Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Nazi Junkies, Ritual: A Psychomagic Story, Zizou and the Arab Spring.
Nazi Junkies
Although it sounds like a bad History Channel show, the documentary is as factual as it is fascinating. Based on research by German writer Norman Ohler, the “revelations” are not as startling as presented. Historians have long known of Adolf Hitler’s dependence on a medicine chest of vitamin, hormone and steroid injections. Eventually, he was prescribed cocaine. However, Ohler’s examination of the records left by Hitler’s physician, Theodor Morell, reveal new details, including the use of opiates. In the last half of 1944, Hitler was injecting a daily speedball that engendered euphoria and a false sense of invincibility.
The documentary fans out from the Führer to show that the Nazi regime distributed uppers of one sort or another to millions of its people. Was the whole nation on a raging amphetamine bender? Hitler’s drug addiction doesn’t explain his ideas but casts new light on the reckless pursuit of his ambitions.
Ritual: A Psychomagic Story
Lia is a psychologically fragile woman with a psychologically cruel boyfriend, Viktor. He reluctantly accompanies her to visit her aunt, reputed as a benign sorceress in the remote village where Lia was born. How the tension between man and women is resolved (or not) becomes strangely compelling in this artfully composed film by Italy’s Giulia Brazzale and Luca Immesi. The acclaimed Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky guest stars as the aunt’s dead (yet still present) husband.
Zizou and the Arab Spring
Tunisia is where the Arab Spring began (2010) and is the only country where it ended happily—so happily that Tunisians can laugh about their revolution. In Férid Boughedir’s comedy, an innocent small-town boy in the big city of Tunis stumbles around a gallery of comical types, just looking for work, as dissatisfaction simmers against the kleptocratic regime of Ben Ali (whose portrait smiles from every wall). The humor is evident across any language barrier.
