Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...foreign film opens today across the country, and to some it might seem oddly familiar. Winner of numerous international film awards, including Italy's prestigious Donotello for Best Foreign Language Film and the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, Train of Life is yet another foray into the human condition during the events of World War II. Director and writer Radu Mihaileanu presents the humorous story of an Eastern European Jewish shtetl (village) and its fantastic escape from the Nazis on a fake deportation train they build themselves. Never mind that it was historically impossible for such an event to have...
...want people to understand is that humanity is wonderfully imperfect, but wonderful. We want to remain imperfect with problems, but we want to try to understand those problems. We just have to try to find peace in our souls. That's the message that my father gave me, that life is such a big gift and we should live it 100%. We should always keep our humor--it is the manifestation of life. We need to keep the humor and our identity and memory, our culture and people, and we need to open our arms and spirit to other people...
There will, of course, be inevitable comparisons to last year's enormously popular Italian comedy about the Holocaust, Life is Beautiful. Both movies provide a positive affirmation of life and humanity through a comic examination of tragic events. But Train of Life, which was actually written before anyone had ever heard of Life is Beautiful, has earned its many international awards and praises on its own merits. It is not, by any means, the same movie. Mihaileanu takes a more collective look at how people react to tragedy, and through this study in optimism, tries to give us a broader...
...have really happened. The train escapes several close calls because of a German uniform hastily tailored to a higher rank, or by the outrageous claim that their train is special because it is deporting extra-dangerous communist Jews. These are examples of the whimsical and creative view Train of Life takes on practically every aspect of the shtetl's endeavor...
...There is a certain severity beneath the lighthearted attitude the movie adopts--not every scene is a humorous denial of the life or death crisis the shtetl faces. The villager elected to play the head fake Nazi goes through his own psychological crisis, and the whole ordeal seems to sorely test the shtetl's religious faith. Even as the shtetl is fleeing death, it runs straight into its own humanity. The most serious crisis in the movie occurs not when they are dealing with real Nazis or are otherwise close to disaster, but when they explicitly ask if God exists...