RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2008) When we were very young, we used to think the world of our parents. They were the strongest, the brainiest and the smartest. Somehow, they knew everything and could do no wrong. Slowly, we grew older and started hating their guts. We view their world viewpoints as archaic and promise never to be like them. We abhor their un-PC statements and over-glorification of the good old days. And yet with the passage of time and dents from the School of Hard Knocks, it soon dawns upon us their wisdom and ability to juggle so many things despite their limited resources.  This film is historical fiction from the point of view of Bruno, an 8-year old son of Army Lieutenant, in Nazi Germany. His father is stationed in the countryside to take charge of a concentration camp. The young boy befriends Shmuel, an 8-years old Jewish inmate, on the other side of the concentration camp. Bruno burrows himself into the camp to help Schmuel locate his missin...

Hannah Arendt (German, English; 2012) Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, who is famous for her assessment of the Eichmann trial and the coining of the phrase 'banality of evil' is depicted here. The film depicts the time surrounding the trial and the controversies of Arendt's articles in the New Yorker and her subsequent book, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' in 1963. First of all, the trial was considered an illegal exercise. Eichmann was charged in the Israeli Courts for cruelty against humanity as if Israel had jurisdiction over this; there was already the Nuremberg trial for that, and the International Courts would be the appropriate platform to try war crimes. Furthermore, the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad,  apprehended him in Argentina through clandestine methods. Prime Minister of Israel then, Ben Gurion, thought it was apt that the world should hear the plight of the Jews during the Second World War. It was an opportune time for the Jews to showcase to th...

Denial (2016) It is said that the Holocaust is a sensitive word. Firstly, the term has been hijacked only to denote one event, to what happened in Auschwitz and the many concentration camps during WW2 to the 6 million Jews there. True, there were many other equally bad, if not worse, atrocities were done by Man to his fellow kind; this event always took centre stage. Perhaps, Hollywood helped to sell this story too. After all, many of the pioneers of the silver screen were disgruntled Jews who themselves were movie doyens who escaped Hitler's tyranny to settle in America. Human history is marred with many bloodbath events and senseless deaths. What comes to mind are The Indian Partition, The Bengal Famine, death under the Stalin regime, Russian deaths in WW2, Rape of Nanking, hunger deaths during the Cultural Revolution in China, Communist witch-hunt in Indonesia, the Armenian genocide and the World Wars, which may have been actually started off by the Russian Revolution....

Son of Saul (Hungarian; 2015) Just how far would you go to maintain cultural and religious practices? Even went your life is in danger? In a World War 2 concentration camp when Jews are shovelled into incinerators by Nazis? Well, this is what Saul does. In this disturbing Hungarian movie, set over two days in one of those camps, Jews are lined up, 'processed' to be killed, burned alive, shot and buried in mass graves, emptied their coats of their belongings, and have their ashes spread unceremoniously by the river. It is just a banal activity that goes on there. Saul is a sonderkommando, a run-around helper of the Nazis, who is threatened with death if they do not help the German soldiers in their nefarious act. Probably to avert his attention from the stresses of yells, screams, and cries of dying people around him, he goes around looking for a rabbi to do the last rights of a young Jewish whom he tried to help and died. His search for a rabbi amongst the ca...

Experimenter (2015) Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps. The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart. Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to ...