and its focus on matters of household politics — dividing up space in the refrigerator, managing sexual tension and differences of temperament — make it resemble a season of "The Real World Catalonia" telescoped into two hours.

Like "The Real World," that perennial, pioneering MTV reality series, "L'Auberge Espagnole," written and directed by Cédric Klapisch, zeroes in on the life-cycle dramas of the early 20's, that phase of life when, at least in the affluent nations of the West, young people have reached legal adulthood without having quite grown up.

Xavier (Romain Duris) is an intense, not entirely likable young Parisian with divorced parents, vague ambitions and a companionable, not entirely likable girlfriend (Audrey Tautou). After learning from a friend of his father that mastery of Iberian economic policy will assure him a good job in the European administrative bureaucracy, Xavier enrolls in an exchange program in Barcelona. At the airport, he meets a smug French neurologist whose shy young wife, Anne Sophie (Judith Godrèche), will be the source of some subsequent romantic complications.

Of these there is no shortage, especially once Xavier finds his new roommates, who resemble a bohemian delegation to the European Parliament. Indeed, the apartment, like the movie itself, serves as a cheery metaphor for the new, transnational European identity. The Englishwoman, Wendy (Kelly Reilly), is a bit standoffish, as if she were not fully part of the community. (She also has a fling with an American street musician, whom Xavier views with disdain.) The Danish guy, his Spanish girlfriend and the Italian stoner hover about the periphery. Xavier, a latecomer to the scene, soon emerges as first among equals, the de facto leader of this happy polyglot tribe. Naturellement. (The German fellow is a little too uptight.)

Xavier also forms a Francophone alliance with Isabelle (Cécile de France), a Belgian lesbian who teaches him how to seduce Anne Sophie. Her macho techniques, which might bring a charge of sexual harassment at an American university, are surprisingly effective. But Xavier never achieves the rapport with Anne Sophie, whom he views as ignorant and unhip, that he does with Isabelle. "I wish you were a woman," she says to him. He says, "The world is badly made."

For its part, "L'Auberge Espagnole," is a bit shapeless and sloppy, losing track of some interesting subplots and throwing in extraneous fantasy sequences and voice-overs. Mr. Klapisch's ragged exuberance seems well matched to his subject, though, and he does pull off one moment of sustained farce involving the unexpected arrival of Wendy's boyfriend from back home. (Most of the housemates are visited at some point by a boy- or girlfriend from back home, and the visits rarely go well.)

He also has an intuitive sense of how seriously to take his characters' lives. He mocks them without belittling them and registers the gravity of their emotions without succumbing (as they sometimes do) to the temptations of melodrama.

b) by Cynthia Fuch - PopMatters Film and TV Editor

"L'Auberge Espagnole" presents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting. The ending, though, feels like a bit of a cop-out, as Mr. Klapisch decides that Xavier's pleasant year abroad must yield a lesson. The ending suggests that the bureaucratic routines of Xavier's job with the European Union are antithetical to the freedom and chaos he savored in Barcelona. They are, but only superficially, since they are aspects of the same phenomenon: the transformation of Europe from a battleground to a consumerist, hedonist playground. Americans, on the other hand, are not so fortunate as to be completely overlooked. The token Yankee is a guitar-slinging cowboy boy toy from Santa Fe, who is (justifiably) referred to as 'stupid American' at least once and whose few lines consist primarily of howling like a dog. His appearance is brief, though, not long enough to really bother me very much.

However, it wouldn't have bothered me at all had the film not gone out of its way to dismantle this sorts of stereotype as it is applied to Europeans. This occurs when a younger brother visits the crew and quickly alienates himself from everyone with his insensitive caricatures of various European nationalities (the anal German, the messy Italian, the mumbling Frenchman). The filmmakers clearly want the audience to be irritated because in the backlash against these ridiculous stereotypes, they will be better able to recognize their own European-ness.
American stereotypes, however, are apparently still fair game, and it just feels like a cheap shot. Because of this, and contrary to some claims, I would argue that this film is not about promoting cross-border understanding generally; rather, it's exclusively about forging a European identity (and a Western European one, at that).

The other thing which annoyed me was the stereotyping - Anne-Sophie is portrayed as a stuck-up French bitch and Wendy as a typically sex-mad unfaithful English girl. The German is portrayed as "typically" having no humor when the English girl's brother makes jokes to him about the Germans. This sort of stereotyping is all well and good but it could be done more intelligently. Also, certain others of the characters we learn little about - the Italian, the Dane. I thought the Belgian lesbian had her character developed a little more. The central character the Frenchman had, I thought a very weak and diluted character and seemed just unable to take it all in ( too much pot, I suppose ). Audrey Tautou's tantrums were unnecessary and she was nowhere near as interesting as in "Amélie Poulain". All in all, a bit of a washout.

Although there are quite a few familiar situations, they are irritatingly cliché and do not go beyond the trivial events. This made the movie uninteresting to watch, and gave me a strong "been-there-done-that-don't-you-have-anything-to-add?" feeling. Apart from that, the movie lacks a firm story. It sometimes looks more like a documentary or 'real-life' show than a seriously made movie.

Indeed the most interesting part is the everyday life in the "Auberge Espagnole" (Potluck Party Year could be an informal translation). Not the life of Xavier at large. Xavier is like Tintin or Amélie: you follow him without questions but you never identify with him. But Klapisch is not Hergé or Jeunet as his vision get mixed up in a short-sighted reality. What eventually makes it a nice little movie is: 1/ the pace (no time to get bored as in more self-concerned movies) 2/ the focus of various issues catering for young Europeans, 20 to 28 year-old (sex and love and life at large in a Friends-like happy-go-lucky atmosphere)

What makes it only a little movie is the lack of strength in Xavier's characterization out of L'Auberge espagnole. Prolog and epilogue, before and after Barcelona sequences are wooden; like some long-time student work. As for me the whole movie should have taken place in Barcelona.

The movie is filled with colourful people, all of them stereotypes (the British twat and her racist brother, the sexually liberated Dane, the ultra-organised German,...). In this case though, the stereotypes are brilliantly done. You feel like you know people like that (I for one know an arrogant doctor and his trophy wife, and they're just like the characters in the film!), they feel like REAL PEOPLE!

For an American audience, the only disheartening aspect is that in this lovefest the odd man out may very well be . . . us. "L'Auberge Espagnole" has only one American character, and he's a complete imbecile, going around with an acoustic guitar. Needless to say, only the English girl will have anything to do with him, and even she knows he's an idiot.

From Fifty Years of Europe: Addendum on Belgium

How anomalous that Belgium should have become the administrative center of the European Union, my generation's attempt to make a unity of the continent! Belgium is certainly not a power. It is decidedly not a nation, split as it is between two peoples, the Flemings and the Walloons, each with their own language, loyalty, history and territory. It has been a state only since the 1830s, and even when there was a Belgian empire in Africa, the Congo was no more than a personal fief of the king. It still seems to me a kind of ad hoc entity. One day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, which is a sort of distillation of all the royal palaces that ever were, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged through its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the king of the Belgians (the sixth to hold that title since its invention). A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cockeyed bearskins, as in musical comedies or fancy dress, included some skeptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road- sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horseshit. Its driver told me he spent his days doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it - and sure enough, as he spoke the horsepersons, having disappeared around the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.

The Belgians endure as many unkind jokes in Europe as the Poles used to in the United States, or the Irish and Welsh in England, and I hate to bait them; but I have to say that even the very heart of this kingdom, the Grand'Place in Brussels, which is frequently touted as The Most Beautiful Square In The World, has always seemed to me pretentiously unsatisfying. There is no grace to it, except when its flower-market blossoms, or they turn part of it into a Christmas skating-rink. Its centerpiece is the gloomily Gothic Hôtel de Ville, and all around it are pompous gabled mansions of old trade guilds. They are covered with gilding and curlicues, with statues and symbols representing Grain, Prospects, Abundance, Agriculture, Slaughter (for the Butchers' Guild), sea gods (for the river-boatmen), quivers (for the Guild of Archers), St. Nicholas (patron saint of haberdashers), Bishop Aubert (patron saint of bakers), St. Barbe (patron saint of tailors), together with weathervanes and ogee windows and bobbles and baubles and initials and elaborate gilded dates. Nothing, to my mind, can make them seem elegant. They are heavy aldermanic houses, rich, chain-of-office houses, and the only touch of irony to them is the fact that in one of the grandest, No.9, Marx and Engels collaborated in 1847 on the Communist Manifesto - "Workers of the world unite!" Nowadays the Grand'Place and the streets that run into it are chiefly devoted to Belgium's preeminent activity, eating, and the house where Marx and Engels worked is La Maison du Cygne (four red spoons and forks in Michelin).

From Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong : Addendum on the European Union

Until recently, war was a defining element of European life. Most European societies, including France, were built for war, and the idea of war remains in the fabric of society, including France, were built for war, and the idea of war remains in the fabric of society. Down the street from our place was a subway station named Guy Môquet, after the name of the seventeen-year old activist who was executed by the Germans in 1942. Right up the street, on Montmartre, stands an old windmill on which the miller was nailed by the invading Russian troops in 1812. France is full of such stories - and worse ones. North Americans, who never faced a comparable situation to what the French experienced during WorldWar II, can hardly imagine the kinds of terrible choices the French had to make just to survive. Until recently, many of France's close neighbors were aggressive enemies. Until 1989, Strasbourg was further from Paris than it was from the Soviet tanks on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

[...] Europe is presently in its sixth decade of peace since World War II the longest span of peace in five centuries. The cancellation of France's two-century old mandatory military service, in 1999, is just the most obvious sign that the era of garrison-states and arsenal economies is over. France's neighbors no longer pose a threat. Borders still exist, but they are transparent and controls have all but disappeared. For a continent where border skirmishes had global consequences for five centuries, the impact of durable peace is hard to grasp.

Since 1951, France and its neighbors have purposefully entangled their national economies to make war impossible. But peace has had a price. France has been forced to adopt thousands of European regulations, which take precedence over France's own. As the almost flawless transition from the French franc to the euro shows, the French are very willing be created out of a single grand plan. He argued that Europe should be built out of practical arrangements between countries that would slowly create authentic solidarity between them. The French would adhere to this thinking for at least the next fifty years.

From the start, the six core countries of the European Economic Community used free trade and market liberalization as tools to build unity among them. They never mistook the means for an end. To begin with, the six core countries gave themselves an executive structure: the European Commission. To create a real economic union, the founding countries of the EEC knew they needed a superior level of jurisdiction above their own national sovereignty.

(Commentators rarely point out the fact that Britain, which had refused to join the Common Market, actually began its own competing European project called EFTA, for European Free Trade Association. It involved Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland and later Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Finland. Eventually most EFTA countries joined the Common Market except for Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.)

The six core countries of the EEC had good reasons to concentrate on building stronger federal links before trying to complete economic integration. From the outset, Europe had to overcome two obstacles: deeply entrenched attachment to national sovereignty in each country, and lack of labor mobility. Establishing a superior jurisdiction was the only way to break the resistance many countries had to giving up sovereignty. But even common institutions were not enough to conquer the second practical problem: different languages and welfare systems made the bulk of Europeans captive to their own country. In practical terms, no ordinary German could simply pick up and move to Milan because there was more work there. So European countries had to accept the notion that they would have to pool fiscal resources and transfer them where they were needed, since money is more easily moved than people.

The European Economic Community stirred so much enthusiasm that by the early 1960s many European politicians were already talking about turning Europe into a federation with an elected president. French president Charles de Gaulle crushed any hope that this would happen quickly, proclaiming that there would be no European federation for fifty years. De Gaulle could make such a proclamation because European decision-making had to be unanimous. He disagreed with the schedule of integration set out in the Treaty of Rome, in particular with th agreement to switch to a majority vote by 1965. In de Gaulle's mind, that change would turn Europe into a federation, and he felt France could not sacrifice its sovereignty so quickly (he certainly wasn't ready to sacrifice any of his own power). So in 1965, France simply refused to sit at the table and vote. It took almost ten years for the EEC to revive its dynamism.

The EEC kicked off again in 1974 with the simultaneous election of two very pro-European heads of state in France and Germany who were also friends: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt. Britain, which joined in 1974 along with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, became the main obstacle to European integration. The British had always been reticent players in Europe; they wanted fewer institutions integrated to a freetrade agreement. Giscard d'Estaing and Schmidt lobbied for more integration anyway and succeeded. In 1979, member countries agreed on a system for creating parity between their currencies, and they created the European Parliament to ratify decisions of the European Commission. The British refused to be part of any parity system, but the other countries moved forward. It was the first time that the EEC accepted leaving one of its member states behind, although this two-tiered approach later became common.

Fortunately, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's successor, François Mitterrand, also had very strong pro-European convictions. In 1985, Mitterrand worked hard to get the pro-Europe Delors appointed as the new president of the European Commission. Delors believed that the spirit of the European Community should be rekindled wit practical measures, and he set to work fostering closer economic integration. In 1986, the member countries adopted the Acte Unique, a program of three hundred amendments to the Treaty of Rome, which called for total economic integration and the removal of border controls, and granted Europe jurisdiction over research and development programs, regional affairs, and more. But the Acte Unique was only one step up the ladder. Delors's cherished project was the creation of a single currency, but the issue provoked bitter discussions among member countries. The Germans were very attached to the Deutschmark, one of the few national symbols they had been allowed to keep during the post-war occupation. Mitterrand, who was in favor of the single currency project, promised the Germans he would support reunification (essentially allowing Germany to become the dominant country in Europe) if Germany would accept a single European currency.

In December 1991, the twelve member countries of the EEC signed the Treaty of Maastricht, creating the European Union. The treaty called for economic integration. It included measures like consumer protection, common environmental standards, free movement of citizens, and transfer payments from the richer to poorer countries. Member countries agreed to create a common foreign policy, to reinforce political and judiciary cooperation, and to put in place a common defense plan. In practice, a French company was no longer required to hold a head office in each of the member countries where it did business.

The centerpiece of the Maastricht treaty was a clear timetable for the monetary union. In 1995, the euro would replace the ECU (European Currency Unit) as Europe's currency of reference. By 1998, member countries had to meet stiff macroeconomic criteria on inflation, deficits, national debit, long-term interest rates, and stability of their national currencies so there would be parity between their different currencies. The actual transition phase to the euro would begin in May 1998, in eleven of the fifteen European countries-Britain, Denmark, and Norway refused t adopt the currency, and Greece would need another year and a half to meet the criteria. The euro became official currency in January 1999, but the old currencies of the euro zone remained in use for a three-year transition period. The population could touch the new bills and coins only in January 2002, and the old national currencies completely disappeared seven weeks later by February 17.

Since the Treaty of Maastricht, Europeans have been openly exploring the idea of putting an end to their nation states and creating a federation. Europe is still far from being a federation, although member countries have given up a lot of their sovereignty. In a way, Europe is the blueprint for a form of much more thorough brand of political globalization than simple free trade à l’américaine, which is almost essentially economic and supposes the absolute sovereignty of the member countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. European integration is the equivalent of a North American free trade agreement that would require the United States to revoke the second amendment and support their minority languages. The European Union is the first case where a diverse group of countries has voluntarily pooled their sovereignty to create a bigger entity and handed over the traditional prerogatives of their nation states to a higher jurisdiction. By comparison, the unification of three hundred German principalities into a single country in the nineteenth century was done by force the unification of the thirteen American colonies into the United States was done between very similar parts that spoke the same language. The European challenge is all the more impressive: this incredibly complex union is made up of diverse members who speak eleven distinct languages, not counting the dialects.

Like a bicycle, Europe has to keep moving to stay up. The number of member countries could reach twenty-seven by 2015, and without changes, Europe will become unmanageable. Member countries agree that decision-making by unanimous consent will soon become unwieldy. The Germans, [with some 80 million people] who are now the biggest country in Europe, no longer feel it's fair to have the same voting weight in the European Parliament as Britain and France. At the December 2001 European summit in Nice, Germany was granted more seats, but a new balance will have to be found again before 2004, when ten more countries (among which are Poland, Cyprus, and the Czech Republic) will be admitted to the Union.[...]

At the moment, the European Union's member countries have different opinions about the direction Europe should take. Will Europe be a minimalist free market, a true federation, a multi-shaped cooperation of sovereign states? The British favor free trade, the Germans prefer a federation, and the French support the model of a consortium of states. Each approach has clear advantages and pitfalls.

The British free-trade approach would have the advantage of making things simple. Reducing Europe to a mere free-trade organization is tempting given the number of states that will soon be involved-twenty-five by 2004. In the British model, all countries would retain their full sovereignty. However, the idea may already be obsolete. The euro has already linked Europe politically. Although there is not yet a clear leader at the helm, member states have already given up some of their own sovereignty over matters as important as trade negotiations, agricultural policy, and even taxing levels.

The German idea of a federation would have the merit of turning Europe into a real State, while allowing each member country to retain some sovereignty. The main obstacle to this model is Europe's diversity. Federations of societies that don't share a common culture tend to be fragile. Even a European union of fifteen countries speaking eleven different languages would be difficult to manage, and there will soon be almost twice that number. There are examples of successful federations that manage two or three different cultures-like Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland, but a European federation of eleven languages in fifteen former countries would be an entirely different project. In Europe, the combined effect of language and very different Social Security systems confines 99 percent of the population to their own national jurisdiction. As a result, a European federation would offer few benefits to citizens unless the notion of transfer payments was fully accepted. Many member countries are also reluctant to give up their individual privileges. At the moment, France and Great Britain both have a seat on the United Nations’ Security Council. If Europe became a federal state, they would have to share one seat with the rest of the continent.

The French idea, which they call a "cooperation of states," is the most realistic model, and is pretty close to the way things are already done in Europe. Each state would retain its sovereignty, but be free to adhere to, or reject, any aspect of the Union. That is the status of the monetary union at the moment. Only twelve of the fifteen European countries have joined the single currency; Britain, Norway, and Denmark refused to join in. The British, meanwhile, strongly favored a common defense plan with France and Germany. The Treaty of Lisbon, signed by member countries in 2000, consecrated this principle of "reinforced cooperation," by which a vanguard of countries can break away from the pack and seek tighter links if they want. Prior to 2000, any other member country could veto.

The new union may end up combining features of all three approaches. It is already a British-style free trade agreement. It is becoming a federation by the mere fact that member states are progressively pooling important elements of their sovereignty and debating how the executive (the European Commission) and the Legislative (the European Parliament) will share powers. Yet, the European Union will probably always be a consortium of states, a loose confederation rather than a tight one. National identities will retain strong legitimacy for generations, and states will continue to seek arrangements with other countries that suit them-as the principle of "reinforced cooperation" has already recognized.

The main challenge the European Union will have to deal with in the coming years is how to give its decisions more legitimacy. The Union is not run by an elected official, a problem the Anglo-American press and opponents of the Union in all countries are quick to note. On the other hand, the European Union is not run either by faceless "eurocrats," as many critics maintain, either, although members of the European Commission, which makes recommendations to the European Council, are not elected. It is the European Council, which makes decisions, that is made up of elected representatives (ministers) from each State. Those decisions are then ratified by the European Parliament, whose members are also elected. The power of the Parliament over the Commission is also growing. When the European Parliament committee investigated cases of fraud involving a French commissioner in 1999, the controversy pushed then-president Jacques Santerre to resign, and the entire Commission followed suit. Parliament has obviously acquired a degree of legitimacy in the public sphere that it does not have on paper.

How Europe will evolve and how it will affect France over the decades to come is really anyone's guess. But one thing is almost certain: Europe will have a bigger impact on France than globalization even will.

French attitudes toward Europe have shifted many times since de Gaulle threw a wrench in the EEC's wheels in the 1960s. In 1992, the French population nearly rejected the common currency scheme by referendum. But since then, they have shown remarkable flexibility and willingness to make sacrifices for European unity-more than their politicians have shown, anyway. Like the infamous Y2K bug, the conversion to the euro in France was a much-anticipated catastrophe that never happened. The French abandoned their eight-century-old currency without remorse. And now the same people who nearly said no to the euro in 1992 are barging ahead in the single European economy and hardly looking back.

The positive effects of the single currency are already beginning to show. In the 1990s, the French economy was submitted to rigorous austerity measures in order to meet the tough single-currency requirements set out by the European Union. To strengthen the franc, the French had to reduce their deficit and adopt a zero inflation policy ? a pretty strong medicine, which produced high unemployment and a sustained gloom through most of the 1990s. The benefits of the euro became apparent in 1998 when the exchange rates between all eleven currencies were frozen for good. In 1999, during the first year of the euro, unemployment in France fell from double digits to single, leaving the country in positive bliss. Foreign publications began to speak of France as the locomotive of Europe.

The French have also begun to think big. The introduction of the euro means that, for the first time, individual companies are staring at a domestic market of three hundred million people, which is bigger than the U.S. domestic market and considerably richer. Boeing owes much of its past successes not only to the quality of its airplanes, but to generous military contracts (in particular, from the all-powerful U.S. Air Force) and to the sheer size of its domestic market. While Boeing grew, many of Europe's national aviation industries were suffering from the crippling effects of small domestic markets. No matter how hard the Swedes or the Dutch pushed their Saabs and their Fokkers, their national market was simply too small to sustain strong growth and achieve high economies of a large scale. But that problem is no longer there. The European consortium Airbus now receives more orders than Boeing.

The French, whose outlook has always been continental (often to a fault), stand to benefit enormously from a single domestic market large enough to equal their ambitions. However, mentalities are slow to change. [...]

Federalism has always been the f-word of French politics. Most of the French only have a scant understanding of how a federation even works. They think of republics and federations as radically opposed, mutually exclusive forms of political organization. When we told the French that it's possible to be a federation and a republic (the United States and Germany are good examples), many didn't believe us. This allergy to federalism is so pervasive that many French opinion-makers have rejected the idea of a federal Europe out of hand, simply concluding that, "France is not a federation." The ideas of uniformity and equality and centralism are so deeply ingrained in the French mind-set that the French have trouble imagining that they could run their own affairs in their own centralized way while being part of a federation.

Yet thanks to the European reality, that attitude is changing. Europe has introduced the notion into the French psyche that federalism could have some benefits. The French State has already agreed to give up national sovereignty and, to a certain extent, hand its destiny to a superior level of government. Authors generally argue, probably rightly, that the French promoted Europe at the beginning because they hoped to control Europe and make it a springboard for their policy of cultural and political grandeur. The French know they will never control Europe and that Europe will never be "French," yet they are moving forward with integration anyway.

Europe is not yet a federation, but it has already forced the centralizing French government to loosen its grip on domestic affairs. Until the 1970s, it was dangerous to drive around Brittany with a "BZH" bumper sticker - the abbreviation of Breizh ("Brittany," in Breton). Such an affirmation of regional autonomy in a regional language was regarded as seditious and could land the car owner in jail! The 1999 European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages states that minorities should be protected in each country, even to the point of translating official documents into a minority language if necessary. So local groups like Bretons, Basques, and Corsicans use Brussels to gain recognition from France.

Europe, not globalization, is pushing the French to adapt their frame of reference and look outside their own borders for new examples and standards. Cultural minorities aren't alone in using the European Union as leverage against old French reflexes. As we saw at a round table on gender equity at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, women are too. Women have always been feebly represented in the French political system. The handful of French female députées at the seminar rejoiced about the fact that they could now use Brussels as leverage against the machismo of French politicians.

The French were the inventors of the Right and the Left, but under the effect of Europe, traditional political fault lines are mutating into a federalist-sovereignist split, Canadian style. The cracks in traditional party division first started to show during the 1992 referendum on Europe. Much in the way that some Americans never accepted the very existence of a federal government in the United States, Jacobin politicians, whether from the Right or the Left, all turned out to be sovereignists (defenders of France's sovereignty against Europe). The pro-sovereignty camp typically believes that Europe would be a state in its own right, which would reduce former member states to the status of provinces. France's libertarian thinkers and pragmatists turned out to be federalists (who think Europe should have precedence over its member states). Federalists want Europe to be one state. This new split hasn't destroyed any traditional political parties in France yet, but the issue demonstrates that even France is seeking new categories for a new political reality.

Europe is clearly taking its rightful place in French minds and hearts. The European Court of justice and the European Human Rights Court have turned the Conseil d’État into a lower jurisdiction of administrative law. In 1976, the Conseil Constitutionnel ruled that transfers of sovereignty to Europe were unconstitutional, since France's Constitution stipulates that sovereignty is sacred. Technically, that means that most of Europe is unconstitutional by French law. Do the French care? No. They are barging ahead with European integration anyway.

But of course, modern France is only a chapter in the life of a very old people. The French aren't less French, even inside Europe. The European Union is certainly not the end of the French story, but simply another chapter. Nobody knows what Europe will make of the French, or what the French will make of Europe. The only certainty is that the French have put a peaceful Europe at the top of their political agenda for at least the century to come. By Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow (Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, p. 326-338)

By "yours truly": Some Reflexions about Stereotypes and Other Things

I’ll begin with a little story - a true story - that tells you how a German feels about an Italian, or more exactly how a young German driving a German car felt about an Italian automobile. That was in the summer of 1961. I was hitchhiking toward Munich on my way to Innsbruck (Austria) to join a group of French, German and Austrian friends I had met at the university of Leuven in Belgium where I was a student at the time (the famous Leuven where Erasmus had taught and, in my days, which was still a bilingual [Flemish-French] university) in those days and go hiking with them in the Austrian Alps. A young German salesperson in a light blue Volkswagen, not the “ladybug” or coccinelle but the 1500 squareback of old, kindly picked me up. There was no speed limit on the autobahn then, andI still can see the speedometer needle on the 150 km mark ... And that was fun ... Suddenly, a red Alfa-Romeo sped by, leaving us behind. We both looked silently at the vanishing beauty. Then, my German Good Samaritan said to me: "You see ? He was talking about the fast and flashy Alfa-Romeo, THAT is the girl to love, but - with a gentle tap to the steering wheel of his reliable VW (pronounced “FaVé”) - THIS is the girl to marry!”.

This example shows how the Germans then saw - and probably still today - see the Italians : nothing in their view replaces Teutonic homemade reliability. Italian women may be beautiful, fancy Italian cars are perhaps very fast, but we Germans still prefer German engineering and German women!

Human nature may be the same everywhere but we do not think or act alike. There is, for example, an expression in Dutch ‘een zuideneuropees leventje’, which says it well. It can be translated as something like “a little life from the south of Europe” that is to say an easy life without problems.

We must never forget the weight of European history : centuries of wars between the British and the French, the French and the Germans, the British and the Irish, the British and the Dutch. Why do you think we still say in English “to talk like a Dutch uncle” or “to go Dutch”? This is just a reminder of the time when the rivalry in international commerce between these two sea powers was very high. Dutch courage, for the British, is the courage of the drunkards, a Dutch wife is (pardon my French!) a bitch of a wife.

In the late Middle Ages, when Latin was the lingua franca, there were already a series of more or less proverbial formulae, stereotypes that already were a form of linguistic racism. The most often quoted of these examples is the one about the multilingual Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500-1558) and what language he would employ. If he wanted to talk to men, the Emperor said, he would speak French; if he wanted to speak to ladies, he would speak Italian; to speak to his horse, he would speak German and, if he wanted to talk to God, he would speak Spanish (his native tongue). This is, of course, the Franco-Spanish version of the anecdote ; for the Italians, Italian, of course, is the language of men and French the effeminate language! German is also ill-treated in another proverb that goes back to the XVIIth century: “German howls, English cries, French sings, Italian plays the comedy, and Spanish talks.”

Let’s begin with the French and see how other languages treat them. English first. Surely we find ‘French cuisine’, ‘French dressing’, ‘French fries’, but immediately after, in alphabetical order: ‘French kiss’, ‘French lover’, ‘to take the French leave’, and other pejorative expressions such as the ‘pardon my French’ just mentioned...

Spanish treats the French a bit more generously. They say ‘desperdirse a la francesa’, (which means without saying good bye), the same as the Germans say ‘sich auf französich empfehlen’ (to escape the French way), which, in both cases seems to have been borrowed from English.

The Germans may comment on the French and their cuisine by saying: ‘leben wie Gott in Frankreich", (live like God in France), but the Dutch say also nasty things about them: ‘Fransecomplimentem maken’, (to compliment the French way) , that is say to flatter, ‘Met de Franseslag’ , (in the French manner), that is to say sloppy ; and here is another one: ‘Parÿse opvattingen’, (Parisian ideas), which means allowing all kinds of debauchery.

The Danes are nor far behind: ‘frankske artikler’ (French articles) - I don’t mean le, la, les ? are... condoms. In L’auberge espagnole you will hear Juan, the barman, ask Xavier if he knows what it is a “francès” - The French, on the other hand, for the now all too-common préservatifs say ‘capotes anglaises’ ‘English raincoats’. For the Danes, ‘franske postkort’ (French postcards) mean erotic postcards. Here is another one: ‘franske ydelser’, (French benefits), which mean not taxable.

From the above we gather a rather negative image of the French: flatterers, lazy and debauched in the view of the Dutch, for example; with a reputation for “taking the French leave”, not very trustworthy in a word. Or again, take the English dictionary and what it says in a Shakespeare’s concordance at the word French: “the lusty French”, “the false French, “the fearful French”.

Truly the French have had bad press. As individuals they are much like anyone else, some good, some bad. But everyone has the same gripe about them as a nation : they’re arrogant. Even the English and the Germans think so, and they should know. They complain that the French act if they had invented culture, as if no one else could cook with élan, write poetry with panache, or behead aristocrats with finesse. For proof of French arrogance, people say, one needs look no further than their generous contribution to the lexicon of snobbery, to which they have donated nouveau riche, parvenu, arriviste, petit bourgeois, faux pas and chauvinist, among others.

Now, what about the English? The French say, as I just mentioned, ‘capotes anglaises’, and the English reciprocate for the same thing with ‘French letter’. In slang, you may hear the expression ‘les Anglais ont débarqué’ or ‘avoir ses Anglais’ (in reference to the red uniform of the British army in the XVIIIth century). For the French, the English are also “des rostbifs”, whereas the Dutch prefer to say ‘Engels gaar’, cooked the English way, that is to say badly prepared. But it is mostly their supposed coolness that seems to dominate, with stereotyped expressions such as : ‘Engels flegma’ in Dutch, le flegme britannique, or as they say in Danish “stive englændere’’, the ‘stiff English’.

More seriously, what does this mean? Let’s try to make sense out of this. When you look at all these stereotyped expressions, what do we see?

1. First, the profusion of popular ways to name people living on the other side of the border, based on their food habits: froggies or frogs, rosbifs, Krauts or sausage eaters, or macaroni or pizza eaters, with a geography based on four poles: overcooked roastbeef in England, sausage and cabbage in Germany, frogs and escargots in France, and pasta and more pasta in Italy.

2. The second picture that we get is the way the English used to talk about their neighbors, the French, the Dutch, and the Irish. You know some of these expressions about the Irish: ‘Irish bull’, ‘to get one’s Irish up’. In other words, these pejorative expressions are like fossils, traces of times past, reflecting the ideological look that the British cast on their former enemies and that have been kept in the language without, many times, any thought of offending anyone anymore.

3. There is a third form of racism prevalent in Europe today, which is the racism against foreigners. Just think of the word we use in French, Italian, Spanish for a foreigner: étranger, straniere, extraño, a word that means both foreign and strange. In the Romance languages, the word for ‘stranger’ also means foreigner, outsider. It has a clear ‘them and us’ distinction, a distinction we find as well in German in the word Ausländer, to say alien or foreigner.

Since the1950s, many new “strangers” have come to Europe? Turks, Indians, Africans and Arabs - ‘guest’ workers are they’re called in German - or former colonial subjects, many of whom are now in Belgium, France or England second generation Europeans. But there is a widespread reluctance to accept them as fellow Europeans. The Italian press has found a novel way of calling these people. They call them extracommunitarios, meaning from outside the European community, which disregards the large number who are European citizens. The expression has caught on, but in shortened form: they’re called the extras. To me this outwardly innocuous little word (“extras”) is more dangerous than froggies or Krauts or rosbifs.

Names can hurt you. Sometimes they stick, sometimes people become what you call them. It’s been 1500 years since the Vandals devastated Gaul but ? where do you think the word ‘vandalism’ come from? ? they still get the blame for graffiti and broken public toilets. The Vandals gave also their name to the southern part of Spain where they have settled: Andalusia.

There is indeed a paradox: Frogeaters, Rosbifs, Krauts, Macaronieters and others, in short the very people who call themselves names, are, as Isabelle comments about the Catalan professor in L’auberge espagnole, working toward a European Union and, at the same time, as seen in the movie, they don’t seem to stop making fun of each other.

If there is some hope, it has to be with the younger generation of Europeans, required, for example, to study two foreign languages in high school and are having constant student exchanges, such as the Erasmus program at the university level. To study another language is to mold yourself into another view of the world and go farther in your perception of the ‘other’, deeper than the fact that they eat frog legs, sausage and cabbage, spaghetti or roast beef.

And to return to "Cinema Across Cultures", I hope that the movies which we've screened all through the semester somewhat illustrate the true meaning of the word “liberal” in “Liberal Arts” or in “Liberal Education”, which is to liberate the mind from the chains that keep us tied to our old habits and prejudices. © Joseph E. Garreau