The English Patient

Yet Michael Ondanchi catapulted cinnamon, Sri Lanka's national spice, to Homeric heights of poetic eroticism in his poem The Cinnamon Peeler.

Ondanchi is best known for The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and whose film adaptation went on to claim nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director.

a burgher of Sinhalese, Tamil and Dutch descent.

Ondanchi was born in Colombo in 1943 and later immigrated to Canada in 1962, the very same year that a military coup aimed at toppling the Bandranaki government in Colombo failed.

The Lovers on the Bridge received much appreciation abroad, with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese championing Harmony Corrine, hiring Jean-Yves Escoffier as his cinematographer for his directorial debut Gumo, after seeing the movie, and Miramax picking it up for the U.S. distribution.

But Miramax's head at the time, Harvey Weinstein, decided not to release it in the American theaters until 1999. a few years after Juliette Binault received an Oscar for her performance in The English Patient.

Leos Carax was the leading figure of a French film movement at the time called Cinéma du Look.

which was dedicated to making hyper-stylized movies about an alienated youth, and his movie The Lovers on the Bridge could be seen as the final work from this movement.

Let's Among.

Well, the U.S. distributor at that time, Miramax, was headed by Harvey Weinstein and because it got like a very negative, or at least one critic gave it a negative review when they premiered in New York and Allegedly, that made him, you know, Harvey Weinstein to decide to hold it for eight years.

And also, in the year 1999, this was also like two years after Julia Bonucci won the Oscar in The English Patient.

And this was also the same year that Leos Carax released his latest movie, Polar X. Yeah, there's an interesting parallel going on.

Generations of adventurers have unsuccessfully scoured the desert for the remains of the lost army.

Amongst them, Count Laszlo Almashi, the model for the so-called English patient.

But this expedition has a dramatic new discovery to investigate.

Published in a Cairo newspaper, this photograph of ancient arrowheads has reignited the hunt for the lost army, suggesting that legend might after all be fact.

Novelists have borrowed the plot.

Adventurers have used the history as inspiration.

Laszlo Almashi, the explorer immortalized as the English patient, spent years searching the Egyptian desert for the lost army.

Just before he died in 1951, he told a friend he was on the verge of finding it.

Yeah.

This film could have been around 30 minutes shorter, but hey, the English patient could have been two hours shorter and it still won a ton of awards.

This film's lack of recognition really is surprising.

My only regret is that it took me 10 years for me to find this title.

But Oppenheimer, I voted for that one for sure.

And The English Patient? Well, I wasn't around at that time.

You

weren't around? You weren't born during The English Patient? That was the year we were born, wasn't it? Is that 96? 96, baby.

Oh shit.

Fuck.

So I voted.

That's why I voted incorrectly.

[laughs]

They're not gonna be like, "Oh my God, I gotta talk to you about The English Patient."

[laughs]

But they show up for, "Man, I wanna talk to you about Cocoon.