Zaza Urushadze's “Tangerines” Guns for Hire in Abkhazia by LOUIS PROYECT
As a peace activist, I have gone out of my way to see films such as “The Grand Illusion” and “King of Hearts” over the years. Largely as a result of Hollywood’s internecine ties to the Pentagon as reflected in films such as “American Sniper” and “Hurt Locker”, it has been more difficult to see anything in recent years with a pacifist bent except Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July”. This week I had the good fortune to attend a press screening of “Tangerines”, a joint Estonian-Georgian production that is being submitted as Estonia’s best foreign language film to the 87th Academy Awards ceremony being held on February 22nd. As far as I am concerned, it also deserves best picture, director and actor awards but what would you expect from an unrepentant Marxist after all? “Tangerines” is set during the war between Georgia and Abkhazia in 1992-93, one that will probably only be familiar to those who keep a close eye on the politics and history of the former Soviet Union but not to the average viewer. It is to the everlasting credit of Georgian writer/director Zaza Urushadze to have made a film that is a universal statement about the evils of war that will be absorbing even to an audience member with scant knowledge of post-Soviet politics. Like William Blake seeing eternity in a grain of sand in his “Auguries of Innocence”, this is a film that will allow you to see the futility of wars of aggression throughout history, and all the more so in an epoch of thermonuclear weapons. As Blake put it in the same poem: Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly For the Last Judgment draweth nigh He who shall train the Horse to War Shall never pass the Polar Bar full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/06/guns-for-hire-in-abkhazia/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
