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House of FoolsRating:
Release Date: 01 March, 2004 Retail Price: $19.99 OUR Price: $17.99 You SAVE: $2.00! Cast: |
House of Fools Reviews
Absolutely Amazing.
This is my first review on Amazon after years of using it, because I just watched this movie, and was blown away by the visuals. I'm no big foreign film fan, I'm really not much of a film fan period, I bought this DVD because I'm learning Russian, and wanted some movies to watch as aids. This movie blew me away. There is a scene, where a helicopter crashes behind Janna while she plays the accordian that I could never in a million years forget.
Truer than life, to one who was there
Baghdad, July 2005
I debated whether I should post this, but when I saw that the Amazon reviewer believes Andrei Konchalovsky "overstates his case" I figured I should help readers decide for themselves.
I'm a reporter for Reuters, right now on assignment in Iraq. Ten years ago I covered the first Chechen war for the French news agency AFP. I saw plenty of horrors there and in subsequent wars, but few stories disturbed me as much as the psychiatric hospital outside Shali, on which this film is clearly based. To me, one of just a handful of people who actually visited that hospital in the days before Shali fell, Konchalovsky's masterfully imagined version is truer than life. I bawled like a baby while I watched the film and felt giddy and sick for hours after. Trust me, this is a case that can't be overstated.
Here is one of the stories I wrote about that hospital in 1995. The movie is better, because it gets inside the fictional Zhanna's head in a way that was impossible for me with the real-life patients in that cold room 10 years ago.
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Chechnya war leaves psychiatric patients to fend for themselves
Peter Graff
18 March 1995
Agence France-Presse
SHALI, Russia, March 18 - In a building with no light and no heat, a bald and naked woman huddles in the corner screaming, oblivious to the freezing cold.
An unshaven man with spit hanging from his mouth slowly mops up filth and excrement from the floor.
Not that he is a nurse or an orderly. He too is a patient at the psychiatric hospital in hell.
The battle front has come to the psychiatric hosiptal here, leaving mental patients to tend to themselves.
Ruslan Dzhabrailov, one of the few lucid patients left, has the keys, but the doors are kept unlocked. The doctors have all left. So have the guards.
During the day, the patients are looked after. Yakha Zavreyeva is one of two cooks that come in alternating three-day shifts. A nurse also comes every second day.
"Nobody pays us. But I cannot abandon them," Zavrayeva said. But at night, every night, the patients are alone.
They clean each other. They comfort each other as the bombing comes close. They bury each other when they die.
The other patients depend entirely on the lucid ones, especially on Dzhabrailov.
"Every day he says to me 'if this war doesn't stop tomorrow I'm going to leave.' But I don't know what the others would do without him," said Zavrayeva.
In a war with countless civilian casualties, the patients of this hospital are the most innocent victims. As the fighting gets closer many have no idea what is going on.
The hospital is located just outside of the town of Shali on the road heading west toward Russian positions across the Argun river. Shali, which Chechen separatists now regard as their capital, is one of the war's most strategic targets.
Russian forces have been pressing to take that road, and the mental hospital is in the line of fire.
On Monday evening a heavy battle was fought a few kilometers away. As shells exploded on the horizon, patients wandered about the side of the road in uncomprehending bewilderment.
Chechen officials boast that the Russian army will never take this road, but an advance could come at any time leaving no building standing in its path.
There are no plans to evacuate the patients from this hospital.
"If the Russians come, I'm not really sure what we will do," Zavreyeva said.
There were once 250 patients at this hospital, then a model of Soviet medical science.
How many are there now?
"Twenty," said Zavreyeva, the cook.
"No. Not twenty anymore. One woman wandered off." Dzhabrailov, the patient with the keys, said.
"Wandered off? When?" Zavreyeva said.
"This shift. I didn't tell you," Dzhabrailov said.
Outside on the street, patients fed broken furniture into a campfire which Zavreyeva helped them to build. It is their only source of warmth since the gas was cut off last month. They carry water themselves and make tea.
"People sometimes bring them food and clothing. Most people are good to them," said Zavreyeva. That includes Chechen fighters, who often give the patients bread as they pass by on the road.
But not all people are so kind, and the patients are defenseless.
Dzhabrailov said that at night the hospital has been attacked and looted. "We had medication, but one night last week the drug addicts came and took it all," he said.
Zabareyeva explained further: "They came in uniforms with guns. They said they needed the drugs and the syringes for the wounded."
"But can't they see that these people are also sick?" she said.
pg/ms
AFP AFP
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