True Story

This sensitive drama from Anthony Fabian tells the remarkable true story of Sandra Laing, a black girl who was born to white Afrikaner parents in 1950’s South Africa. Due to a genetic throwback, Sandra’s hair is frizzier than that of her parents, and her skin darker. As her conservative father seeks to defend her mother from persistent accusations of infidelity, Sandra becomes embroiled in a series of legal battles to classify her race. Amazingly, The Laings’ campaign is successful and the dark-skinned Sarah is officially classified as white. She is legally entitled to attend a “white” school, sit in the “white” section in waiting rooms and dine in “white” restaurants. Her parents blankly ignore the stares from racist onlookers, and their policy of “reclassifying” their daughter appears to work, for a while.

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We are all fat, lazy and complacent. We use television as a way of switching our minds off to what is going on in the world around us. The media has great potential to educate, to promote political debate, to bring about justice, yet we are contented with air-headed trash if it brings in a few bucks through advertising.

This is the message that Edward Murrow gives to a room of CBS employees in 1958, but one that could apply equally today. In his second film as director, which was shot when the ‘war on terror’ was in full swing, Clooney offers a rebuke to contemporary US journalists who lose sight of the truth because they are too concerned with appeasing advertisers and the government. Clooney can’t be accused of falling into this camp: he was paid $1 each for writing, directing, and acting in the film and even offered to mortgage his house in order to fund it. Clooney would have been familiar with newsrooms of this era because his father was a news anchor for some 30 years.

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Once seen as a respected institution of Western movies (and Dirty Harry), Clint Eastwood, now 78, has revealed himself to be an adept storyteller who just gets better and better with each new release. Like his 2006 war film Letters from Iwo Jima, Changeling is a provocative and relentless film that looks on the past with coldness and suggests the present has learnt few lessons from it. Child abuse and infanticide feature heavily, but really act as a prism through which the central themes of real-life police corruption and the disempowerment of women are played out with brutal force.

Meticulously researched by the former journalist and Babylon 5 creator  J. Michael Straczynski, who lifted most of the screenplay directly from court records, Changeling is the factual account of a mother whose young boy disappeared, and of a corrupt Police Department in 1928 Los Angeles that would go to any lengths to save its own skin.

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Directed by celebrated painter Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the remarkable tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the 43-year old Parisian fashion editor and playboy who, at the zenith of wealth and success was paralysed by a stroke and suffered from “locked in syndrome”, where he is alive and conscious but unable to communicate with the world.

Bauby wakes up in hostpital from a coma to find himself paralysed from head to toe and unable to speak. The only part of his body he can move is his left eyelid, which he uses to communicate. The pretty speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze) recites the alphabet in the order of most frequently used letters, and Bauby chooses a letter by blinking. Thus, letter by letter, blink by blink, he ‘dictates’ his extraordinary memoir on which this film is based.
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