Word: verges
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...darkest places of the soul. Werner Herzog journeys to Antarctica for Encounters at the End of the World. Kevin Macdonald's My Enemy's Enemy considers the life and crimes of Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie. Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate is a fascinatingly equivocal study of Jacques Vergès, who defended Barbie and many of last century's most notorious figures...
...Barbet Schroeder has directed movies with stars like Jeremy Irons, Sandra Bullock and Gérard Depardieu. But he has also made documentaries, including up-close studies of Idi Amin Dada and Koko the talking gorilla. His new film, Terror's Advocate, is a biopic of Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer who has defended many of the 20th century's most notorious miscreants, from Carlos the Jackal to the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie. Asked if he would defend Hitler, Vergès replies, "I'd even defend Bush. Of course he'd have to admit...
...showing in Cannes. Like Winterbottom, but long before him, Schroeder has compiled an imposing resume of fiction films (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female, Murder by Numbers) and documentaries (General Idi Amin Dada and Koko, a Talking Gorilla). His new non-fiction study is a biography of Jacques Vergès, a lawyer who defended some of the most infamous activists of the 20th century, from the terrorist Carlos the Jackal to the Nazi executioner Klaus Barbie...
...Born in Thailand, Vergès fought in the French Resistance before becoming a lawyer, defending Communist students who protested the departure of French soldiers to the Algierian war. In Algeria he took up the case of Djamila Bohired, the anti-colonial bomber of cafés. After he won her freedom, they married and had two children. He then vanished for eight years, returning to become the lawyer of choice for terrorists - or freedom fighters? - from Europe and the Middle East. ("Today's Palestinian," he says, "is yesterday's Algerian.") Some of these participants speak fondly onscreen of their...
...Part of the film's fascination, at least to those unfamiliar with Vergès, is its novelty; the story is fresh, epic, and challenging to all preconceptions about the use of violence for political purposes. To what extent, Schroeder asks, do individuals practice terrorism and countries practice military diplomacy, when both actions end in the deaths of dozens, or millions, of innocents? The filmmaker has no easy answers; no answers at all; and that moral dilemma hangs over the viewer of Terror's Advocate long after the specific horrors of A Mighty Heart will have receded into the mists...