22 July

The current world is reflected in several of the films I selected this year, in documentaries like “Fahrenheit 11/9” or “American Dharma”; indirectly in Paolo Sorrentino’s “Loro” (a wild imagining of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi) or Paul Greengrass’ “22 July”.

This last film looks at the events of July 22 2011 in Norway, when a bomb attack on government buildings in Oslo and a mass execution of young people at a summer camp on the island of Utoya led to the deaths of 77 people and hundreds of injuries. The perpetrator, Anders Berling Bréivik, was captured on Utoya.

The film introduces many of the characters on the day before the attacks, then proceeds through the actual day and continues along three loosely connected timelines — the arrest and trial of Breivik, as seen mostly through the eyes of a lawyer who is asked by Breivik to represent him; the recovery and rehabilitation of one of the survivors and the Norwegian Prime Minister, who called for an inquiry shortly after the attacks.

The events at Utoya in particular are gruelling, as Breivik coldly hunted down the students. It’s after his arrest that his madness comes to the fore, as he attempted to manipulate the proceedings to advance the clash of civilizations that he felt was inevitable and which, in his own way, he tried to precipitate. Through this period, the questions of how one deals with the administration of justice against someone who is ideologically opposed to it are brought strongly into focus.

Although Breivik’s actions occurred seven years ago, his ideas are perhaps even closer to the mainstream than it was then. “American Dharma” puts the focus on Steve Bannon in a new documentary by Errol Morris. I’ll talk about that in a future post.