Geopolitics and the Emotions – Dominique Moïsi
Dominique Moïsi’ s 2009 The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World, is …
Category Archives: Middle East
Theeb: A Bedouin Boy in the WWI Desert
Aimless movie wandering sometimes pays dividends. We happened into a streaming presentation of Theeb, by British-Jordanian director, Abu Nowar. Recipient of considerable …
Tigers on the Tenth Day — Fabled Syria
Zakaria Tamer (b 1931 in Damascus) has been in exile from his native Syria in England since the early 1980s where …
The Toll Booth — Unsettled Desperation in Turkey
The Toll Booth (2014), more accurately, the” toll taker,” has a nice play on words in it, at least in …
Halfaouine: Boy of The Terraces –Coming of Age in Tunis, 1990
Every once in a while the unexpected out does itself. In Halfouine, Ferid Boughedir’s small 1990 movie from Tunis not …
Terror: The Terrible Numbers
The attacks in Paris are most recently on our minds, and for many of us, more heavily there than attacks …
Refugees Today and Yesterday
This started out as a post about two movies — about refugees– but talking about movies before actualities seemed just …
1913: Seeds of Conflict in Palestine
1913: Seeds of Conflict, a 2014 PBS distributed documentary by Ben Loeterman, is a fine, short introduction to the little …
Lawrence In Arabia — the Southern Reaches of WW I
As World War I came to its bloody close in the fall of 1918 the British public had to be …
Why We Fight: Unmaking the Myth
Eugene Jareck’s 2005 documentary, Why We Fight, available at Netflix, is still a relevant film to watch, even though the motivating …
Cities Of Salt: Wadi No More
Cities of Salt, a sweeping trilogy* of novels, and particularly the first, with the same name, by Abdelrahman Munif does …
Turkey: The Islands
It’s raining on the Sea of Marmara. It’s raining and cold. The warm cocoon of the ferry boat, on …