Zwartboek (Black Book)

Black Book is a hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.

Set in the Netherlands during World War II, it is a return to director Paul Verhoeven's Dutch roots after a series of American studio movies. Verhoeven, best known for such fare as Showgirls and Basic Instinct, clearly demonstrates that he is capable of more than just sexual provocation or mindless action as in his Starship Troopers, Total Recall or RoboCop.

Black Book is an agile thriller that consistently entertains. Breaking records in the Netherlands as the highest-grossing Dutch-made film, it explores underground Resistance efforts by the Dutch during the Nazi occupation. Making observations that are both political and personal, Book is almost always cynical and knowing. One disturbing sequence involving the torture of suspected traitors evokes the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The story's focus is a Jewish woman (Carice van Houten) who forms allegiances with whomever she can in order to avoid capture by the Nazis.

Rescued by Resistance fighters, she becomes an arms smuggler, infiltrating Nazi headquarters. Abruptly seizing an opportunity, she flirts with and seduces a high-ranking Nazi soldier (The Lives of Others' dashing Sebastian Koch) in a move that changes the outcome of several lives.

Van Houten is both steely and sensual, and always convincing as the film's unflappable heroine. Koch, so terrific as the East German playwright who is targeted by the secret police in Others, further demonstrates his depth and range. His character is far more complex (and occasionally unnervingly sympathetic) than the usual cardboard-cutout Nazi officials in films.

Also excellent are Thom Hoffman as a doctor who joins the Resistance and Derek de Lint as the Resistance leader reeling from the capture of his beloved son.

Characters are refreshingly multidimensional: Protagonists are not always humane and antagonists have admirable qualities.

The film's momentum turns sluggish near the conclusion. At nearly 2½ hours, it feels a bit too long, but things are never dull. The provocatively sexual scenes, though somewhat prurient (as one might expect from Verhoeven), have an erotic charge that is startling and unusual in a war film.

Black Book's tale of espionage and uncertain alliances, with riveting performances and intriguing moral complexity, makes for an exciting and absorbing movie.

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Read the Original review here

Max Manus

The eponymous hero of Max Manus was one of the more notable Norwegian resistance fighters in World War II, operating out of Oslo. After the fighting stopped he survived quietly in business until 1996. He's a figure undoubtedly still generating national pride, perhaps explaining the high praise accorded the movie from local sources. That's not to say this is a bad film by any means, but ultimately Manus' biographical wartime experiences, at least as translated to screen here, play out as something of a Boy's Own adventure, rather than a ruthlessly honest warts-and-all biopic despite the hero's final drunken introspection and occasional doubts. It's a film where the participant's have-a-go attitude and laddish enthusiasm for adventure keeps the action flowing smoothly from one escapade to another, with courage under duress, noble sacrifices, love interest and final victory almost a given.

As a portrait of continental wartime resistance shown through the increasing travails and vicissitudes of a group it belongs in the same category as the recent Female Agents (aka: Les Femmes des Ombres, 2008), Verhoeven's Black Book (aka: Zwartboek, 2006), or further back, the Dutch director's Soldier Of Orange (aka: Soldaat van Oranje, 1977). Incidentally, the latter also includes a scene where the hero meets royalty as a moment of great pride, but in place of Manus' relatively black and white view of events it offers a narrative altogether more complex and ironic, a world where loyalties are far more confused. Soldier Of Orange and Black Book both show both good and traitorous amongst the occupied - characters perhaps engendered by Verhoeven's presence as a child during the troubled times it represents. Even The Heroes Of Telemark (1965), Anthony Mann's snowbound film about the Norwegian resistance, featured a traitor or two as well as emphasising the painful, but necessary sacrifice of civilians. Those behind Max Manus are from a different generation presumably with no imperative to draw out such contradictory truths, although danger still lurks everywhere.

Of course a dose of revisionism is not the only way to make a good war film. One of the more interesting things about Max Manus is that it sandwiches the main action, set amongst the Norwegian resistance, between scenes of the hero fighting earlier as a soldier - one action in particular, a short, bloody encounter fought out in 1940 against the Soviets, before he was fighting back in Oslo. Perhaps intended to contrast the 'clean', if nervously exhausting, war on the front with the shadowy deceptions and suspense necessary elsewhere in Manus' career, these moments also serve to remind us of the type of the hero Manus was, in his own way, before fighting the Nazi occupation back at home. This is useful as, when we first see Manus in action away from such brutal certitudes of combat, his actions against the occupying forces are almost amateurish - initially working on an underground newspaper, posting flyers and plotting ludicrous assassination attempts - all with little professionalism, a fact noted by more experienced resistance fighters. Gradually however he makes his mark, notably with one daring escape from a hotel window for which he gains a small, slightly humorous reputation.

Using an escape route via Sweden, he find himself in Scotland, part of the first Norwegian volunteer force of saboteurs, being given his first assignment, now better trained and equipped when sent back home on assignment. Norway is now occupied, run by a puppet government, and something has to be done. Soon our hero is blowing up ships in Oslo harbour with limpet mines, dodging the efforts of the determinedly adversarial local Nazi Gestapo commander Fehmer (an intense performance by Ken Duken, incidentally, which at times reminds one by Ray Liotta) in locating him, as well as resolving some growing romantic issues of his own. In contrast to the earlier combat scenes it's noticeable that Manus is now more assured and calm as a fighter; in one notable moment, which might have escaped from a James Bond movie, he fires backwards at his enemies with a machine gun while escaping on a motorbike. Elsewhere the action and suspense are more convincing - including a moment when the hero accidentally shoots himself - presumably staged around documented true events. The hero's chief romantic interest is 'Tikken' Lindebraekke (Agnes Kittelsen), the resistance contact at the British embassy in Stockholm, but here emotions remain somewhat enigmatic and, to its credit, the film avoids any stereotypical resolution to their mounting tension.

Max Manus is staged with a confidence and with assured flow by its co-directors, and this, the most expensive Norwegian production to date is highly engaging. Adding considerably to this is the performance by Aksel Hennie as the hero; Hennie makes of him a very likable character, with convincing weaknesses and belief in his own mortality - a trait considerably humanising what could easily just become a nationalistic action figure. Towards the close of the movie, peace newly restored, this introspection comes to the fore as the surviving hero ponders his own moral culpability - even if the smile breaking out at the end of Max Manus for this viewer at least is less complex by way of implication than that which concludes, say, Once Upon A Time In America.

Paragraph 175

Probably history was after all, meant to be a study of human consciousness in guilt. Of course, there is always a need to realize something valuable out of the past, that a study about the past is after all a human being’s reverse-troubleshooting guide. Probably that’s the reason why there are beautiful pictures of stoic, stiff-lipped people in our high school history text-books. We like to think of ourselves as the descendants of glorious generations, men and women valiant in their own right, contributing their bit to the proud bloodlines we carry today. We read on these people, associate ourselves with the affairs of their lives, judge them for their actions, name calendar days after them, hate them, worship them, write books on them, film biopics on their lives, name our babies after them… The reason we can’t forget these people could be because they’ve either given to or taken from this world in proportions far greater than what you or me have.
Between the years 1933 and 1945 one man changed our world because he believed in something that seemed stupid at first. As time rolled into horrorfest mode, it turned into mankind’s worst-ever mistake. Something that psychologically stopped time and spun it backwards. We remember that man either because he took away from this world a chunk of our moral fiber, the scars forever etched in our minds, or probably because he gave this world freedom from the ideologies of mankind’s vilest prodigy when he hanged himself.
Today, history attests the importance of this period of madness with facts and figures that might seem absurdly horrible for our generation. We’ve all probably read enough to forget about a past like this. Biopics and documentaries have already dry-choked our tear glands at the horrifying experiences recounted by jewish survivors. Pictures of gas chambers and mass-graves have already made us numb. And just when we thought that we kneww too much to burden our consciences, comes a movie about this small group of men who disappeared off the face of the earth because of something that disturbs, intrigues and thwarts us till this day: Love, and all the stigma it carries. And for something so simple and subtle as love to take place between two people, there lies an even more absurd reasoning as to why the two people shouldn’t be of the same sex. That’s the Nazi regime’s code of stigma, also known as Paragraph 175. And no, your fat, dog-eared history text book does not consider the lives of one hundred thousand men who lived during that time, loving others…. worth mentioning. These men died unnoticed and in secret captivity, so secret that even those labor camps within which they died are today not preserved for posterity. Few of those numerous men survived. Fewer live today. And fewer still are willing to come out of their dark closets of tears and share their experiences, unscripted and undistilled to a camera crew detwrmined to make known to us such a vital, forgotten part of man’s history.
It’s pretty obvious what the contents of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code contained, judging by the number of innocent lives it consumed, it would be more appropriate if you’d watch the movie and learn rather than have me explain it to you in a website review. What’s most unsettling is interestingly, not Paragraph 175 itself, considering the circumstances under which it took form. Rather, it’s the fact that a law that was so fatal took a hundred and twenty three years from the time it was adopted in 1871, to be finally revoked in 1994. Even after the fall of the nazi government in 1945, it still took close to fifty whole years and six amendments to finally strike it down.
Nazis killed plenty of men, women and children. You certainly wouldn’t expect the most powerful and conservative army in the world to go soft against gay men and women and suddenly endorse mutual love. Not at a time when your first-duty towards the people you love was replaced by the pride of the country and certainly not at a time when race was more important than gender. So in short, nazis did what nazis do best: kill. But, even after we thought the horrible era of an insane ideology was over and done with, heads of government still remained conservative and chose to ignore the ills of their pasts, dragging their feet through the marshes of sludge-bureaucracy.
Rob Epstein conveys all of these truths with anger and emotion, throughout while interviewing these survivors. Some, among them is a half-Jewish gay resistance fighter who posed as a Hitler Youth member to rescue his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp in an ultimately futile effort; Annette Eick, the Jewish lesbian who escaped to England with the help of a woman she loved; there’s a young man who was freed from a sentence at Dachau only to be interned again at Buchenwald, the German Christian photographer who was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality, then joined the army on his release because he “wanted to be with men” and Pierre Seel, the French Alsatian teenager, who watched as his lover was eaten alive by dogs in the camps.
Perhaps the problem was that there were just not enough men alive today who were willing to talk about their experiences. From the outset, the pool of interviewees was certainly going to be limited, but also limited is the actual archival footage of life in the concentration camps. Instead the directors have chosen to pepper the film with well-preserved family photographs, and lively footage of gay and lesbian culture blossoming during the days of the Weimar Republic after WW1. When the inadequacy of photographic technology left us these photos of brotherly love, it’s even more bittersweetly touching. Each weather-beaten photo has a iridescent moment behind it. The everlasting intimacy and beauty in these photos already suggested love is universal.
The statistics are staggering: Between 1933 and 1945, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality, roughly half of them were sentenced to prison, and from 10,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. The camps were used for re-education, slave labor, castration and sadistic medical experiments. It’s believed only about 4,000 survived their ordeal. It is interesting to note that the penal code didn’t cover lesbians. The Nazis considered lesbians to be “curable.” Women were regarded, as vessels of motherhood – increasing the German population was top priority – therefore, they were exempt from mass arrest. Most lesbians went into exile or quietly married gay men. One woman, who tells her story in the film, was given exit papers and was lucky enough to escape to England.
There are only about 10 homosexuals left from this tragedy, and they interviewed eight for this special film. It was incredible and moving and, if you are not touched by their stories, then you are cast in stone.

By Fazil (at PassionforCinema.com)
To view the original article, click here
 
Wiki Paragraph 175

The Reader

Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

This isn't meet-cute. Fifteen-year-old schoolboy Michael Berg (David Kross) first encounters his 36-year-old future lover Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) by throwing up in her doorway. It's a dismal rainy day in a German city in 1958 and he has taken ill on the way home from school. She cleans him up and accompanies him to his family. He turns out to have scarlet fever, and is kept at home for months. Once he's well again he goes back carrying a bunch of flowers to thank Hanna for her kindness, but realizes he's turned on, and bolts in embarrassment while she's bathing. Eventually Michael returns and happily loses his virginity. A regular ritual of reading, bathing, and lovemaking develops between him and Hanna. He reads to her; she bathes him; the sex is mutual. She is a tram conductor with a harsh manner, and several huge secrets. She seems to be using Michael, but she's also enjoying him mightily, and he is reaping enormous rewards, though his affair puts pressure on his relations with family and schoolmates.

Bernhard Schlink's original The Reader was an international bestseller. A lawyer and judge who writes, Schlink departed from his usual detective stories with this novel that becomes a meditation on Nazism--the denial of the surviving participants and the incomprehension of Germans like Michael who were born in the aftermath. Michael's feelings toward Hanna become much more complicated than simply those of a youth introduced to love by an older woman--as complicated as the feelings of Germans about the demons in their modern past. As for Hanna, she seems to understand nothing and to be more concerned about how she appears than what she has done.

The book is in three parts. First there is the love affair of the schoolboy and the tram conductor, which ends abruptly and painfully when Hanna suddenly disappears. In the second part it's eight years later and Michael is a law student attending trials of Nazis with fellow students and their seminar teacher, Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz). One day the young man is horrified and riveted to learn one of the defendants is none other than his long lost Hanna. She turns out to have been an SS guard at a satellite of Auschwitz and she's on trial with five other women for allegedly allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death locked inside a church. This trial paralyzes Michael. He has never gotten over his first, interrupted love idyll with Hanna. Now he is filled with guilt for having loved her but also a sense that he should help her when he realizes he has information that might lower her sentence.

The last part, thirty years later, consists of several brief visits by Michael, first to Hanna in prison, then to the posh Manhattan flat of a Jewish woman, Rose Mather (Lena Olin), who was at the trial. She was one of the survivors and wrote a book about her experiences that was used in evidence. This provides a kind of coda.

Schlink's novel is neat and arresting, a page-turner that conceivably makes you think. Its Holocaust issues are cunningly intertwined with a sensuous--and rather peculiar--coming-of-age story told by a sensitive man still struggling to understand his experience and his country's. I read the book with interest, but found it a bit contrived. This together with Stephen Daldry's previous choice to film Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows a weakness on the English director's part for stories that are a little too clever and schematic.

This time the screenplay by the British playwright David Hare does damage to the book by altering its chronology, chopping it up and muddling the original linear three-part structure. Hare has said in interviews that the interpolated device of Michael's telling his story to his grown daughter was necessary to make sense of his voice-over. (That,however, is debatable.) Having settled on this device, Hare felt obligated to keep interjecting the mature Michael, played by Ralph Fiennes, at points throughout the film. The omnipresence of Fiennes' glum face undermines the sense of the young Michael's eagerness and, later, shock and confusion.

Fiennes as Michael revisits a cosmetically aged Kate Winslet as Hanna three decades later when she is about to be released from prison. Michael could never bring himself to visit her, but sent her tapes of himself reading the same books he read to her during their affair. Fiennes is a cold fish, hard to relate to the lively and sweet personality of young David Kross.

The film is hampered from the outset by its use of the outmoded artifice of dramatizing a story that takes place in another country and another language and yet having everyone speak English, with several of the main characters played by Brits (Winslet, Fiennes) putting on German accents. Bruno Ganz speaks with less of a German accent than they do.

There is much of interest in this glossy production, beautifully photographed on location by two of the best DP's in the business, Chris Menges and Roger Deakins. Ganz's professor is an ambiguous, subtle characterization. But since the drama of the unfolding story has been destroyed by breaking it up into pieces, the only thing that remains alive and beautiful and strange are the love scenes between Kross and Winslet. There is good chemistry between the 18-year-old Kross and the 34-year-old Winslet, and their nude scenes are bold and intimate. It's only when the machinery of what Schlink and the filmmakers are trying to tell us about German guilt and denial goes into action that things begin to be clunky and cold. Unfortunately, that is a big part of the picture.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Just when it increasingly appears the wells of Hollywood's creativity have dried up, continually resorting to reworking tired cinematic and narrative clichés, films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button emerge to unexpectedly rekindle faith in the industry. Intriguing enough by its mere storyline core (a man is born a senior citizen, and 'ages' backwards throughout his life), what could have resulted in an overly gimmicky excuse for a melodrama is seemingly effortlessly transformed by the delicate directorial touch of David Fincher into something far less contentious and volumes more poignant and lyrical. A haunting, resonant exploration of time, life, death and the transition from one to the other, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button miraculously manages to be sombre and emotionally draining without once becoming excessively dour, with sublime bits of charm, humour and hope peppering the profundity and making it a true cinematic experience for the ages.

To call The Curious Case of Benjamin Button close to a contemporary masterpiece would hardly be overstating things, and yet such praise feels out of place, not because the film is not deserving of it (far from it) but that it makes no claims as to aiming for such heights - were it not for the enormous budget and stars, the film could easily have been a small, independent production. Few films prove so enormously ambitious and yet ultimately unassuming, with such vast scopes, and yet such simple aims all things considered, and Fincher toes the line between the grand and the intimate with remarkable precision. Moreover, it is interesting to see perennial cynic Fincher tap into such unbridled emotional resonance (the film is unlikely to leave a single dry eye in the house), and yet such moments are pure sentiment trimmed of all sap and Hollywood tear-jerking cliché, making them all the more gently genuine and lasting. If his past films such as Fight Club and Seven appeared to be expunging hidden depths of suppressed rage and bitterness, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button appears an attempt to tap into more tender feelings, and the result is in no way less magnificent.

While on very first impression the film might be sized up as overlong, rambling and full of extraneous subplots, over time it becomes increasingly clear the film's intent is not merely to tell the story of Button, but, to the best of Fincher's considerable ability, to live alongside him, complete with all the highs, lows, and little bits in between. This not only provides incredible empathy and pathos for Button's unconventional situation, but allows the story through the character to extrapolate and explore deeper existential themes, reflecting upon the notions of time and its fleeting potential, the overlap of life and death and the importance of living life to the fullest regardless of adversity. While it can be argued that despite this the script still has the occasional clunky bit of exposition, with storytelling so operatic yet paradoxically quiet and unassuming, such concerns only register as rare minute breaches in the film's incredible quality.

Fincher's flair for stunning visuals also carries through in fully force, from the luscious period costuming and sets to the bold visual contrast between the exhilarating (a tense second world war sea battle) to the amusing (boyhood/elderly man Benjamin discovering alcohol) to the heartbreakingly dramatic (Benjamin's quietly horrified meeting with his father) and the seamless flow between them. Alexandre Desplat's luminous musical score and Claudio Miranda's grandiose cinematography ably reinforce the lyrical content. This all, of course goes without even mentioning the film's most central hook, the visual effects and prosthetic 'reverse aging' effects. At first startlingly convincing, the greatest testament to the incredible visual talent on display is how near immediately the viewer forgets about it, remaining so engrossed in Button's bizarre story to extract one's self from the narrative enough to properly appraise the incredible work put into it - a sign, if any, of masterful film-making.

As the titular Button, Brad Pitt is simply a marvel, delivering a performance which is quiet, ego-less, unshowy and all the more supremely effective and credible for it, perfectly convincing no matter what age or contrasting physical appearance. Infusing unassuming heart and unspoken pathos into a character stoically resigned to 'unusual' circumstances rather than milking them for all their emotional worth, Pitt's Benjamin Button becomes an unforgettable underdog for the ages, all the more effective from Pitt's continual refusal to adhere to cliché or Hollywood showboating. Cate Blanchett proves just as marvellous, also essaying a character over the course of over 70 years of her life and proving completely convincing and heartwarming every step of the way while delivering a tremendously emotional performance with the utmost precision and grounded care. Rather than delivering a typical female romantic lead type, Blanchett's Daisy is a fleshed out, enormously credible human being, making her romantic struggle with Button all the more achingly affecting. Supporting the lead duo and their simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking relationship, Taraji P. Henson gives an enormously powerful yet understated performance as Button's surrogate orphanage mother, and Jason Flemyng proves a perfect combination of quirky and hauntingly credible as Button's estranged father. Finally, Tilda Swinton delivers a performance layered with emotional volumes and nuance as a fleeting romantic interest of Button's, managing to both capture the audience's heart and contempt simultaneously.

Despite demanding nearly three hours of the viewer's life, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button makes every last second more than worth it, its power and incredibly uniform quality made all the more appealing by its lack of pretension and vehement avoidance of cliché. While the story or length may not appeal to every last audience member, it is all the more of a shame, as such unanticipated cinematic mastery deserves to be enjoyed and reflected upon by as many as possible.

Waltz with Bashir

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Every war generation processes horror and guilt in its own fashion, but Ari Folman has come up with a truly unprecedented genre: the animated repressed-memory atrocity-mystery documentary. Watching "Waltz With Bashir," Israel's entry for the 2008 foreign language Oscar, you feel like a 19th-century naturalist presented with a platypus. How can something made from so many different pieces draw breath?

"Waltz With Bashir" not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence. The film is concerned with events of the 1982 Lebanon War but its echoes volley off the current conflict in Gaza, the history of Israel, the history of the Jews - the history of war itself. The film, devastating and distressing in equal measure, widens in meaning as it narrows in scope.

It begins very simply. Folman visits a friend, Boaz, who tells of recurring nightmares about the dogs he shot while on patrol in Lebanon, lest their barking wake the enemy. Afterward, the filmmaker realizes he has no memories of his own from the period. A quarter century on, the best he can come up with is a jagged image of fellow soldiers rising naked from a livid sea and coming ashore at the foot of bombed-out high-rises.

This film, then, is Folman's investigation into his own past and his generation's. "Waltz With Bashir" is animated, one senses, out of self-protection - from a need to get close to the nub of trauma while keeping it abstract enough to confront. The visuals are awkwardly realistic, similar to the rotoscoping technique used in films like "Waking Life" and "Chicago 10" but not quite as convincing. The colors are nightmarish; the movements have the repetitive smoothness of a Web cartoon. Animation serves as a diving suit here, allowing the director to plumb his psychic depths, but it's leakier than he'd like.

Still, as a therapist friend tells Folman, "We don't go places where we really don't want to go." So the filmmaker heads off to interview high school pals and platoon-mates, hoping their memories will give shape to his, like blips on a sonar screen. In Holland, he visits a friend who has made a fortune selling falafel to health-conscious Europeans and who recalls shooting up a Mercedes full of Arab innocents in a blind panic.

Other men remember other horrors: a child sniper shot to pieces in an Eden-like forest; a junkyard full of body parts; a soldier who watches his platoon wiped out and then floats through the night sea back to his regiment, feeling calm bleed into survivor guilt. Each step of "Waltz With Bashir" brings us closer to what one character calls the "disassociative event" - the September 1982 massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

The killers were Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen, revenge-crazed over the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel two days earlier. The camps were ostensibly protected by the Israeli Defense Force, of which Folman was a member. At first the filmmaker only knows he was within several hundred yards of the genocide, separated from it by soldiers and walls. Then, as his friends' memories chip away at his subconscious, "Waltz With Bashir" burrows closer toward the black core of personal experience. The IDF sent up flares. They only served to let the Phalangists see the women and children they were murdering.

At its rueful heart, the movie is a meditation on the lines where being present at an atrocity turns into being complicit, where complicity shades into guilt, where guilt becomes a shadow identity. Who knows how far up the Israeli chain of command knowledge of the massacre went? Folman's parents survived Auschwitz, and the line "Waltz With Bashir" brushes with its most inarticulate loathing is where a Jew might become a Nazi. Memory here becomes an act of poisoned expiation.

And then it becomes simply memory: bearing witness, no more. At the very end, when Folman has tunneled far enough into his past, he lets go of animation like an unwanted life vest and throws himself and us onto the rocks of real life. Footage from the camps in 1982; stunned women wailing "Photograph this!"; something unspeakable lying under an overhang of rubble. "Waltz" at last looks and sees and understands, and that understanding is the coldest comfort of all.

A short history of the sequence of events that led to the Sabra and Shatila massacre:

In June 1982, the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon after Israel’s northern towns had been bombarded for years from the Lebanese territory. The Israeli government’s original plan was to occupy a 40 km security zone in Lebanon in order to “cleanse” the missile range used by the Palestinians against Israel’s northern towns. In fact, the Israeli Minister of Defense at the time, Arik Sharon, developed a fantastical and ultra-imaginative plan: to occupy Lebanon as far as Beirut, including Beirut, and to appoint his Christian ally, Bashir Gemayel, President of Lebanon, thus eradicating the threat to the State of Israel from the north and expanding and increasing the front against Syria, a country that also borders on Lebanon and was always considered Israel’s cruelest and most tenacious enemy. Sharon and senior military leaders were actually the only ones who knew about the plan. While the Israeli government approved a 40 km range operation only, the IDF thrust full speed ahead all the way to Beirut.

Within one week the IDF inundated Lebanon and reached the outskirts of Beirut. However, just then, before entering the city, questions were raised: What business does the army have being in a foreign capital, so far from home? Why are Israeli soldiers being killed on a daily basis when their actions have no real link to the protection of Israel’s northern border? Suddenly, the correlation to the Vietnamese war was inevitable.
In August, two months after war broke out and the IDF was still waiting on the outskirts of Beirut for the command to penetrate the city, a treaty was signed with the Palestinians according to which all Palestinian combat fighters would be evacuated from Beirut on ships to Tunisia. In return, the IDF would remove the threat of penetrating the city. That week, Bashir Gemayel, senior commander of the “Phalangists” Christian militia, was elected President of Lebanon. Gemayel was considered extraordinarily charismatic, a fashionable young man, handsome and infinitely admired by all Christian militia soldiers and their families. He was especially esteemed by the Israeli leadership. Gemayel’s appointment as President of Lebanon was designed to ensure relative quiet on the tense border between the two countries.

While giving a speech at the Phalangist headquarters in East Beirut, Bashir Gemayel was killed by a massive explosive charge. To this day it is unknown who was responsible for the murder, but the assumption is that the assassination was orchestrated by Syrian or Palestinian factions or that they collaborated thereon.
That afternoon, Israeli troops penetrated a region in West Beirut that was mostly populated in those days by Palestinian refugees, and they surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Towards evening, large Phalangist forces made their way to the area, driven by a profound sense of revenge after the killing of their revered leader. At nightfall, Phalangist forces entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps aided by the IDF’s illumination rounds. The declared objective of the Christian forces was to purge the camps of Palestinian combat fighters. However, there were virtually no Palestinian combat fighters left in the refugee camps since they had been evacuated on ships to Tunisia two weeks earlier. For two whole days the sound of gunfire and battles could be heard from the camps but it was only on the third day, September 16th, when panic-stricken women swarmed the Israeli troops outside the camps, that the picture became clear: For three days the Christian forces massacred all refugee camp occupants. Men, women, the elderly and children, were all killed with horrific cruelty. To this day the exact number of victims is unknown but they are estimated at 3000.

News of the massacre shocked the entire world and a spontaneous protest of hundreds of thousands Israelis forced the Israeli government to create an official inquiry committee to investigate the liability of Israeli political and military authorities. Minister of Defense Arik Sharon was found guilty by the committee for not having done enough to stop the horror once he became aware of the massacre. He was dismissed of his duties and prohibited from serving as Minister of Defense for another term. This did not stop him from being appointed Prime Minister of Israel twenty years later.

Äideistä parhain (Mother of Mine)

I sat down to watch this film not knowing a thing about this movie. It wasn't until one of the reviews told me, what it was about that I realized what kind of movie I was about to see and - most important - that this is a story that had not yet been told on the big screen and that this was a story that needed to be told. I couldn't agree more, it's just a shame that this was the particular story that they chose to tell.
Parts of this movie is absolutely brilliant - the scenery, the cinematography and the actors. Oh, the actors! Michael Nyqvist, Maria Lundqvist and the young Topi Majaniemi are superb, utterly superb, it's in the script this movie fails and mainly on one pivotal point. In order for this movie to work you have to feel the anguish of young Eero, you have to feel his heart breaking when his mother sends him away to Sweden. And you do. But you also have to feel his heart breaking when he is sent back to Finland. This you don't do and that's because you don't get to feel the connection between Eero and his foster-mother Signe. When Eero and Signe first meet she doesn't want anything to do with him. She alienates herself from him, pushes him away. Towards the end she shows genuine love towards him, the thing is...I'm not aware of when this shift occurs. There aren't enough scenes in which we see them bonding. Suddenly they just...do. And this is where the movie fails.
Now, please remember what I said earlier. There are many things about this movie that are superb. The main thing being how the part of Eero is written and portrayed. A lot of films have a tendency to make children more mature than they really are, this movie doesn't make that mistake. Eero is a child and acts like one too. Not knowing why he feels the way he does he simply acts out his frustration in ways that a child would - not by sitting his foster-mother down and offering up wisdom befitting a 70-year old (which is all too common in movies such as these).
So, worth watching, just don't expect to get a wholly encompassing movie about what all Finnish war-children went through.