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A new Iranian film, a book of maps like you’ve never seen them, the year’s most spellbinding documentary, and more.
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FILM | BUS 174 | JOSÉ PADILHA, DIRECTOR
Currently in theaters throughout the United States; opening this summer in the UK, Australia, and Japan. Television broadcast by ARTE upcoming in France and Germany
In June 2000, a young Brazilian man hijacked a public bus in a fashionable district of Rio de Janeiro and took its passengers hostage. A tension-filled standoff with the police ensued, captured live on tape by dozens of television cameras. That riveting footage forms the dramatic center of Bus 174, a remarkable (and controversial) new documentary by Brazilian director José Padilha. Intercutting interviews with hostage survivors and testimony by those who knew the hijacker — a former street kid — the film tells the harrowing story of a boy neglected and abused by a society and a prison system intent on denying his very humanity. Vertiginous aerial images of Rio, hauntingly shot prison interiors, and a sickeningly mesmerizing slow-motion climax make Bus 174 not just an important documentary, but a cinematic tour de force. |
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WEBSITE | WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS
www.wordswithoutborders.org
an online literary journal
“Literature,” announces Words Without Borders, “is a passport to places both real and imagined.” With that in mind, this new webzine offers an unlimited visa for English-speaking readers, introducing them to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from all over the world. Themed issues have included literature from the Balkans, Russia, Argentina, Iran, and Iraq, and have included work from writers representing traditions well known to the West, like France’s J.M.G. LeClezio, as well as writers hitherto unavailable to English readers, like North Korea’s Han Ung-bin. |
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FILM | TALAYE SORGH/CRIMSON GOLD |
JAFAR PANAHI, DIRECTOR
Opening soon in Brazil, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, and elsewhere
What drives a reticent, somewhat peculiar, but generally likeable pizza-delivery man to rob a jewelry store, shoot the owner, and then (once everything is hopelessly botched) shoot himself? (The answer is life in all its indignities — but we won’t spoil the end.) Directed by Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) and written by Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), this splendid psychological riddle has all the impeccable elegance and irresistible urgency of the best Iranian new-neo-realism. The twist in this plot is that we learn less about what drives a man to kill, and more about the depths of our own capacity for sympathy with a murderer. |
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BOOK | YOU ARE HERE: PERSONAL GEOGRAPHIES AND OTHER MAPS OF THE IMAGINATION
edited by Katherine Harmon Princeton Architectural Press (available on www.papress.com)
Perhaps you were not bedazzled as a child by every map that came your way, staring for hours at the map of the Hundred-Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh, or Middle Earth in The Hobbit, the paintings-cum-maps of feudal estates in school textbooks. And perhaps you do not dwell on the online satellite imagery of your own neighborhood, or find it almost impossible to enjoy an overland journey through a new landscape without pinpointing your position on a good map. But if you understand that maps have an essentially magic power, distilling vast swaths of messy reality into a universal language at compact size, then you will adore this gorgeously conceived and produced book. It consists of dozens of variously awesome and funny maps and map-like works of art accompanied by six short, smart essays. |
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BOOK | CHINESE PROPAGANDA POSTERS
by Anchee Min, Duoduo, Stefan R. Landsberger, Taschen (editions available in English/French/German, Italian/Spanish/Portuguese, and Japanese)
To a media-savvy eye, folksy images of workers, peasants, and schoolchildren celebrating youth, industry, and the collective good may seem too quaint to be viewed with anything other than a bemused irony. But there is more to this collection than the cheery delusions of a failed regime. This engaging array of posters offers lessons both about the obscene spectacle of state-sponsored agitprop (children holding rifles while getting haircuts) as well as the quietly subversive ability of certain artists to undercut the narrative of a worker’s paradise while staying well within the framework of the ideology they were commissioned to espouse.
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