Word: localism
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...short films in the early '80s, and in the features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987) and The Long Day Closes (1992), he wove a tapestry of family life, of a violent father and gentle mother, an entire neighborhood that soldiered through hard times singing pop songs at the local pub. This was nostalgia with the blinkers off, an epic saga in miniature. The films documented their time and place with an artistic clarity so acute as to be both unbearable and endearing. (See the 100 best movies of all time...
...Davies, then, was just the fellow for the local burghers to summon as a celebrant-critic for the 800th anniversary of the founding of the borough of Liverpool in 1207. They commissioned Of Time and the City, which Davies fashioned into a kind of Liverpool mon amour: a 71-min. documemoir that underscores newsreels of the city, home movies and new footage with romantic strains from Liszt, Mahler, Brahms, Fauré. Anchoring the piece are Davies' fond and acid recollections of his home town - what he, in his drawling, very un-Liverpudlian narrative voice, calls "a valediction and an epitaph...
...will never forget the almost aristocratic courtliness of the local soccer team, on those "slow Saturdays, when football like life was still played in black and white, and in shorts as long as underwear, when it was still not venal, when sportsmen and -women knew how to win and lose with grace and never to punch the air in victory." Or perhaps it was the strong bodies of the sportsmen that transfixed the young Terry. He realized he was different when he watched professional wrestling - or rather, the wrestlers: "O save me from those dark desires which thrill and compel...
...young Christian says that in 2007 the manager of a Christian bookstore in Gaza was shot dead. Early last year, he adds, armed gunmen stormed the local YMCA and tossed a bomb into the library, destroying thousands of books. Hamas condemned both attacks but never made any arrests. The head of a Christian relief organization was also asked by Hamas to leave Gaza after accusations that his staff were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. One Catholic nun from Slovenia brushed aside these worries. "We practice our faith, but we do it quietly," she says. "And people here respect...
...Cinema Club, for example, is run as part of a film class at a local Catholic school, but most of its students are Muslims. Inside, the altar of the Virgin Mary is easy to disassemble so that the room can revert to being a Cinema Club when the Muslim students return to class. On the wall hangs a trinity of portraits that display the seemingly contradictory loyalties of Palestinian Christians: the Latin Patriarch, the Pope and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East...