Jason Apuzzo – Page 4 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Reviews Raw Herring @ The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. It’s a Dutch thing, you just wouldn’t understand. In Holland, they love their herring, preferably raw, which they consume by dangling overhead, like a cartoon cat preparing to devour a squirming mouse. Unfortunately, the classically Dutch herring industry has fallen on hard times. Viewers will set sail on one of the two remaining Dutch commercial herring fishing boats in Leonard Retel Helmrich & Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich’s Raw Herring, which screens during the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

The tightly knit, religiously devout community of Katwijk is known for its tradition of herring fishing, but competition from Norwegian crews has drastically thinned their ranks. Only the Wiron 5 and 6 still venture out, often in Norwegian and Scottish waters. On this outing, much of the skipper’s time is spent tracking a Norwegian rival skulking nearby. The Wirons still process herring at sea, using traditional methods, but such days are apparently numbered. In fact, recording the end of the era was a primary motivation for the Retel Helmrich filmmaking siblings and their producer In-soo Radstake (a director in his own right, having helmed the intriguing Parradox).

No matter how long the filmmakers hold their breath and jump up and down, critics will still inevitably compare Raw to Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel’s Leviathan. However, Raw has the advantage of being comprehensible. Frankly, Leviathan seeks to disorient, whereas the Retel Helmrichs present a vivid sense of the Wiron environment and capture some striking images. Their scenes of gulls diving underwater in search of fishy prey are particularly impressive.

In further contrast, Raw is also conveys the personalities of the Wiron crew, while remaining strictly observation in approach. We see these rugged, inked-up men praying before each meal. Of course, they are still sailors, so you know what that means.

Raw is not the Dutch version of a History Channel reality show. Nonetheless, it is mindful of the dangers of the job, beginning with the dedication to a monument to Katwijk fishermen lost at sea. Arguably, it bears closer comparison to a more accessible Castaing-Taylor documentary, Sweetgrass, which had its merits. Yet, the periodic flashes of earthy humor and some of the incredible shots primary cinematographer Leonard Retel Helmrich pulled off further distinguish Raw Herring. Recommended for patrons of you-are-there-style documentaries, Raw Herring screens again tomorrow (4/20), Wednesday (4/24), and next Saturday (4/27) as part of the World Documentary Competition at this year’s Tribeca.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on April 19th, 2013 at 11:28am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Voices Raised in Resistance: Powerful Defiant Requiem Premieres on PBS Sunday, April 7

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. If a hallmark of great art is its ability to transcend the limited circumstances of its creation, then there is no more heartbreaking realization of this than the 1944 performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Catholic Requiem by Jewish prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp Terezín. The story of Terezín and of the Requiem is told eloquently in director Doug Shultz’s powerful new documentary Defiant Requiem, which premieres this Sunday, April 7, on PBS at 10 p.m. ET/PT (check listings for additional screenings on local PBS stations).

It was at Terezín in 1944 that imprisoned Czech conductor Rafael Schächter led a chorus of his fellow Jewish prisoners — most of them doomed to the gas chambers at Auschwitz — in brazenly performing Verdi’s Requiem before the very Nazis who had condemned them to death. One of the most complex and demanding of chorale works, Verdi’s 1874 Requiem was originally intended as a musical rendition of the Catholic funeral mass. Rafael Schächter took Verdi’s music and transformed it into a universal statement, one proclaiming the prisoners’ unbroken spirit and warning of God’s coming wrath against their Nazi captors.

Defiant Requiem tells two parallel stories: the first takes place during World War II, when Jews throughout Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Terezín as part of an elaborate deception to convince the world that Germany treated its prisoners humanely. Among those arrested and dragged to Terezín in 1941 was the young Rafael Schächter, a courageous and steadfast Czech opera-choral conductor.

Distinguished American conductor Murry Sidlin, who discovered the history of Schächter and the Terezín performers in the ’90s, and who went on to found and conduct the Defiant Requiem concerts, notes in the film that “Schächter would have emerged as a great conductor” had his life not been cut short by the Nazis.

Within the confines of Terezín, Schächter lifted the spirits of his fellow inmates by creating a musical program for them to perform — a program that inspired an astonishing outburst of cultural activity, which would eventually include almost a thousand different performances of chamber music and operas, oratorios and jazz music, theatrical plays, and some 2,300 different lectures and literary readings. Included in this were 16 performances of Verdi’s emotional and musically challenging Requiem. As Terezín survivor Zdenka Fantlova explains in the film: “Doing a performance was not entertainment. It was a fight for life.” She later adds, “If people are robbed of freedom, they want to be creative.”

This flurry of activity within the walls of the prison camp — achieved under the most trying possible circumstances of starvation, disease, and abject cruelty — would culminate in a performance on June 23, 1944, of the Requiem in front of the camp’s Nazi brass, visiting high-ranking SS officers from Berlin, and gullible Red Cross inspectors brought in to verify that the prisoners were being well treated.

It was at this point that Verdi’s Requiem, with its dark, apocalyptic Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) choral passage — evoking the Last Judgement — and equally harrowing Libera me (“Deliver me”) passage took on connotations that Verdi could hardly have imagined. Serving as both a spiritual catharsis for the prisoners, and as a prophecy of the Nazis’ ultimate fate, the Requiem was immediately transformed by Schächter and his fellow prisoners into an anthem of divine supplication and retribution. Indeed, shortly after this final performance, both Schächter and most of his choir would be sent to Auschwitz.

Defiant Requiem‘s second, parallel story takes place in 2006, as Murry Sidlin brings a full orchestra and the Catholic University of America’s chorale ensemble — along with surviving members of Schächter’s chorus — back to Terezin to perform the Requiem once more, this time in tribute. (Sidlin continues to conduct such tribute performances of the Requiem, with concerts scheduled for The Lincoln Center on April 29 and Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral on June 6.)

The journey to Terezín is clearly a spiritual quest for Sidlin (who has since founded The Defiant Requiem Foundation), who views the modern performance of the Requiem at Terezín as the completion of something begun seventy years before. As Sidlin says at one point in the film: “I brought the Verdi here because I want to assure these people [Schächter and the deceased prisoners] that we’ve heard them.” Sidlin’s staging of the Requiem in the now unassuming confines of Terezín is powerful and gripping — and serves, one senses, as the perfect tribute to Schächter and his fellow performers.

Highlighting the role that individuals can play in keeping important cultural history alive, it was Sidlin’s discovery of the book Music at Terezín in the late ’90s, and his subsequent championing of the concert series, that has brought the otherwise forgotten history of Rafael Schächter and the Terezín Requiem performances back to life. It is a culmination both of Sidlin’s passion for music and of his own personal history; Sidlin’s grandmother and many of her closest relatives were murdered outside Riga, Latvia by Nazi SS assassination squads during World War II.

This June, Sidlin will be awarded the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Medal of Valor for his efforts to commemorate Rafael Schächter and the Terezín prisoners. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Voices Raised in Resistance: Powerful Defiant Requiem Premieres on PBS Sunday, April 7

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Courage & Individual Conscience: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2012

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. Freedom must thrive for the arts to flourish. It’s therefore an encouraging sign that so many of 2012’s most acclaimed films – such as Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Les Misérables, or Skyfall – should explore the centrality of freedom to our civilization. As we celebrate 2012 in film, it’s fitting that we honor movies that affirm the very liberty that makes our art, our traditions of free speech, and our democratic form of government possible.

Whether depicting historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, or pop-culture icons like James Bond and Katniss Everdeen, or contemporary dissidents like China’s Ai Weiwei and Russia’s Masha Drokova, the movies below illustrate how freedom only survives when brave individuals are willing to risk their lives fighting for it. These films also depict the virtues that accompany such bravery: a strong individual conscience and empathetic feelings of responsibility toward one’s fellow human beings.

Many of this year’s best pro-freedom films also portray the bravery of women. In a refreshing development, movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Barbara, The Hunger Games, and Putin’s Kiss all feature complex, independent women as their leads – while Skyfall, in the character of “M” (Judi Dench), features a strong woman in a pivotal leadership role. This is another way in which these movies powerfully affirm the democratic spirit.

Here then are our ten best pro-freedom films of 2012:

1. Zero Dark Thirty

A taut and intense account of the almost ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden, director Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty captures the emotional and ethical complexity of the War on Terror – while unfolding a vast, investigative mystery that takes audiences from secret CIA bases in Afghanistan, to the corridors of power in Washington D.C., to the urban mazes of Pakistan. Leading this historic manhunt is an indomitable young CIA analyst named Maya, played with steely resolve by Jessica Chastain, who for nearly a decade tracks down bin Laden’s courier on the way to locating the terrorist mastermind. Scrupulously non-partisan, Zero Dark Thirty gives primary credit for bin Laden’s demise not to any politician – but to sober career intelligence professionals as well as military personnel, a tragic number of whom gave their lives in pursuit of Al Qaeda’s leader. Telling their story with a refreshingly understated realism, Zero Dark Thirty honors these largely anonymous men and women who protect our freedom in an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world.

2. Barbara

Germany’s official Oscar entry and winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state – in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s. Nina Hoss gives a complex, Oscar-worthy performance as a pediatric surgeon whose desire to leave East Germany puts her under the watchful eye of the Stasi (the secret police), and of a conflicted, would-be lover played by Ronald Zehrfeld. Austere and suspenseful, Barbara is one Germany’s best dramas since the 1970s, and an indictment of any society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.

3. Lincoln

Director Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln brings the story of The Great Emancipator to life in a way that is both respectful of our 16th President’s achievements and alive to his humanity. In perhaps the richest depiction of Abraham Lincoln since Henry Fonda’s in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Daniel Day-Lewis brings warmth, interiority and conviction to a man charged with the weightiest responsibilities in American history – as both slavery and the fate of the Union hang in the balance. Lincoln also highlights the value of eloquence in free societies; in recounting the sometimes baroque political backstory behind passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Spielberg suggests that it was Lincoln’s poetic oratory as much as any other factor that ended slavery in America for good.

4. The Other Dream Team

One of the best sports documentaries in recent years, and a highlight of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, director Marius A. Markevičius’ The Other Dream Team tells the emotional story of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team – a symbol of freedom and Lithuanian national pride after decades of Soviet rule. The film tells the improbable tale of how Lithuanian basketball talents like future NBA stars Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis came to dominate Soviet basketball in the 1980s (even defeating Team USA in the 1988 Olympics) – only to face off against Russia in the ’92 Barcelona Games, wearing tie dyed uniforms provided by The Grateful Dead (!), after Lithuania had just won its hard-fought independence. A moving and uplifting piece of Cold War history, The Other Dream Team is as much a tribute to the courage of the Lithuanian people in the face of communist tyranny as it is to the inspirational power of sports.

5. Skyfall

One of the best James Bond thrillers since the 1970s, director Sam Mendes’ Skyfall reinvents 007 as a hero for the War on Terror era – and thoughtfully affirms the value of our intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world. In Skyfall, information pertaining to NATO penetration of worldwide Islamic terror cells has been stolen in Istanbul, and Bond must retrieve the data before Western agents are exposed and killed – the opening act of an elaborate revenge plot orchestrated by the sociopathic Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). In a film rife with references to Winston Churchill and his legacy, Bond and his colleagues are depicted as reflexively selfless in the cause of freedom – and Dame Judi Dench’s quotation of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” as both she and Britain come under attack, packs an unusually stirring punch for a Bond film. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Courage & Individual Conscience: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2012

The Long Shadow of North Korea: LFM Reviews Our Homeland, Submitted By Japan for the Oscars

By Joe Bendel. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, many Korean-Japanese immigrated back to their homeland. Unfortunately, they chose the wrong one. With family at risk in the DPRK, active members of Japanese-North Korean friendship associations had no choice but to tow the party line. Yet, the implications of the basic foodstuff care packages they sent to loved ones spoke volumes. Granted a special three month visit for medical reasons, one such “repatriated” North Korean reconnects with his guilt-ridden family in Yang Yonghi’s devastating Our Homeland, which has been selected by Japan as their official foreign language Academy Award submission.

Yun Sung-ho most likely has a brain tumor. Given the woeful inadequacies of the North Korean medical system, he is allowed to briefly return to Japan—after a five year waiting period. He is fortunate his father is the president of the North Korean society, but he will still be monitored the entire time by his minder, Mr. Yang. Regardless, his family is grateful to see him again, especially his poor mother. Likewise, Rie is delighted to see her beloved brother again, but she cannot ignore certain ironies, like her brother developing malnutrition in the “Workers’ Paradise.” Yes, she is our kind of free-thinker and the unambiguous conscience of Our Homeland.

Based on writer-director Yang Yonghi’s own family experiences recorded in Dear Pyongyang and a subsequent documentary, Homeland is even more direct in addressing conditions in North Korea. Perhaps liberated by the fictional context, the film explicitly blames the DPRK for the misery of its citizens. There is no inclination towards moral equivalency. In fact, there is a clear affection for the Ozu-like quiet serenity of Japan.

While Yang’s script is unusually honest and challenging, her leads really make it hit home. Dynamic and vivacious but deep as a river, Sakura Andô is simply remarkable as Rie. It is an award caliber performance. Conversely, it takes a while for Iura Arata’s pitch-perfect portrayal to sink in, striking uncomfortable chords between bitterness and resignation. Boasting a top flight ensemble from top to bottom, Homeland is also distinguished and humanized by memorable supporting turns from Kotomi Kyôno as Yun’s ex Suni and Tarô Suwa as his loving blacksheep capitalist Uncle Tejo.

An assured narrative debut, Yang masterfully controls the mood and tone, despite the almost complete lack of soundtrack music. Her approach is intimate and not surprisingly documentary-like, but Homeland never feels overly talky or draggy. Indeed, the emotional drama never slacks.

Our Homeland is a deeply compassionate film, but it is also somewhat angry, plainly calling an older generation to account for sacrificing their children on ideological grounds. Its unmistakable critique of North Korean Communism might not sound like Academy fodder, but the foreign language division can be surprising – in a good way. After all, The Lives of Others won the Oscar and Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn was nominated before it even had American distribution. Regardless, Our Homeland would be a worthy nominee that deserves an international audience.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on December 18th, 2012 at 11:59am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The New Star Wars, Disney & Why Sci-Fi Was So Great in the 1970s

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo. It’s by far the biggest, best and most surprising entertainment news of 2012, yet still no one knows quite what to make of it: starting in 2015 we’re getting a new Star Wars trilogy, beginning with Episode VII, supervised by George Lucas and produced by Disney.

As Darth Vader might say, there’s “a tremor in the Force.” The question is: what will this new Star Wars look like, now that we don’t have Emperor Palpatine to kick around any more?

There’s certainly been nothing like this news in Hollywood in years, with rumors swirling around about the new Star Wars films almost on a daily basis. What will the new storyline be? Who will direct the films? Will Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford make a cameo? Did Boba Fett survive the Sarlacc Pit?

And will SPECTRE or the Miami Heat be the new villains?

LukeLeia — Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

It seems incredible that overnight Star Wars has managed to reinvent itself – again – and become the biggest, most talked-about sci-fi franchise around. (Imagine what James Cameron must be thinking right now.) The question on everyone’s mind, though, is what exactly a new Star Wars trilogy will look like with limited involvement from George Lucas, the original cast having hit retirement age, many crucial characters gone, and having to pick up where 1983’s Return of the Jedi left off – i.e., with Ewoks playing victorious drum solos on Stormtrooper helmets.

In other words, what is the ‘essence’ of a Star Wars film now that the series can’t lean on standbys like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi or exploding Death Stars anymore?

For clues to this mystery, it’s best to go back to the 1970s, the fabulous era – at least, for science fiction fans – when Star Wars was born.

Although the 1950s are justifiably regarded as science fiction’s Golden Age, the era of the 1970s easily rates a close second. It was the period when science fiction finally replaced the Western as the great American movie genre.

BuckRogers — From "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century."

To be fair, what we’re calling ‘the ’70s’ here probably began around 1968 with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, and didn’t end till around 1984, with the release of The Terminator. So maybe we should call this sci-fi’s ‘modern’ era – or simply ‘the Star Wars era.’ Science fiction had a distinctive flavor during this period – it was darker, more realistic, and also more emotional – and Star Wars set the tone for the time.

It was also during this era that science fiction became more popular than ever – more popular even than comic book movies are today – dominating both the box office and prime time television.

Of the top 15 highest grossing movies of all time adjusted for inflation, four are sci-fi films from this period: the original Star Wars trilogy, plus Steven Spielberg’s E.T. A host of other films from this time – Alien, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, just to name a few – are similarly regarded as classics. Plus, television series like The Six Million Dollar Man (and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman), Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were huge hits – with the Galactica franchise still around with us today.

So how did they do it back then? What made sci-fi of this period so wildly popular?

The key thing to understand about ’70s or Star Wars-era sci-fi was how it revised and updated a genre that had gotten old and slightly creaky (think Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). It did so in three major ways:

1) Science fiction became more realistic.

The big leap forward in sci-fi ‘realism’ came in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Kubrick made after consulting with scientists and engineers at NASA and MIT, and after devising new visual effects techniques like front projection. After 2001, which played out like a Cinerama documentary shot in space, sci-fi films couldn’t afford to look anymore like they were shot in your parents’ garage (even if they were). Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The New Star Wars, Disney & Why Sci-Fi Was So Great in the 1970s

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: What a Surveillance State Looks Like: Barbara Revisits Cold War East Germany

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo. Imagine being subjected to 24-hour secret police surveillance, or being surrounded by informers at your place of work – whose mission is to gain your confidence in order to evaluate your loyalty to the state.

Or imagine being subjected to random body searches, conducted by capricious security officials with too much time on their hands. (OK, admittedly we already have that – even if only at our nation’s airports.)

For the most part, however, Americans only have a dim sense of what it’s like to live in a truly repressive society – such as East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And this, ultimately, is the true value of director Christian Petzold’s gripping new film Barbara, which starts its U.S. theatrical run in December and recently screened at the AFI Festival in Hollywood. Germany’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state, in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s.

Already the winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the Berlin Film Festival, Barbara stars Nina Hoss in the title role as a pediatric surgeon whose promising career at the prestigious Charité hospital in East Berlin is cut short when she files for an Ausreiseantrag, officially expressing her desire to leave East Germany. A terse and enigmatic blonde, Dr. Barbara Wolff also happens to be in the midst of a torrid, secret affair with a West German businessman – who’s quietly arranging for her escape to the West, as he makes officially sanctioned business trips into East Germany.

As punishment for her desire to leave East Germany, Barbara is sent to a rural hospital near the Baltic Sea, where she works under the watchful eye of Dr. André Reiser (actor Ronald Zehrfeld), who heads a modest pediatric unit. André tries to get chummy with Barbara, which she resists – suspecting him of being an informant for the Stasi (the East German secret police), who periodically arrive at her front door to strip search her or otherwise harass her.

Just another day in East Germany’s worker-paradise, you might say.

As the story unfolds, however, Barbara slowly warms up to André, as she gradually comprehends his quiet, understated resistance to the inhumanity around them. She also grows absorbed in her clinical work with children – especially Stella, a pregnant escapee from a socialist labor camp, whose only wish is to raise her child in the freedom of the West. Barbara’s feelings of professional and personal responsibility for Stella complicate her own plans to defect, leading to the film’s suspenseful finale.

‘Understated’ really is the word for Barbara. Don’t expect lengthy speeches about tyranny, or furniture-smashing sex scenes in this film. More like an austere German drama from the 1970s (Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum comes to mind), Barbara gets most of its mileage out of quiet moments of drama between people who by force of circumstance are incapable of trusting each other.

As such, the film becomes a profound indictment against the type of society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.

Having myself visited East Germany and the Soviet Union prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having known Soviet dissidents (including one who worked in the Kremlin), my sense is that Barbara gets the details right in terms of depicting the inauthentic, paranoid lives people led behind the Iron Curtain – particularly those with secrets to keep. The film also captures the creepy voyeurism that fuels the modern surveillance state – where the bogus imperatives of political fanatics justify shocking levels of access into people’s private lives.

Nina Hoss is already getting Oscar buzz for her performance as Barbara, and with good reason: she brings a distinctly European mixture of intelligence, world-weariness and discreet sexiness to her role. (It’s easy to imagine Deborah Kerr or Eleanor Parker playing her role in another era.) The rest of the cast fares similarly well – particularly Rainer Bock as the chief Stasi officer. By contrast, Ronald Zehrfeld sometimes seems too soft and cuddly as André, a man ostensibly doing double-duty as head of a clinic and state’s informer – but in the film’s sweeter, more intimate moments he shines.

Barbara_hoss4 — The cost of a conscience.

The main takeaway of Barbara is that we don’t want our own society ever looking like East Germany does in this film – dreary, lifeless and deeply fearful. It’s a punitive, masochistic world lacking any defining features beyond those associated with mindless (and heartless) political conformity.

Of course, the totalitarian society shown in Barbara is also one that was doomed to collapse, in no small measure due to the type of quiet heroism and compassion depicted in the film. That’s Barbara‘s other big takeaway – the importance of individual heroism, and fidelity to one’s conscience – and it’s a message that’s as important today as it was when the Wall came down.

Posted on November 19th, 2012 at 12:47pm.