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Showing posts with the label reality vs imagination

"Train de vie"

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Train of Life  (in  French   Train de vie ; in  Romanian   Trenul vieÅ£ii ) is a 1998 tragicomedy film by  France ,  Belgium ,  Netherlands ,  Israel  and  Romania  made in the  French language . It tells the story of an eastern European Jewish village's plan to escape  the Holocaust . The film starts off with a man, named Schlomo ( Lionel Abelanski ), running crazily through a forest, with his voice playing in the background, saying that he has seen the horror of the  Nazis  in a nearby town, and he must tell the others. Once he gets into town, he informs the  rabbi , and together they run through the town and once they have got enough people together, they hold a town meeting. At first, many of the men do not believe the horrors they are being told, and many criticize Schlomo, for he is the town lunatic, and who could possibly believe him? But the rabbi believes him, and then they try to tackle the p...

"A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear" (by Atiq Rahimi)

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The modern history of Afghanistan is a tapestry rent and torn by invasions and internal conflict, both political and religious. Through it all, Afghanis have struggled to define what it means for them to be a united people.  A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear  elegantly captures the essence of this tumultuous cultural narrative, with all its existential angst. To traverse the fractured mind of Farhad, the protagonist and narrator of Atiq Rahimi’s latest novel, is to glimpse the broken soul of a battered and confused country. The backdrop of Farhad’s story is Afghanistan prior to the 1979 Soviet invasion, a time when internal politics are in upheaval. In 1973, a coup toppled Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchy, only to have the new ruling regime fall five years later after another coup.  A series of bloody wranglings for power ensued, and while the communist Hafizullah Amin eventually emerged as president, his reign was short.  The Soviet Union invaded the countr...