Cinema: The Bright Side of the Ax

The 25th Hour. One fine day in the summer of 1939, a young Rumanian farmer with an iron arm and a wooden head jumps happily into his hay wagon and goes rattling away to the nearest market town. "Keep the bricks wet," he calls out to his wife. "I'll be back this afternoon." She keeps the bricks wet, but he does not come back that afternoon. She does not see him again until the bricks and both their lives and all of Europe have been ground to rubble under the German jackboot.

In this pacifist parable based on C. Virgil Gheorghiu's 1950...

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