Anyone who thinks black people are oppressed by white parents who assert they are against the teaching of critical race theory in the schools, or that conservatives who support the (defunct) Remain in Mexico policy are heaping hate on “immigrants,” should be forced to watch the documentary, For Sama (2019), about the killing and destruction in Syria at the hands of Bashar al-Assad. Here is where you’ll witness oppression and hate in this filmed account by a female Syrian journalist, Waad al-Kateab (a pseudonym), and collaborator Edward Watts. At one point Waad, who is married to a doctor named Hamza, says she regrets that she gave birth to her baby—Sama, a girl—in such an environment.

Her camera shows us the city of Aleppo blasted to smithereens. Bashar’s forces are viciously putting down an uprising and many people have bleeding wounds while others are dead. Doctors like Hamza are hard at work, but perhaps the worst thing that happens is that Russian planes, which are there to protect Bashar’s regime, bomb the hospital. The film is shocking, unsettling, though also it is heartening whenever someone is rescued from ubiquitous death. (It happens all too seldom, though). And we get some relief from seeing Waad and other Syrians being allowed to go into exile instead of suffering in Aleppo. This deal comes from Russia, Bashar’s ally, and it is no surprise when the Syrians express uncertainty over being able to trust the Russians.

The daily efforts of Waad and Hamza to stay alive are done, Waad says, for Sama, for her sake. Hence the doc’s title. The parents love and enjoy their child—there are domestic scenes here both pleasant and interesting—and one hopes they will eventually love and enjoy life. At least one hopes it if he doesn’t feel oppressed when he shouldn’t.

The 1997 film Ulee’s Gold, by Victor Nunez, is a tough but friendly drama about a beekeeper (Peter Fonda) and his screwed-up family. Mick LaSalle was one of the few critics who understood how inadequate the work is.

In my view Nunez’s direction is barely passable, if it is even that, and his plot (in the Nunez-penned screenplay) is weak and contrived. Crooks look for abundant dough hidden away by a fellow crook (the beekeeper’s son)—a trite idea, this. The son’s drug-addicted wife hangs around with the greedy crooks and just happens to tell them about the dough. Etc. LaSalle points out that Nunez can really blow it with dialogue, citing the following exchange between Ulee and his young granddaughter:

Granddaughter: “I’m sad.”

Ulee: “You like sad?” [A dumb question.]

Granddaughter: “No, but sometimes, inside, it makes

you quiet.”

Words like these confirm for me that Ulee’s Gold has a lot of admiring people fooled.

The 1997 film Ulee’s Gold, by Victor Nunez, is a tough but friendly drama about a beekeeper (Peter Fonda) and his screwed-up family. Mick LaSalle was one of the few critics who understood how inadequate the work is.

In my view Nunez’s direction is barely passable, if it is even that, and his plot (in the Nunez-penned screenplay) is weak and contrived. Crooks look for abundant dough hidden away by a fellow crook (the beekeeper’s son)—a trite idea, this. The son’s drug-addicted wife hangs around with the greedy crooks and just happens to tell them about the dough. Etc. LaSalle points out that Nunez can really blow it with dialogue, citing the following exchange between Ulee and his young granddaughter:

Granddaughter: “I’m sad.”

Ulee: “You like sad?” [A dumb question.]

Granddaughter: “No, but sometimes, inside, it makes

you quiet.”

Words like these confirm for me that Ulee’s Gold has a lot of admiring people fooled.

The twelve-year-old child in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is surrounded by foolishness although she herself is a sinner in the making.  Raised in a Catholic home, she nevertheless has “ugly” thoughts about people and “[h]er prayers . . . were usually perfunctory . . .”  From her frivolous cousins she learns about a half-man, half-woman freak at the county fair, who serenely declares to the spectators that, however appallingly strange his body is, it is “a temple of the Holy Ghost”—a source of fascination to the child.

The freak—a Christian—is living a great mystery.  But in the story’s last sentence, the child sees that the sun going down at twilight is “a huge red ball like an elevated Host [of the Eucharist] drenched in blood.”  It is easier to accept that the poor freak’s body is a temple when one realizes that Jesus Christ himself is a Host, a Savior, who was drenched in blood through the crucifixion.  There is a nexus between the two, although for the child it is the Passion that has the greater meaning.  She is becoming, after all, a fledgling in sin.

“The Loan,” by Bernard Malamud, is one heck of a sobering short story about human need (and more). An unhappy friend, Kobotsky, asks Leib, a Jewish baker, for a loan of two hundred dollars to purchase a headstone for his wife’s grave. Leib’s wife strongly opposes this, mostly due to all the bills imposed on the couple. Kobotsky, to be sure, has had a hard time of it, but Leib’s wife can one-up the man as the subject of the known suffering of the Jews emerges in the story. There has been severe deprivation for the wife (“the Bolsheviki came when she was a little girl and dragged her beloved father into the snowy fields without his shoes”).

This is one of Malamud’s breezy, strikingly luminous stories, like “The Magic Barrel.” More luminous than “In Retirement.” Its breeziness, however, quickly takes us back to the dire matters at hand, to brass tacks.