This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, director of the critically-acclaimed films Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo, the tale of a Senegalese Winston-Salem cab driver and his uncommonly taciturn, self-destructive Southern passenger. Roger Ebert has called Bahrani “the new great American director,” “a gifted, confident filmmaker with ideas that involve who and where we are at this time.” In the New York Times, A.O. Scott named him as one of the vanguard of the “neo-neo-realism” movement in modern cinema.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks with Ian Buruma, journalist, novelist, documentarian and Henry R. Luce, Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Buruma’s new book is a sprawling historical novel called The China Lover, a semi-fictionalized history of Japan during and after World War II and the life of actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi, who began her career as a propaganda film star in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In the voice of three different narrators a Japanese cultural official and China enthusiast, an American expatriate cinephile and a convert to the Japanese Red Army Buruma’s book captures the multifaceted, elusive nature of both Yamaguchi and Japan itself.
