Captives

In the late-17th century, as white settlers in the New World pushed further and further west, Native Americans suddenly found themselves fighting for both their territory and their lives.

In the late-17th century, as white settlers in the New World pushed further and further west, Native Americans suddenly found themselves fighting for both their territory and their lives.

The film focuses on one of the greatest ballet teachers of the 20th century, Ludmila Pavlovna Sakharova. Sakharova is the current artistic director of the Perm Ballet school. The Perm school is one of the top 3 ballet schools in Russia, with the others being the Vaganova Academy and Bolshoi school. Sakharova was the teacher that trained her most famous student and probably the most remarkable teenage student ever, Nadezhda Pavlova. At the same time that she was teaching Pavlova, her other student, Olga Chenchikova, was winning the silver medal against older professional dancers in the 1973 Moscow Ballet Competition when 16 year old Pavlova became the only ballerina to win the Grand Prize at a major competition of that level.

A murdered businessman's daughter is shipwrecked on a jungle island with the son of the man who killed her father. Both are threatened by a smuggling ring that uses the island as its headquarters.

The US Army is under pressure from the desperate relatives of white prisoners of the Comanches to secure their rescue. A cynical and corrupt marshal, Guthrie McCabe, is persuaded by an army lieutenant to assist in the negotiations with the Comanches. However, just two captives are released; and their reintegration into white society proves highly problematic.

During WWII, the death camp at Treblinka had an escape, causing the Commandant at a similar camp in Sobibor to vow that his camp would never experience the same thing. But those who were its captives, the Jewish laborers that had been spared from the ovens, knew that they were on borrowed time and that their only hope was to escape… the only question was how to do it. However, because the Germans would kill an equal number of others whenever a group attempted to escape, the captives knew that if ever an escape was tried, all 600 prisoners in the camp would have to be included…

During WWII, the death camp at Treblinka had an escape, causing the Commandant at a similar camp in Sobibor to vow that his camp would never experience the same thing. But those who were its captives, the Jewish laborers that had been spared from the ovens, knew that they were on borrowed time and that their only hope was to escape… the only question was how to do it. However, because the Germans would kill an equal number of others whenever a group attempted to escape, the captives knew that if ever an escape was tried, all 600 prisoners in the camp would have to be included… logistically precluding any ideas about tunnels or sneak breakouts. Indeed, to have such a mass escape could only mean that the Ukrainian guards and Germain officers would have to be killed, which many of the Jews felt simply reduced themselves to no better than their captors… thus making it a struggle of conscience. And therein lies the story, with the film being based on a factual account of what then happened at that Sobibor prison.

The scars that have devolved on succeeding generations from the Japanese Imperial Army’s “Rape of Nanking” on the eve of World War II have gained prominence in the news of recent years. We recall how the Japanese government has only been able to go so far in recognizing a national culpability. A book of that title written by Iris Chang came into prominence three times at least – the first time upon publication in 1997, on the suicide of its author in 2004, and again at the release of an incendiary documentary inspired by her book in 2007, the year that it was at last published in a Japanese translation. Given raw feelings are on both sides 70 years after the destruction of the city, the prospect of a mainstream feature film dealing with that period is likely to be met with concern and trepidation. The wonder is that director Lu Chuan finds humanity in the suffering on both sides, and has made a film both impossible to watch and yet hypnotically seductive.