Foreign Film of the Week: Week 2

The Siren is having a hard time staying on top of blogging at length, but at least she got in her foreign film of the week. It is really depressing when a New Year's Resolution is gone before the mid-point of January

Last week's movie, sent by Flickhead, whose thoughts on the movie are located here: A Talking Picture, directed by Manuel Oliveira.

What's missing from the table and from much of the picture, of course, is the true (truer, anyway) cradle of humanity, basis of much of even Greek civilization, the Middle East. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt among others are not represented, and while Egypt's monuments are shown and discussed, they're discussed not by an Egyptian but by a Portugese. The silence is overwhelming; we hear secondhand about Muslim civilizations, usually as it relates to and clashes with Western civilizations (the Hagia Sophia, Napoleon visiting the pyramids, the Arabs burning the library at Alexandria (a historically disputed event)). Suddenly the Middle East speaks out (or at least we assume it's from the Mid-East--Oliveira leaves even this ambiguous), in the form of a ship's officer with an urgent message, and the entire ship is forced to react to a neglected
culture's startling response.

--from Noel Vera's review