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Wednesday 26 November 2014

Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here – Untold Stories From the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, Book by Karima Bennoune, W.W. Norton and Company 2013, 9* out of 10

Karima Bennoune has written a thought provoking book. Invaluable reading for anyone wishing to form a better understanding of the struggle for freedom, justice and equal opportunity by courageous individuals in places where totalitarian interpretations of Islam aim to suppress these universal values by terrorising those who strive for them.

In Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here the Algerian/American Human Rights lawyer Karima Bennoune presents a number of important people to us who deserve to be much better known in the West than they currently are. Like Bennoune, they fight for dignity, justice, personal freedom and equal opportunity for men and women against radical Islamist movements that want to deny them. Many of them, though by no means all, are women. All of them are active in countries where it is in the name of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that they have often endured the constant threat of terrible violence to themselves and to those dear to them. In many instances that threat has been realised. Through her interviews Bennoune enables us to hear the protagonists speak in their own voice.

As the daughter of a man who suffered such threats himself, Bennoune knows what this means from personal experience and she is able to convey it vividly to her readers. As a Human Rights lawyer working for NGOs like Amnesty International, she also understands how to address these instances with professionalism.

Bennoune collected her interviews and wrote her book in the midst of the period when the hopes elicited by the Arab Spring turned into near despair in most of the Arab world. This made her work particularly challenging and the outcome especially interesting.

Unusually as a writer closely associated with the Human Rights movement in the West, Bennoune is an important voice denouncing the tolerance towards Islamist political movements of the liberal and not so liberal left, including her former employer Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and similar NGOs as well as many Western governments. How easily they are fooled by the dissimulation of “moderate” Islamism and the willingness of radical Islamist movements to participate in a “faux-democratic” process. This she finds is often based on a flimsy understanding of the nature of the path to true democracy and a wilful blindness towards any movement that share the Western political Left’s dislike of the US and its policies particularly those towards the wider Middle East.

Her book also stands out from the crowd because she manages to combine the personal with the professional and is willing and able to turn a clear and critical eye on herself.  

Bennoune illustrates the impact of what she sees as the blatant misuse of Islam for a violent ideology suppressing the freedom of people and particularly to enjoy not only a dignified life but also theatre, music, and culture. And she shows how courageous women and courageous men stand up against incredible odds and in the face of terrifying violence in mostly non-violent struggles for justice and dignity for themselves their families and their people.

Karima Bennoune is a talented writer able to paint a vivid picture of the people she has interviewed and the countries with their specific political and social circumstances that form the specific background for each of the human rights activists she has interviewed. Not surprisingly she succeeds particularly well in telling the story of her native Algeria where people died in their thousands as a result of fundamentalist violence under reported and often misunderstood and misrepresented in the West. The chapter on Iranian human rights activists is also particularly successful. Less coherent is her apparent need to limit what others will make of her book, particularly when, after criticising the misdeeds of the Islamist Hamas, she  pronounces her own Fatwa on supporters of the current Israeli Government using her findings to comfort their own positions in any way. This seems to have to do more with US leftist university campus politics - Bennoune is a law professor at UC Davis - than the subject of her book as she does not feel she has to distance herself just as strongly from anti-Islamists in the US and the West who do not share her leftist political convictions.   

Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is a very readable and thought provoking book. Invaluable reading for anyone in the West wishing to form a better understanding of the struggle for freedom, justice and equal opportunity by courageous individuals in places where totalitarian interpretations of Islam aim to suppress these universal values by terrorising those who strive for them.



Karima Bennoune

Saturday 8 November 2014

The Kindergarten Teacher (Haganenet), Film France-Israel 2014, written and directed by Nadav Lapid, 8* out of 10

The Kindergarten Teacher is a very human film. Clearly situated in Israel, the film’s message will resonate in European countries, where feeling uneasy about consumerism and pining for a life in which poetry and art that can nourish more than the soul is the dream of many a rat-race marathonist. Interesting, moving and thought-provoking.

Nira (strong performance by Sarit Larry) is an experienced Kindergarten teacher, the wife of a civil servant (Lior Raz), embattled in minor office politics, and the mother of a teenage son just about to complete his compulsory army service. She is competent in all those roles, but her heart really is in her Kindergarten.

One of the children she looks after is Yoav (beatifully portrayed by 5-year-old Avi Shnaidman). When Nira discovers that he has a talent for spontaneously inventing poetry in trancelike bursts, she decides to dedicate herself, beyond the call of duty, to allowing the boy’s talent to develop.  This is not easy, as Yoav’s family circumstances are all except favourable to a future career as a poet. His mother left Yoav and his father to take up with a lover in America; Yoav’s father Amnon (Yehezkel Lazarov) is a successful owner of a Michelin- starred-restaurant, whose brother (Dan Toren) is a minor and relatively penniless poet. So in his view, to ensure his son’s happiness and financial well being, Yoav’s poetical side mustn’t be encouraged. As Yoav is also a very normal and quite social young lad when he doesn’t have one of his poetical trances, his father may indeed have a point. 

Yoav’s nanny Miri (spiky performance by the multi talented Ester Rada) does her job quite well, but without any overenthusiasm. She is not much interested in what’s right or wrong for the child-poet in her charge.  But she knows what’s good for her, and uses little Yoav’s poems as audition texts to further her acting career. 

Nadav Lapid’s script and his characters worked for me. Nira’s development, as she lives out a mid-life crisis by giving full rein to her romantic ideas in just the area of her life where it’s arguable that she should act professionally at all times may truly annoy some viewers. Other more poetically inclined viewer's hearts may go out to her. 

Fortunately, Lapid deploys a significant dose of irony and humour in the way he portrays how society around her reacts to what Nira has to reveal about her prodigy’s talents. Nira, while clearly obsessed, is clever and practical about checking out Yoav’s talents and seeking to protect the child.

As a director, Nadav Lapid has employed interesting means of using the camera perspective to give his audience more insight into what is going on; and it works.

The Kindergarten Teacher is a very human film, mainly about Nira’s personal journey. Not far below the surface, it is also about the role and goal of education in society and politics. Clearly situated in Israel, the film’s message will resonate in France and other European countries, where feeling uneasy about consumerism and pining for a life in which poetry and art that can nourish more than the soul is the dream of many a rat-race marathonist.










Wednesday 5 November 2014

Ida, Film Poland 2013, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and director Pawel Pawilowski, 10* out of 10

"Ida" treats important subjects too big to ignore, indeed almost too big to cope with. The understated style of this film make it a most moving, and true tale about human resilience and its limits and about human nastiness beyond limits. The beautiful low key performances of Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska are outstanding. 


Poland in the early 1960s.  Eighteen-year-old orphaned Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska)  is preparing to take her vows as a nun in a catholic monastery. Before she does so, Mother Superior instructs her to spend time with an aunt, the sister of Anna’s mother, of whose existence Anna was uanaware.

Anna’s aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) turns out to be a former hard-line communist, who made her career as an unforgiving prosecutor in Polish political trials in the 1950s. Why has she avoided contact her niece? 

Wanda tells Anna about her Jewish mother and father who were killed in the war. She knows that searching for the truth about what happened to her sister will compel her to face the demons of her own past.

Anna whose birth name is Ida,  has to learn to live with her true and truly terrible family-history in a Polish society of which she is a part, an outsider, a victim and a shaper of her own future all at once. Will the young woman break down under the almost unbearable weight of her history? 

The dry, true, deeply tragic wisdom of her Aunt Wanda and a young Polish Jazz musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) whom the two women meet on their search for the truth may help her to cope; but the seemingly strong can be terribly vulnerable too. 

"Ida" treats important subjects too big to ignore, indeed almost too big to cope with. The understated style of this film make it a most moving, and true tale about human resilience and its limits and about human nastiness beyond limits. The beautiful low key performances of Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska are outstanding. 

Director Pawel Pawilowski does an excellent job in letting the story and its characters unfold. The black and white photography reveals many shades of grey in 1960s Poland. 

"Ida" demonstrates once more, if such a demonstration were needed, that the Lodz film school in which many first class Polish filmmakers are able to learn their craft is a great boon for quality cinema in Europe.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2718492/