Change Your Image
amsciforum
Reviews
Fehér isten (2014)
Hungary's Dogs Finally Have Their Day
If it's true that no dog was harmed, and all were adopted afterward, then this sounds like a timely and telling mirror of the unspeakable and unforgivable human abuse of all the other sentient species on the planet (including humans!). May the dogs' day come, everywhere, and soon. But let it not be vengeance, but mercy and justice.
Most of the monstrous harm we do to helpless animals we do not out of necessity for our safety, health or survival, but out of apathy and greed. Even making a movie at their expense is suspect. But art can sometimes be redemptive rather than just hedonic and self-indulgent.
We live in an era of images and transparency. And most of us are not psychopaths; we are just in a state of ignorance and denial of the monstrous suffering that we inflict, needlessly, on other sentient species. We've outlawed it toward our own species. Subjugation, slavery, colonialism, rape are now all abolished. But real psychopaths will continue doing it to people as long as we continue to support and sustain it toward other animals.
Perhaps images like these will help dispel the ignorance and denial, at long last. Too late for all the past victims, but in time to spare those to come.
The Green Prince (2014)
Non-partisan glimpse of tragic vendetta
This is the story of the son of an influential Hamas zealot, turned into an Israeli informant from the age of 17, and his Israeli handler, a Shin Beth agent. Both are surrounded by brutality -- Hamas's ruthless violence, and Shin Beth's likewise ruthless violence -- the informant struggling with conflicts of loyalty and shame, but the handler conflicted too, for a genuine personal bond of trust, affection and loyalty had also emerged between the two of them. Despite the fact that the portrayal is scripted, it has the ring of sincerity and it gives a non-partisan sense of the tragic vendetta in which they are both engulfed.