By Michael Atkinson
Just in time for the holidays, particularly Chanukah and Eid al-Adha (okay, that was a few weeks ago), here come two new Mideast films that quietly tear into the bilious, ruinous hypocrisies of fundamentalist religion. It's an ironic conflict from where we stand: nothing is as ripe and ready for the firing squad as reactionary religious discipline, and yet few social codes are as ubiquitous. What's more, they all somehow demand "respect." Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist, and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's "My Father My Lord" (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's "Takva: A Man's Fear of God" (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of "extreme tradition" (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently,...
Just in time for the holidays, particularly Chanukah and Eid al-Adha (okay, that was a few weeks ago), here come two new Mideast films that quietly tear into the bilious, ruinous hypocrisies of fundamentalist religion. It's an ironic conflict from where we stand: nothing is as ripe and ready for the firing squad as reactionary religious discipline, and yet few social codes are as ubiquitous. What's more, they all somehow demand "respect." Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist, and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's "My Father My Lord" (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's "Takva: A Man's Fear of God" (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of "extreme tradition" (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently,...
- 12/23/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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