So as a first attempt at a quick selection of movies I'd recommend I'm going to suggest a few recent films I've enjoyed that look at the attempts to resolve conflict or deal with the aftermath of conflicts and abuses.
Endgame
Channel 4 produced movie about the conversations leading up to end of Apartheid. It's a great piece of film making that doesn't shy away from the complexity of the situation. Beyond it's own subject it shows just how much could been with a movie about the conversations between the Major government and the IRA.
The performances in the film are beautiful and I was particularly impressed with William Hurt. As an actor I find he can be stilted and difficult, a Patrick McGoohan without the charisma. Here he's perfect as a stilted and difficult professor tasked with doing the unthinkable and talking to the ANC.
http://www.zerosec.ws/endgame-2009-limited-dvdrip-xvid-lpd/
Judgment at Nuremberg
When I first came across this it was after a few months spent reading up on the initial Nuremberg trial and the accounts of conversations with witnesses and the defendants. I'd already seen the BBC adaptation of the first trial and thought this would provide an interesting counter-point.
What I wasn't prepared for was the quality of the main performances and the subject matter. The movie addresses not the huge initial trial but one of the trials which was to follow afterward. Already the cold war is closing in, there's encouragement to get everything over with an acquit those useful to the Americans and people are tired and weary from previous trials.
Into this setting steps Spencer Tracey, chief judge appointed to deal with the case of a number of Nazi judges and what follows is one the most solid, stoic examples of a story about justice. There's one scene featuring the cross-examination of a man, played with dignity by Montogomery Clift, who has been sterilised by the Nazis that shows in one moment the terrible personal price that can be paid for the law to properly defend all.
http://movie-megaupload.com/2009/09/26/judgment-at-nuremberg-1961.html
Amistad
This may seem something of a strange pick, given that it's a film about a slave revolt before the American Civil War, and it's one of the events that played a small part in the build up for the eventual conflict between the states. But it's also a film about a country trying to come to terms with a changing world, where their barbarity and criminal exploitation is increasingly revealed.
The period after the end of legal slave transportation fascinates me because of the complete lack of any true justification. Horribly, horrifically, wrongly in the days of slave transportation those bigoted profiteers could claim they actually believed Africans were in some way less than equal. But during the period of Amistad, slavery is legal only for those slaves born in slavery (although the film shows how abused this law was).
So surely at this point all justification falls away and in the aftermath all that is left is the true barbarity and profiteering of those whose wallets were lined with the blood of generations of others. Amistad shows, slowly and carefully, how any exposure to the light of discussion and reason those foundations of cruelty could not remain and eventually would have to be addressed.
http://linkgod.blogspot.com/2007/12/amistad-1997.html
Anyhoo, just a few quick picks there - let me know what you think or anything else you'd recommend.
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