DAN WEBSTER:
When it comes to arts appreciation, the age-old question some of us ask is… what exactly is the point?
Are we interested in learning something? Are we searching for some greater meaning to this mystery we call life? Is the larger point to embrace, or reject, the respective artist’s attempt to make some sort of social or political comment? Or do we desire merely to entertain ourselves?
Maybe all of these questions hold equal value. Maybe not. But they and more were on my mind last week as I attended the 37th Palm Springs International Film Festival. Over the course of 10 days, I sat through 26 insightful movies. And true to the “international” theme of the festival, fully half of them came from abroad: Turkey to Tunisia, Continental Europe to Ukraine.
Seeing that many movies in that short of time can be mind-numbing. In years past, while attending the Seattle International Film Festival, my wife and I would sometimes see as many as five films in a day. And I recall walking toward my car afterward having trouble telling what was real, the city that hummed around me or the films I had been immersed in so completely.
In Palm Springs this time, the experience was even more profound, not just because of the number of films or the various storylines they presented, though those factors certainly played a part. The more telling element could be summed up in four specific movies, each from a different country but exploring similar gut-punching themes.
Take Palestine 36, a film set in 1936 in a part of the world that evokes daily news reports. The film focuses on the residents of a Palestinian village slowly being squeezed to extinction as the ruling British authorities displace the Palestinians to make room for Jewish immigrants. That process sets off a violent revolt—and, no surprise, initiated a conflict that continues to this day.
Then there’s the Ukrainian film Two Prosecutors. Set in 1937 Russia, it follows a young lawyer working for the prosecutor’s office in the city of Bryansk. Alerted by chance that a former colleague from his same office is being held at a local prison, and wants to talk, he decides to investigate. But, unfortunately for him, this is the time of then-dictator Stalin’s Great Purge, and any attempt to look hard at alleged corruption—even with all the best intentions of living up to Soviet ideals—is a death wish.
Another period piece, A Land Within, is a joint German and Italian film set in 1961 in the extreme north of Italy. This is the area known as the South Tyrol, these days an autonomous province of Italy. But during the time in which the movie is set, thanks to deals made by the Allied nations during and after both world wars, the primarily German-speaking citizens of the province faced discrimination by the Italian government. And as the film points out, some among them began a reign of terror to achieve what they saw as their freedom—which they ultimately won but with predictably tragic results.
If those three films didn’t bring home to me the reality of what conflict does to the human condition, then The Voice of Hind Rajab did. Based on a real event, it is a dramatized re-enactment of what occurred in 2024 when a Palestinian emergency-service office talked by phone with the 6-year-old girl of the film’s title. Caught up in the forced evacuation by Israeli forces of her Gazan neighborhood, the girl was the only survivor when the car she was riding in—also carrying her aunt, uncle and four cousins—came under fire.
Over the course of the film’s 89 minutes, which the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania pared down from the actual three-and-a-half-hour incident, we hear Hind’s actual voice, begging for someone to rescue her. The emergency workers desperately do what they can to find a way through the complicated maze of political contacts to help… but, tragically, to no avail.
Even when the house lights came up, and I emerged from the theater into the bright California sunshine, my mind was still in that emergency services office. And at that moment the horror of what goes on in the world felt more real than the messaging blared by any newspaper headline or broadcast report.
That may be as good an argument for the purpose, if not value, of art as there is.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
