Injustice destroys civilisation. The corruption of rulers leads to the ruin of dynasties.
~Ibn Khaldun
This really happened. The most grotesque thing you could imagine (until the next thing, at least). This is indeed the TRUTH that Donald Trump posted this morning. He wasn't hacked, and it wasn't a hoax. In what more auspicious possible circumstance could I return to write the first post on this blog since I left things off nearly a year ago?
A post about some of the actors and directors who will come into focus when I get to the heart of this matter......
Purim falls on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar. It fell in late February in the year that I stayed in Jerusalem. There was a big fancy dress party, and then the day after was seemingly a fairly quiet one until my friend from down the corridor came to ask me if I'd heard the news about what had happened in Hebron.
Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the Modern World. I'm in danger here of making this blog into something which it definitely is not trying to be, but let's pretend for a few minutes that this is a film blog...... If we're going to go there, it's a given that Iranian cinema was deeply influenced by Italian neorealism in the 1960s, and then something strange happened. While the rest of the world moved on and tried out new cinematic fads and trends, this intentionally naive realistic style became the living breathing identity of Iranian cinema...
Click or tap on the links or pics to go to an exhaustive (but still growing) catalogue of films. There are links to trailers, and sometimes to the whole film.
Most of the films are made in Israel and/or about Israel, but there are also many interesting films from the Jewish Diaspora.
To be clear, there are some turkeys. I don't necessarily LIKE all the films in the catalogues, but I'll talk about them anyway.
"I" comes before "P" in the alphabet, and I can't get a fancy function to randomise the order that the lists appear here.
I wanted to randomise it, but honestly the system I'm using doesn't stretch to that. Maybe in the future it will be possible.
Many troubles in the Middle East started over small potatoes, true, but please understand the intention. Whatever. Check out the films.
These pics are picked at random from a database, but I'm trying to balance between the various 'sides'. Every time I change the site again, faces will change!
Contrary to cruder analyses, there are more than two (or even three) 'sides' in the Mid East. Hence not all will be represented in the pics.
Also, maybe you've noticed that the Middle East is still pretty patriarchal, so there's a chance you don't see any female faces here. Tap/click to find a few, however.
As with the directors, these pics are being pulled from a database, and they change every time I change the site.
Hopefully you're seeing a fair mix, but as pointed out above, there are more than three sides to this story, so not all sides will show up here.
However, there is a fighting 50% chance that you'll see at least one woman here, as the ratio of actors is more or less 50/50.
I didn't really need to make this page, because of course you can already find the posts automatically listed.
However, once my blog started to feel more like a book (one that will surely need a lot of editing), I decided to make this page.
Partly it's just a way for me to refer quickly back to what I've already written about, but hopefully readers will also find it useful.