From the category archives:

Film

Green Border

by Chris Bertram on August 14, 2024

I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a weapon against “the West” by opening up a route for them from Turkey and then shipping them to the border with Poland and, hence, the European Union, where they might hope to claim asylum. The refugees themselves are blameless in all this, and we first see the main family on the flight, Syrians, full of optimism and hoping, that unlike in Turkey they will be able to get their children into school. But what happens is that they are driven to the border by the Belarussians and pushed over into inhospitable forest in winter and then, when discovered by the Poles, brutally pushed back across, through and sometimes over the razor wire that marks the frontier. Stranded in this zone, more and more of them succumb to cold, hunger, injury and disease.

The focus of the film is distributed among various characters: a Polish border guard and his heavily pregnant partner (which mirrors the condition of several refugees); a Polish psychologist and widow to Covid, who lives near the border and responds to cries she hears late at night; the Syrian family and the English-speaking Afghan woman who attaches herself to them and whose brother worked with Polish forces in Afghanistan; and the activists, riven by disagreements.
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Film Review: The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales

by Ingrid Robeyns on January 11, 2023

One of the challenges critics of our contemporary form of capitalism face, is how to make the analysis of that beast clear to a broad audience. Let’s face it, most academic books on the topic are hard to understand. Moreover, many people hardly ever read a non-fiction book about politics, let alone the economy. Film is in this respect a great medium, since it is easier to digest than reading a book. And often a picture says more than a thousand words.

Some years ago, I was teaching ‘ethics of capitalism’ to an interdisciplinary group of undergraduate students. Many of them had never had any economics, and since any third-year student could take this course, I had students in that class from all over the university – history, philosophy, economics, geography, anthropology, sociology – even a student from theoretical physics. In the last week of the course, we zoomed in on the financial crisis, and I was worried how to teach such complex material. So, in addition to giving a lecture, I also organised a screening and discussion of Inside Job, and that worked very well. The film was pretty effective to further process the dry material from the lecture, and put all of it into a broader perspective. [click to continue…]