Reel North Film Festival, in partnership with the Thompson Public Library, wraps up its third season of monthly Saturday night double features April 10 in the basement Bijou Room of the Thompson Public Library with Cairo Time and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
Tickets are $5 per person and the doors for the Bijou open at 7 p.m. with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas at 7:30 p.m. followed by Cairo Time at 9:15 p.m.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a fictional story that works to offers perspective on how prejudice, hatred and violence affect innocent people, particularly children, during wartime. Through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy largely shielded from the reality of the Second World War, moviegoers witness a forbidden friendship that forms between Bruno, the son of Nazi commandant, and Shmuel, a Jewish boy held captive in a concentration camp.
Though the two are separated physically by a barbed wire fence, their lives become intertwined.
The critics were decidedly mixed in their review of the film when it came out in 2008. Manohla Dargis for the New York Times wrote, "See Bruno. See Bruno run. See Bruno see a farm. See Bruno see "farmers" in "striped pajamas See Bruno ponder the kind of false paradoxes that only an authorial contrivance, like the artificial naïf, would face: Jews are supposed to be bad, and yet Shmuel is nice."
Boston's Christian Science Monitor was kinder: "And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully."
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer opined that director Mark Herman's "intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways."
In Ruba Nadda's Cairo Time, Juliette Grant (Patricia Clarkson), a magazine editor, travels to Cairo to meet her husband, Mark (Tom McCamus), a United Nations official working in Gaza, for a three-week vacation. When he is unavoidably delayed, he sends his friend Tareq (Alexander Siddig), who had been his security officer for many years, to escort her throughout the beautiful and exotic city.
Both movies won "People's Choice Awards" from Film Circuit, a division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, whose mandate includes providing filmgoers in "under-served communities, transformative experiences through access to Canadian and international independent films they would otherwise not have the opportunity to see."
With over 190 groups in 166 communities across Canada, Film Circuit is intended to help the Toronto International Film Festival Group building markets and audiences for Canadian work.
