*Fjord* and *Fatherland*

Both of these movies I found worth watching. Fjord won the Golden Prize at Cannes, and it concerns the rights of the family vs. the rights of the state, when it comes to raising children. As I interpreted the story, it was so right-wing and so based I am shocked it won. It is by the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who is best known for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, also referred to as “the Romanian abortion movie.” His new outing is a quality film but I found theh messaging a bit heavy-handed at times (and am I one to defend European bureaucracy?), noting that some critics are still debating which side the director took so “maybe it is just me.”

Fatherland is a Polish take on postwar Germany and some travels of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. A German director might have been afraid to portray the communism of East Germany as this movie does, in any case I found that convincing. It captures what I imagine the immediate postwar era to have been like, and the moral dilemmas people faced as they had to decide their future relationships with Germany (and indeed Germanies), past, present, and future. At one hour, twenty-two minutes it worked very well, though it requires the viewer to know a good deal about German history, literature, and culture.

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