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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/
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