The Day of the Jackal is a 1973 political thriller film based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth of the same name, published just a couple of years earlier. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann, who already had prestigious films such as High Noon and From Here To Eternity among his credits. The book's plot follows a professional assassin - known simply as "the Jackal" - as he prepares to carry out a contract for killing French President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. The screenplay follows the book pretty closely: it simplified rather than modified the book; it cut some pieces of dialogue; it moved the city where the Jackal's forger and gunsmith are based, from Brussels to Genova; and it eliminated one of the Jackal's fake identities. Other changes are minor. This film is unique and worthy of analysis, in my opinion, for using mainly P on the audience, with a little bit of R , and I as to the structure of the narrative, and very few concessions to other element...
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African lawyer, political activist and Thembu hereditary nobleman who was the most prominent leader of the movement against that country's system of institutionalised racial segregation known as apartheid . He served as South Africa's first president of the post- apartheid period from 1994 to 1999 after having been a political prisoner in 1964-1990. Backround : Mandela was born in 1918 in what is today the Eastern Cape province, in the core territory of the Xhosa ethnic group; more precisely he belonged to the royal family of the Thembu, a smaller group within the Xhosa. He studied law at Fort Hare, not far from his home town of Qunu, and in 1943 he continued his studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Up to this time, as per his own account, Mandela's life experiences had been mostly limited to rural areas where his daily exposure to the social realities of being a black South African were minimal, and his p...