Videodrone Foreign Affairs: 'A Separation'

"A Separation" (Sony) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and deservedly so. This story of a divorce in contemporary Iran, sought without rancor (she wants to leave for America on a hard-won visa with a short window of opportunity, he is obligated to remain home to care for his ailing father) but not without frustration and some resentment, begins small but the reverberations come back on all around them. Everybody has their reasons, so to speak, and they are legitimate, but these actions have terrible consequences.

It is, in the words of MSN film critic Glenn Kenny, "an almost classic story of a wrong move in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how the specific gravity of a circumscribed situation can shift and turn innocuous actions performed with the best intentions almost deadly. It's a story with what they call "universal" appeal and ramifications, and the fact that it unfolds in a culture that's very much unlike our own while at the same time proving not entirely unlike our own adds yet another level of intrigue to the proceedings."

More on "A Separation" and other foreign arrivals at Videodrone

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