Let’s play torture
TORTURE: The Berlinale again goes straight into harsh and provoking subjects.
Nazi
Freedom, limited
RUSSIA: The authoritarian stranglehold of the Kremlin closes in across national holidays in contemporary Russia.
The third message
BIOGRAPHY: By focusing on her artistic approach to language, the complex and multi-layered Nobel laureate also reveals the deep contradictions of her native Austria.
History repeating
WAR: Footage from a Soviet war crimes trial in Kiev in 1946 underscores today’s atrocities committed by the heirs to the Red Army in Ukraine.
A lesson in past and present war crimes
UKRAINE: Sergei Loznitsa’s new archive-based doc is an impressive reconstruction of the trial of 15 Nazi officers in Kiev after World War II, inevitably making the viewer reflect on more recent war crimes.
Human safari
CONFLICT: The story of wealthy foreigners who turned besieged Sarajevo into a human safari, paying high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents.
The depths of forbidden love
LOVE: A poignant and deeply moving story of the love that two women found in a Nazi concentration camp.
In the direction of the totalitarian
PRE-FASCISM: Written for society «between Hitler and Stalin», Timothy Snyder’s book lies between patriotic obedience and political disobedience.
Choices of war
CONFLICT: Sergei Loznitsa’s sombre documentary, The Natural History of Destruction, re-examines the heavy bombing of British and German cities during World War Two, posing the question – ‘is it morally acceptable to kill civilian populations as a means of war?’
The world’s best Catholics?
RELIGION: With the discovery of children’s graves in Canada, the Canadians are arguably making the Irish rank as «the world’s best Catholics.»
