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E rmanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a 3-hour long feature film, won the prestigious Golden Palm and the prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. For those who have been fortunate to have sat through the slow-paced realistic film right up to its end, it would prove to be a rare cinematic entertainment, indelible from their memories. It would touch any sensitive individual’s heart and mind in a way few movies can. It is a film without a single professional actor and yet when the respected Hollywood thespian Al Pacino was asked to identify his favorite film, the first name that came to his mind was The Tree of Wooden Clogs.   That statement says a lot about the quality and credibility of the performances by the ensemble of non-professional actors gathered by Olmi from his own village in Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy.  Why is The Tree of Wooden Clogs an outstanding film? Few films are made by directors that are based on a script totally written...

T here are very few examples of movies that make you scurry to the libraries to figure out the full implications of the source material after a screening, with the implicit understanding that one needed to know more. That is the power of great cinema. Kieslowski’s ten part movie  Dekalog  is one of them. The late film director Stanley Kubrick had described  Dekalog  as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime. And, interestingly, Kubrick is often considered an atheist! And the added attraction for most viewers is that, unless one is a die-hard film enthusiast, each of the ten parts can be seen and appreciated in isolation. Each of the ten parts has different characters, all living in the same condominium in Poland. Each tale is set in the late Eighties. What is common to all the ten parts is that they all have the three common creators: the director Krzysztof Kieslowski, the co-scriptwriters Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, and ...

V iewers of this Oscar-winning Argentinean film are likely to enjoy the experience for varied reasons. It is definitely an engaging thriller with loads of subtle humor.  It is therefore not surprising that the film was a commercial and critical success in the country of its origin, Argentina. The best foreign film Oscar, the second for Argentina over the years, bestowed on the film would have boosted its popularity at home even further. However, the film can be enjoyed by non-Argentinean audiences as well for several additional elements beyond the obvious thrilling tale the film unfolds. The film is at a basic level a detective story of tracking down a rapist and killer and ensuring that he gets a fitting punishment for the crime. At a more complex level, it is a tale of love of two sets of couples and a strong camaraderie of two detective colleagues. And finally, the screenplay captures the mood of Argentina’s “dirty war” period from 1976 to 1983 (during which tale is set) when cr...