Summary: The film takes place in the isolated and dilapidated Hungarian countryside sometime at the end of communism. The locals spend their days drinking, dancing, and quarrelling with each other, or just sitting around doing nothing. A few of them decide to steal whatever little money the community has left and leave the village forever….
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A collection of high-quality academic essays.
Sankofa (Movie): Summary, Analysis
Summary: While on a photo shoot in the site of a former slave castle, a self-absorbed African American model is magically transported back to a Jamaican plantation where she experiences the realities of slavery first-hand. Having experienced a slave revolt and joining a maroon colony, she returns to her present-day life with a deepened connection…
Silences of the Palace – Summary – Analysis
Summary: Alia is the illegitimate daughter of Khedija, a servant in an old Ottoman royal palace, Tunis. Her presumed father is Prince Sidi Ali, one of the last beys (Turkish governors), now a puppet of French colonial rule during the mid-1950s, when the movement for independence is growing violent. Khedija is beautiful, she works in…
La Roue (The Wheel): Film Summary & Analysis
Summary: A railroad operator, Sisif, saves a young child, Norma, from the wreckage of a train crash. He raises the orphan girl alongside his biological son, Elie. The children grow up believing that they are related by blood. Both Sisif and Elie fall in love with Norma. Sisif reveals his feelings for Norma and the…
Rome, Open City (1945) – Summary – Analysis
Summary: In Nazi-occupied Rome, the Gestapo is hunting the ringleaders of the local Resistance movement, Manfredi and Francesco. The pursued men are hidden and assisted by the local people, including the local priest Don Pietro and Francesco’s fiancée, Pina, while the diabolical Major Bergmann tracks them down from the comfort of his office. Francesco is…
The Handmaid’s Tale: Analysis
Critics read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a cautionary story of oppression against women as well as a critique of radical feminism. Some who focus on Offred, the narrator and main character, criticize her passivity in the face of rigid limitations on her individual freedom: Gayle Green in her article, “Choice of Evils,” published…
The Handmaid’s Tale: Setting
International Conservatism In the 1980s, the political climate around the globe turned toward fiscal restraint and social conservatism. In general, this shift was a response to the permissiveness and unchecked social spending that occurred in the 1970s, which were in turn the extended results of the freedoms won by the worldwide social revolutions of the…
The Handmaid’s Tale: Imagery, Point of View & other Literary Devices
Narration The events in this novel take place at different points in the life of the narrator, but the primary setting, the present tense of the novel, is Gilead, where she has been a handmaid in the Commander’s house for five weeks. The reader is introduced to new characters that she meets from this point…
The Handmaid’s Tale – Themes
Sex Roles The roles that are assigned to the two genders in this novel are exaggerations of the roles traditionally played: women here are responsible for domestic duties and men in Gilead run the government functions (since this is a totalitarian state, business and military concerns are part of the government). To most of the…
The Handmaid’s Tale – Characters
The Commander The Commander is a powerful figure in the Gileadean government. He is apparently sterile, although this is not confirmed because, according to law, only women are tested for being fruitful or barren. The first time the Commander is seen breaking the strict social structure is when he sends for the handmaiden to come…