Emma Stone to portray Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, in Yorgos Lanthimos' new film

After “The Favourite”, “Poor Things” and the soon to be released “Kinds of Kindness”, Academy Award winning actress Emma Stone and Greek film director Yorgos Lanthimos are once again joining forces towards a very promising project focused on the life of the great bolshevik revolutionary and father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 

As Lanthimos has revealed, Stone will portray Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's faithful wife who played a significant role not only in Ulyanov's personal life, but also in the political scene during the first years of the October Revolution. 

Thoughts prompted by the film "The Young Karl Marx"

By Nikos Mottas.

“Der junge Karl Marx” (The Young Karl Marx) is a historical drama that covers the revolutionary, theoretical and political activity of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the period from 1843 to 1847. This is the period when Marx and Engels began the joint work which became the foundation of the scientific worldview of the proletariat.

Within the limited framework of a film, Raoul Peck tries his best in order to present both the rich theoretical work of the two revolutionary thinkers as well as their militant activity. Despite the difficulty of the task the director uses effectively the powerful tools provided by cinema as a means of disseminating ideas. 

Theo Angelopoulos: The Great Poet of Cinema

The 24th of January marks the death anniversary of the acclaimed Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos. He was killed by a motorcycle on January 24, 2012, while he was attempting to cross a busy road in Piraeus.

Being one of the last and most characteristic representatives of modernism in Cinema, Angelopoulos was, without any doubt, the most internationally respected Greek filmmaker and one of the greatest directors of his generation. He received numerous awards with the most notable being the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for his remarkable film “Eternity and a Day”. 

"Peterloo": A very British massacre (Review and Trailer)

Peterloo (2018) Film Review.

Director: Mike Leigh. Stars: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake and Neil Bell. 

Waterloo – a field in Belgium where in 1815 the armies of Britain, Prussia and other European powers defeated the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. St Peters Field – a square in Manchester where on 19 August 1819 cavalry charged a crowd of unarmed protesters killing around 20 people. The closeness of the two events led to the latter being called the Peterloo Massacre; an event now the subject of a feature film, Peterloo, directed by Mike Leigh. The events in the field in Belgium were made into a film almost 50 years ago, in a film entitled Waterloo. A film about the events closer to home is long overdue.

The Death of Stalin: Vulgar anticommunism under the veil of "comedy"

"The Death of Stalin" is the title of the anticommunist film which is going to be screened on cinemas. The two-minutes trailer of the movie is enough for someone to understand that it is another case of crude and vulgar anticommunism, of distortion and counterfeiting of History, as long as it shows Stalin as the "fear and terror of the nation" and other personalities of the time (e.g. Marshall Zhukov) as miserable caricatures.

But the text of the [film's] synopsis by the distribution company ODEON which accompanies the movie and has been published in the media is also revealing. Promoting the film, the distribution company refers to it as "a comedy based on real events": "On the night of March 2, 1953, a man is dying. A terrible stroke is wracking his entire body. He is drooling. He is pissing himself... The man is Joseph Stalin, dictator, tyrant, butcher as well a Secretary General of USSR. ‘The Death of Stalin’ is a satire about the days before the funerals of the Nation’s Father. Days that shine a sardonic light on all the madness, depravity and inhumanity of totalitarianism. Days that will see the men surrounding him fight to inherit his supreme power. And it’s all based on true events."

Anti-DPRK propaganda exposed: Greek TV news presented still from Hollywood movie as real fact!

Greek TV news presented still from Hollywood movie as real fact!

Gaffe or deliberate propaganda? In the effort to vilify the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) all possible means can be used. In their news programs, two Greek TV channels- Epsilon and Alpha TV- used stills from the film "The Interview" (2014), which they presented as a real fact! More specifically, both TV channels used the film's opening scene where a little North Korean girl sings an anti-american song. 

"Is for the United States to explode in a ball of fiery hell. May they starve and beg, and be ravaged by desease. May they be helpless, poor, sad and cold" say the lyrics of the film's opening scene, which Epsilon and Alpha TV presented as an actual fact that took place in the DPRK! 

Olga Benário Prestes (1908-1942)

Olga Benário Prestes is an extraordinary- but not broadly known- case of a Brazilian communist hero. Olga was born in Munich, Germany as Olga Gutmann Benário, to a Jewish family. At the age of 15, In 1923, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 she helped her husband and comrade Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison. She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow. As an active figure of the Communist Youth International, Olga undertakes several missions; in one of these she was briefly arrested in Britain accussed as a spy. 

In 1934 she was tasked with helping the return to Brazil of Luís Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Communist Party of Brazil, to whom she was assigned as a bodyguard. In order to accomplish this mission, false papers were created stating that they were a Portuguese married couple. After a failed insurrection in November 1935, Benário and her husband went into hiding, and after barely escaping a police raid at Ipanema, they were both eventually arrested in January 1936, during the harsh anti-communist campaign declared after dictator Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed martial law and was already plotting the 1937 coup that would eventually lead to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

    

A memorable scene from Theo Angelopoulos' acclaimed film Ulysses' Gaze (1995), starring Harvey Keitel, Erland Josephson and Maia Morgenstern. In memory of the extraordinary actor Thanasis Veggos (1927-2011) who plays the taxi driver in the above scene.  

Стачка / Strike (1924) by Sergei M.Eisenstein (Full Film)

      

Strike was Sergei Eisenstein's first film (1924). It depicts life at a factory complex in Tsarist Russia and the conditions the workforce experienced. The plot is about the workers organising a strike which due to repression escalates into a full blown occupation.