This article critically assesses Deepa Mehta's Earth (1998) and Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (2001) as cultural outputs of recent political and historical debates over the nature of India's nationhood. The article argues that the films politicize history, constructing an innocent past with the aim of advocating a more inclusive Indian society.
In 2001, renowned Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola released his film Concorrenza sleale. Upon its release, Scola stated repeatedly that his historical film about the anti-Jewish legislation of 1938 aspired to go beyond the historical setting in order to convey a critique of intolerance in contemporary Italian society. Moving from an analysis of the film's evolution from script to post-production, this article offers a textual and contextual analysis of Concorrenza sleale, investigating its relationship both to the period the film seeks to represent and to the time of its production. Questioning both the allegorical ambitions of the film and the political implications of historicizing the issue of racism in Italy, this article argues that Scola's film is ultimately unable to abandon the italiani brava gente template, thus leaving its ambitious questions about Italian attitudes towards the other not only unanswered, but also unasked.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.