Bitter Bread

Abbas Fahdel’s 2015 film Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is one of the great, essential documentaries of this decade. Described as a “choral saga,” it chronicles the daily life of Fahdel’s family in Baghdad, immediately before and after the 2003 US invasion. Fahdel records as his society’s stability evaporates, dramatically replaced by grief and confusion as the country (now without an operating government) plunges into chaos.

Bitter Bread turns a compassionate eye on the hardscrabble lives of people who have been violently uprooted from their homes, and still yearn for them. The refugee crisis is frequently depicted as a serious yet abstract issue, but Fahdel brings it into focus on an immediate, human level.
Bitter Bread screens October 1 and 3 at Film at Lincoln Center(165 W. 65th Street), as part of the 57th New York Film Festival.
Author, Mosaic Artist, Curator

Comments

Post a Comment

Indian Slavery

think

absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption

Little Man Little Man

Popular posts from this blog

What is “blackbirding”?

Image
Elles Houwelingon, January 21, 2019, New Historian



Everyone has heard shocking stories about the transatlantic slave trade, but this was hardly the only type of slavery in which Europeans were engaged. The Pacific slave trade involved the forceful enslavement of Pacific islanders from the mid 19thcentury to the 20thcentury. This particular type of slavery is often referred to as “blackbirding”.

The primary focus of “blackbirding” was to supply cheap labor to sugar-cane plantations on Pacific plantations, particularly in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoan Islands. This was mainly achieved through trickery and kidnapping. They were frequently deceived about the length of time for which they were “contracted” and the nature of their “contract”. If all this failed, the islanders were simply loaded onto slave ships at gunpoint.

The captured islanders were collectively known as Kanakas, which means Person or Man in Hawaiian. These workers were essentially treated a…
Read more

Andrew Jackson Was A Real-Life Horror Movie Monster

Image
The truth about Jackson’s savagery was just as disturbing as the fake news. After a particularly bloody battle in 1814, Andrew Jackson’s men counted the dead Indians by cutting off their noses. They collected 557 noses.

and... (this comment)

Jackson ran an ad in the Nashville Gazette, in October, 1804, for the capture of a runaway slave, which stated that in addition to the reward, he would pay an extra $10 per 100 lashes (up to 300), to anyone who willing to inflict them upon his miscreant property. He was known to hold a vengeful lifetime grudge against anyone whom he felt had slighted him, regardless of how minor the supposed offense. His betrayal the Choctow tribe, whom he persuaded to become American allies over the British during the war of 1812, culminated in the “Indian Removal Act” (Trail of Tears), of which he took personal responsiblity to see implemented, resulted in the death of thousands of men, women and children. It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White…
Read more