title: All Too Well

text: "The Guardian" writer Laura Snapes also dubbed the song an epic track, "one that eviscerates her slick ex in a series of ever-more climactic verses that never resolve to a chorus, just a shuddered realisation of how vividly she recalls his disregard." Snapes associated the lyric "soldier who's returning half her weight" with Swift's eating disorder, and interpreted it as a nod to the physical manifestations of heartache. Spencer Kornhaber of "The Atlantic" wrote that "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)" contains more specificity in its lyrics, exuding "both warm nostalgia and cooling disdain", which "mesmerizes as Swift's cadence slips and slides against the steadily pounding beat", rather than cluttering the song as one would expect. Kornhaber also admired its outro and tempo shift. In a less complimentary review, Olivia Horn from "Pitchfork" felt the song was too long and sprawling, undermining the emotional climax of "All Too Well" (2012). In agreement, Lindsay Zoladz preferred the five-minute version, but appreciated the 10-minute version for its "unapologetic messiness" with nuanced messages about female emotions and societal relationships.


title: All Too Well

text: "GQ" ranked "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)" as the best single of Swift's career, in October 2022. "Alternative Press" ranked it as the most emo track in Swift's catalog. The song appeared on several year-end rankings of the best songs of 2021.


title: All Too Well

text: On November 5, 2021, Swift posted a teaser of a self-directed short film for the 10-minute version, titled "All Too Well: The Short Film", based on the premise of the song, and stars Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien as a couple in a romantic relationship that ultimately falls apart; Swift also makes a brief appearance. It was released on November 12, 2021, to critical acclaim. The version of the song used in "All Too Well: The Short Film" was made available to streaming platforms on June 11, 2022, the same day Swift made an appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival to discuss her approach to making the short film.


title: All Too Well

text: "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" debuted at number one on the Australian ARIA Singles Chart the same week "Red (Taylor's Version)" topped the Australian ARIA Albums Chart, earning Swift a fourth "Chart Double". It also helped Swift score a "Chart Double" in Ireland, her second number-one song in the country after "Look What You Made Me Do" (2017). The song was Swift's eighth number-one on the Canadian Hot 100, and entered the UK Singles Chart at number three, the longest song to reach the top three in the UK chart history.


title: All Too Well

text: On the US "Billboard" Hot 100, "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" marked Swift's eighth number-one song. It topped the chart with 54.4 million streams, 57,800 downloads sold, and negligible airplay. The song became the longest number-one song in chart history, surpassing Don McLean's 1972 song "American Pie", a feat recognized in the "Guinness World Records". Topping the "Billboard" Hot 100 the same week "Red (Taylor's Version)" topped the "Billboard" 200, it marked Swift's record-extending third time to debut atop both charts the same week. As Swift's 30th top-ten entry, it made her the sixth artist to reach the milestone. It was her fifth song to top "Billboard" Streaming Songs and 23rd to top "Billboard" Digital Song Sales charts, extending her record as the female musician with the most chart toppers on both. "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" is Swift's ninth number-one song on "Billboard" Hot Country Songs chart, 18th number-one song on "Billboard" Country Digital Song Sales chart, and sixth number-one song on "Billboard" Country Streaming Songs chart, confirming her status as the artist with the most number-one songs on the latter two. In addition, the song is the first by a solo female artist to enter the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts at the summit simultaneously.


title: All Too Well

text: Don McLean, when asked about his record broken by Swift in a "Billboard" interview, said "there is something to be said for a great song that has staying power. 'American Pie' remained on top for 50 years and now Taylor Swift has unseated such a historic piece of artistry. Let's face it, nobody ever wants to lose that No. 1 spot, but if I had to lose it to somebody, I sure am glad it was another great singer/songwriter such as Taylor."


title: All Too Well

text: On January 26, 2014, Swift performed "All Too Well" at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, where "Red" was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Country Album. Wearing a dramatic beaded gown with sequin detailing and a long train streaming out behind her, she sang while playing piano on a low lit stage, before being joined by a live band midway through the performance. Her performance was praised and received a standing ovation. Swift's headbanging at the song's climax gained significant media coverage. Sean Thomas of "The Slanted" called it the "performance of the night," and Amy Sciarretto of "Pop Crush" hailed it as "unforgettable."


title: All Too Well

text: Swift also performed the song live throughout her Red Tour, while playing the piano. On August 21, 2015, Swift performed the song in Los Angeles at the Staples Center, the only time on The 1989 World Tour. On February 4, 2017, Swift performed the song as part of the Super Saturday Night show in Houston.


title: All Too Well

text: Swift performed an acoustic version of the song on the first show of her Reputation Stadium Tour in Glendale, Arizona on May 8, 2018, the fifth show in Pasadena, California on May 19, 2018, and the last show of the U.S. leg of the tour in Arlington, Texas on October 6, 2018, the latter of which appeared in her Netflix concert film of the same name. On September 10, 2019, Swift performed the song as part of the "City of Lover" concert. On October 11, 2019, she performed the song at a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR Music.


title: All Too Well

text: She performed the 10-minute song after the screening of "All Too Well: The Short Film" at its film premiere, and on "Saturday Night Live" the following night. "Hits" dubbed the "SNL" performance "one of the most riveting musical moments of the year." She also performed the song at the 2022 Nashville Songwriter Awards.


title: All Too Well

text: Music critics, fans and journalists hail "All Too Well" as Swift's best song in her discography, citing her vivid songwriting that evokes deep emotional engagement. Music journalist Rob Sheffield of "Rolling Stone" commented, "No other song does such a stellar job of showing off her ability to blow up a trivial little detail into a legendary heartache."


title: All Too Well

text: The song featured on many publications' lists of the best songs from the 2010s decade, including "Rolling Stone" (5th), "Uproxx" (10th), "Stereogum" (24th), and "Pitchfork" (57th). It featured in unranked 2010s-decade-end lists by "Time" and "Parade", and at number 13 on NPR's readers' poll for the best songs of the same decade. Sheffield ranked "All Too Well" first on his 2010s-decade-end list. "Rolling Stone" placed "All Too Well" at number 29 of its 2018 list of the 100 Greatest Songs of the Century So Far, and 69 on its list 2020 revision of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2021, Sheffield placed the song at number one on his ranking of 206 Taylor Swift songs. In a list titled "The 25 Musical Moments That Defined the First Quarter of the 2020s", "Billboard" described "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)" as the "crown jewel" of "Red (Taylor’s Version)" and one of 2021's "biggest cultural hits". In 2022, "Billboard" named "All Too Well (10-Minute Version)" the best breakup song of all time.


title: All Too Well

text: Critics often regard "All Too Well" as Swift's best song. "Billboard" stated "All Too Well" is the song that "proved to skeptics who might've thoughtlessly dismissed Swift as a frivolous pop star—in an era when such artists still weren't given nearly as much credit or attention by critics and older music fans as they are now—that she was in fact a truly formidable singer-songwriter." Bruce Warren, assistant general manager for programming for Philadelphia public radio station WXPN, stated that "All Too Well" foreshadowed Swift's music direction for 2020. He said "In 2014 or 2015, you wouldn't have been able to say, '[Taylor Swift] is working with Justin Vernon,' right? ['All Too Well'] foreshadowed the place she's in now... 'All Too Well' showed the potential of how great a songwriter she would be, and how she would evolve as a songwriter. And ["Folklore" and "Evermore"] took her to another level."


title: All Too Well

text: "All Too Well" is a fan-favorite. Over time, the song achieved a cult following within Swift's fanbase, and with the critics and other artists as well. Despite not being a single, "All Too Well" is one of Swift's most widely recognized, requested, and covered songs. Swift herself remarked this unexpected popularity during her Reputation Stadium Tour:


title: All Too Well

text: Upon announcement of the release of the original, 10-minute version of "All Too Well" as part of Swift's second re-recorded album, "Red (Taylor's Version)", the extended version became the most anticipated song from the album. The multimedia release of the album, the 10-minute song, and "All Too Well: The Short Film" has been described as one of the biggest pop culture moments of 2021.


title: All Too Well

text: "All Too Well" opens with the lines "I walked through the door with you / the air was cold / but something about it felt like home somehow / and I left my scarf there at your sister's house / and you've still got it in your drawer even now", and contains the lines "But you keep my old scarf from that very first week / 'Cause it reminds you of innocence / And it smells like me / You can't get rid of it / 'Cause you remember it all too well" in its final verse. Over the years, the whereabouts of the scarf referenced in the lyrics have become a subject of media attention and speculation.


title: All Too Well

text: According to media outlets, the scarf mentioned in the lyrics was originally lost at the residence of American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, sister of Jake Gyllenhaal. According to "The Cut", it is a "very 2008 Americana chic" dark blue scarf with red and gray stripes. "Insider" confirmed Gucci as the scarf's brand and that Swift was wearing the scarf when she was taking a stroll in London with both Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as seen in multiple photographs by paparazzi. Brad Nelson wrote in "The Atlantic" that the scarf is a Chekhov's gun whose reappearance in the final verse is thoughtful and "brutal". He explained the missing scarf quickly became a "fantastic pop culture mystery" that has created much online buzz.


title: All Too Well

text: When enquired about the scarf in 2017 by American host Andy Cohen, Maggie Gyllenhaal stated she has no idea where the scarf is, and did not understand why people asked her about it until an interviewer explained the lyrics to her. The scarf's existence or its lyrical use as just as a metaphor has been a topic of debate among fans, music critics and pop culture commentators, who "agree it's more than a simple piece of outerwear." According to Sheffield, both the song and the scarf are so significant to Swift's discography that it "should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." The scarf has become a symbol in Swift's fandom, inspiring jokes, memes, and interview questions. It has even inspired numerous fan-fictions in other fandoms. Writer Kaitlyn Tiffany of "The Verge" described the scarf as "the green dock light of our time." "Insider" Callie Ahlgrim called it a "fabled accessory" and "a source of cultural curiosity". "NME" critic Rhian Daly said the scarf is "an unlikely pop culture icon in an inanimate object". "USA Today" said the scarf "re-entered the pop culture conversation" after "All Too Well: The Short Film". Kate Leaver of "The Sydney Morning Herald" wrote only Swift "could make a decade-old item of clothing a universal symbol for heartbreak." "The Guardian" named the song one of "the most debated lyric mysteries ever".


title: All Too Well

text: In 2021, following the release of the film and "Red (Taylor's Version)", the Google searches for "Taylor Swift red scarf meaning" spiked by 1,400 percent. The scarf has been depicted as a plain red scarf in "All Too Well: Short Film" and the music video for the country single "I Bet You Think About Me"; in the film, Swift is seen hanging the scarf over a banister, whereas in the latter, she gifts the scarf to a bride, leaving the groom confused. Replicas of this scarf—named "The All Too Well Knit Scarf"—were sold on Swift's website.


title: All Too Well

text: Many celebrities have commented on the scarf; American singer and television host Dionne Warwick asserted on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" that the scarf should be returned to Swift. Canadian actor Simu Liu said the same in an interview and stated he is looking for the scarf. Speaking to "Access Hollywood", South Korean boy group BTS said Swift does not need the scarf and that she has many better ones. American actor Andrew Burnap tweeted the scarf is in his possession; the authenticity of his claim has not been verified. In an interview at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, Swift described the red scarf as a metaphor, and that she made it a red-colored scarf to agree with the album's theme.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path (), officially the Communist Party of Peru (, abbr. PCP), is a communist guerrilla group in Peru following Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and Gonzalo Thought. Academics often refer to the group as the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (, abbr. PCP-SL) to distinguish it from other communist parties in Peru.


title: Shining Path

text: When it first launched its "people's war" in 1980, the Shining Path's goal was to overthrow the government through guerrilla warfare and replace it with a New Democracy. The Shining Path believed that by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, inducing a cultural revolution, and eventually sparking a world revolution, they could arrive at full communism. Their representatives stated that the then-existing socialist countries were revisionist, and the Shining Path was the vanguard of the world communist movement. The Shining Path's ideology and tactics have influenced other Maoist insurgent groups such as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path has been widely condemned for its brutality, including violence deployed against peasants, trade union organizers, competing Marxist groups, elected officials and the general public. The Shining Path is regarded as a terrorist organization by Peru, Japan, the United States, the European Union, and Canada, all of whom consequently prohibit funding and other financial support to the group.


title: Shining Path

text: Since the captures of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán in 1992 and his successors Óscar Ramírez in 1999 and Comrade Artemio in 2012, the Shining Path has declined in activity. Only one remaining faction of the Shining Path, the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), is active in the Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) region of Peru, and it has since distanced itself from the Shining Path's legacy in 2018 in order to maintain the support of peasants previously persecuted by the Shining Path.


title: Shining Path

text: The common name of this group, the Shining Path, distinguishes it from several other Peruvian communist parties with similar names (see Communism in Peru). The name is derived from a maxim of José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the original Peruvian Communist Party (from which the rest of communist parties split; now commonly known as the "PCP-Unidad") in the 1920s: "" ("Marxism–Leninism will open the shining path to revolution").


title: Shining Path

text: This maxim was featured on the masthead of the newspaper of a Shining Path front group. Due to the number of Peruvian groups that refer to themselves as the Communist Party of Peru, groups are often distinguished by the names of their publications. The followers of this group are generally called "senderistas". All documents, periodicals, and other materials produced by the organization are signed as the Communist Party of Peru (PCP).


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path splintered into several groups following its collapse in support. In 1999, brothers Víctor and Jorge Quispe Palomino split from the Shining Path and established the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), which consists of about 450 individuals who remained in the Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) region. The group allegedly obtains its revenue from cocaine trafficking. The MPCP has attempted to recharacterize and distance itself from the original Shining Path groups that had attacked rural communities in the area, describing Abimael Guzman as a "traitor".


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path primarily comprises two groups and their sub-branches; the People's Guerrilla Army () and United Front ().


title: Shining Path

text: The People's Guerrilla Army (, EGP) was created for the purposes of combat, mobilization and producing an income for Shining Path. The Army was officially created on 3 December 1982. Recently the EGP has made money from selling cigarettes, clothes, candy, competitions and other methods.


title: Shining Path

text: The United Front serves as the political and bureaucratic arm of the Shining Path. It has two main branches: the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (MOVADEF) and the Front for Unity and Defense of the Peruvian People (FUDEPP).


title: Shining Path

text: The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (MOVADEF) was created on 20 November 2009 when Alfredo Crespo, the defense lawyer of Abimael Guzmán, and fifteen others gathered. MOVADEF has three sub-branches; the Central Historical Committee, the Provisional Central Committee and the National Executive Committee (CEN). The branch filed to become a political party in Peru with the National Jury of Elections (JNE) in 2011, though the application was denied. The Peruvian government has accused MOVADEF of advocating terrorism.


title: Shining Path

text: The Front for Unity and Defense of the Peruvian People (FUDEPP) was created in 2015. In association with MOVADEF, the group announced that it had 73 provincial committees and allegedly received 400,000 to 500,000 signatures for the JNE to participate in the 2016 Peruvian general election. They were ultimately prevented from participating in the elections.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path was founded in 1969 by Abimael Guzmán, a former university philosophy professor (his followers referred to him by his nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo), and a group of 11 others. Guzmán was heavily influenced by a trip to China and admired the teachings of Mao Zedong. His teachings created the foundation of its militant Maoist doctrine. It was an offshoot of the Peruvian Communist Party – Red Flag, which itself split from the original Peruvian Communist Party founded by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1928.


title: Shining Path

text: Antonio Díaz Martínez, an agronomist who became a leader of the Shining Path, made several important contributions to the group's ideology. In his books "Ayacucho, Hambre y Esperanza" (1969) and "China, La Revolución Agraria" (1978), he expressed his own conviction of the necessity that revolutionary activity in Peru follow strictly the teachings of Mao Zedong.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path first established a foothold at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, in Ayacucho, where Guzmán taught philosophy. The university had recently reopened after being closed for about half a century, and many students of the newly educated class adopted the Shining Path's radical ideology. Between 1973 and 1975, Shining Path members gained control of the student councils at the Universities of Huancayo and La Cantuta, and they also developed a significant presence at the National University of Engineering in Lima and the National University of San Marcos. Sometime later, it lost many student elections in the universities, including Guzmán's San Cristóbal of Huamanga. It decided to abandon recruitment at the universities and reconsolidate.


title: Shining Path

text: Guzmán believed that communism required a "popular war" and distanced himself from organizing workers. Beginning on 17 March 1980, the Shining Path held a series of clandestine meetings in Ayacucho, known as the Central Committee's second plenary. It formed a "Revolutionary Directorate" that was political and military in nature and ordered its militias to transfer to strategic areas in the provinces to start the "armed struggle". The group also held its "First Military School", where members were instructed in military tactics and the use of weapons. They also engaged in "Criticism and Self-criticism", a Maoist practice intended to purge bad habits and avoid the repetition of mistakes. During the existence of the First Military School, members of the Central Committee came under heavy criticism. Guzmán did not, and he emerged from the First Military School as the clear leader of the Shining Path.


title: Shining Path

text: By 1980, Shining Path had about 500 members. When Peru's military government allowed elections for the first time in twelve years in 1980, the Shining Path was one of the few leftist political groups that declined to take part. It chose instead to begin a guerrilla war in the highlands of the Ayacucho Region. On 17 May 1980, on the eve of the presidential elections, it burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi. It was the first "act of war" by the Shining Path. The perpetrators were quickly caught, and additional ballots were shipped to Chuschi. The elections proceeded without further problems, and the incident received little attention in the Peruvian press.


title: Shining Path

text: Throughout the 1980s, the Shining Path grew both in terms of the territory it controlled and in the number of militants in its organization, particularly in the Andean highlands. It gained support from local peasants by filling the political void left by the central government and providing what they called "popular justice", public trials that disregard any legal and human rights that deliver swift and brutal sentences including public executions. This caused the peasantry of some Peruvian villages to express some sympathy for the Shining Path, especially in the impoverished and neglected regions of Ayacucho, Apurímac, and Huancavelica. At times, the civilian population of small, neglected towns participated in popular trials, especially when the victims of the trials were widely disliked.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path's credibility benefited from the government's initially tepid response to the insurgency. For over a year, the government refused to declare a state of emergency in the region where the Shining Path was operating. The Interior Minister, José María de la Jara, believed the group could be easily defeated through police actions. Additionally, the president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who returned to power in 1980, was reluctant to cede authority to the armed forces since his first government had ended in a military coup. The result was that the peasants in the areas where the Shining Path was active thought the state was either impotent or not interested in their issues.


title: Shining Path

text: On 29 December 1981, the government declared an "emergency zone" in the three Andean regions of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurímac and granted the military the power to arbitrarily detain any suspicious person. The military abused this power, arresting scores of innocent people, at times subjecting them to torture during interrogation as well as rape. Members of the Peruvian Armed Forces began to wear black ski-masks to hide their identities, in order to protect themselves and their families.


title: Shining Path

text: In some areas, the military trained peasants and organized them into anti-rebel militias, called "rondas". They were generally poorly equipped, despite being provided arms by the state. The rondas would attack the Shining Path guerrillas, with the first such reported attack occurring in January 1983, near Huata. "Ronderos" would later kill 13 guerrilla fighters in February 1983, in Sacsamarca. In March 1983, "ronderos" brutally killed Olegario Curitomay, one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot him. The Shining Path's retaliation to this was one of the worst attacks in the entire conflict, with a group of guerrilla members entering the town and going house by house, killing dozens of villagers, including babies, with guns, hatchets, and axes. This action has come to be known as the Lucanamarca massacre. Additional massacres of civilians by the Shining Path would occur throughout the conflict.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path's attacks were not limited to the countryside. It executed several attacks against the infrastructure in Lima, killing civilians in the process. In 1983, it sabotaged several electrical transmission towers, causing a citywide blackout, and set fire and destroyed the Bayer industrial plant. That same year, it set off a powerful bomb in the offices of the governing party, Popular Action. Escalating its activities in Lima, in June 1985, it blew up electricity transmission towers in Lima, producing a blackout, and detonated car bombs near the government palace and the justice palace. It was believed to be responsible for bombing a shopping mall. At the time, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was receiving the Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín.


title: Shining Path

text: During this period, the Shining Path assassinated specific individuals, notably leaders of other leftist groups, local political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations, some of whom were anti-Shining Path Marxists. On 24 April 1985, in the midst of presidential elections, it tried to assassinate Domingo García Rada, the president of the Peruvian National Electoral Council, severely injuring him and mortally wounding his driver. In 1988, Constantin (Gus) Gregory, an American citizen working for the United States Agency for International Development, was assassinated. Two French aid workers were killed on 4 December that same year.


title: Shining Path

text: By 1990, the Shining Path had about 3,000 armed members at its greatest extent. The group had gained control of much of the countryside of the center and south of Peru and had a large presence in the outskirts of Lima. The Shining Path began to fight against Peru's other major guerrilla group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), as well as "campesino" self-defense groups organized by the Peruvian armed forces.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path quickly seized control of large areas of Peru. The group had significant support among peasant communities, and it had the support of some slum dwellers in the capital and elsewhere. The Shining Path's interpretation of Maoism did not have the support of many city dwellers. According to opinion polls, only 15 percent of the population considered subversion to be justifiable in June 1988, while only 17 percent considered it justifiable in 1991. In June 1991, "the total sample disapproved of the Shining Path by an 83 to 7 percent margin, with 10 percent not answering the question. Among the poorest, however, only 58 percent stated disapproval of the Shining Path; 11 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the Shining Path, and some 31 percent would not answer the question." A September 1991 poll found that 21 percent of those polled in Lima believed that the Shining Path did not torture and kill innocent people. The same poll found that 13 percent believed that society would be more just if the Shining Path won the war and 22 percent believed society would be equally just under the Shining Path as it was under the government. Polls have never been completely accurate since Peru has several anti-terrorism laws, including "apology for terrorism", that makes it a punishable offense for anyone who does not condemn the Shining Path. In effect, the laws make it illegal to support the group in any way.


title: Shining Path

text: Many peasants were unhappy with the Shining Path's rule for a variety of reasons, such as its disrespect for indigenous culture and institutions. However, they had also made agreements and alliances with some indigenous tribes. Some did not like the brutality of its "popular trials" that sometimes included "slitting throats, strangulation, stoning, and burning." Peasants were offended by the rebels' injunction against burying the bodies of Shining Path victims.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path followed Mao Zedong's dictum that guerrilla warfare should start in the countryside and gradually choke off the cities. The Shining Path banned continuous drunkenness, but they did allow the consumption of alcohol.


title: Shining Path

text: When President Alberto Fujimori took office in 1990, he responded to Shining Path with repressive force. His government issued a law in 1991 that gave the "rondas" a legal status, and from that time, they were officially called "Comités de auto defensa" ("Committees of Self-Defense"). They were officially armed, usually with 12-gauge shotguns, and trained by the Peruvian Army. According to the government, there were approximately 7,226 "comités de auto defensa" as of 2005; almost 4,000 are located in the central region of Peru, the stronghold of the Shining Path.


title: Shining Path

text: The Peruvian government also cracked down on the Shining Path in other ways. Military personnel were dispatched to areas dominated by the Shining Path, especially Ayacucho, to fight the rebels. Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Apurímac and Huánuco were declared emergency zones, allowing for some constitutional rights to be suspended in those areas.


title: Shining Path

text: Initial government efforts to fight the Shining Path were not very effective or promising. Military units engaged in many human rights violations, which caused the Shining Path to appear in the eyes of many as the lesser of two evils. They used excessive force, tortured individuals accused of being sympathizers and killed many innocent civilians. Government forces destroyed villages and killed "campesinos" suspected of supporting the Shining Path. They eventually lessened the pace at which the armed forces committed atrocities such as massacres. Additionally, the state began the widespread use of intelligence agencies in its fight against the Shining Path. However, atrocities were committed by the National Intelligence Service and the Army Intelligence Service, notably the La Cantuta massacre, the Santa massacre and the Barrios Altos massacre, which were committed by Grupo Colina.


title: Shining Path

text: In one of its last attacks in Lima, on 16 July 1992, Shining Path detonated a powerful bomb on Tarata Street in the Miraflores District, full of civilian adults and children, killing 25 people and injuring an additional 155.


title: Shining Path

text: On 12 September 1992, (GEIN) captured Guzmán and several Shining Path leaders in an apartment above a dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima. GEIN had been monitoring the apartment since a number of suspected Shining Path militants had visited it. An inspection of the garbage of the apartment produced empty tubes of a skin cream used to treat psoriasis, a condition that Guzmán was known to have. Shortly after the raid that captured Guzmán, most of the remaining Shining Path leadership fell as well.


title: Shining Path

text: The capture of Guzmán left a huge leadership vacuum for the Shining Path. "There is no No. 2. There is only Presidente Gonzalo and then the party," a Shining Path political officer said at a birthday celebration for Guzmán in Lurigancho prison in December 1990. "Without Presidente Gonzalo, we would have nothing."


title: Shining Path

text: At the same time, the Shining Path suffered embarrassing military defeats to self-defense organizations of rural "campesinos" — supposedly its social base. When Guzmán called for peace talks with the Peruvian government, the organization fractured into splinter groups, with some Shining Path members in favor of such talks and others opposed.


title: Shining Path

text: Guzmán's role as the leader of the Shining Path was taken over by Óscar Ramírez, who himself was captured by Peruvian authorities in 1999. After Ramírez's capture, the group further splintered, guerrilla activity diminished sharply, and peace returned to the areas where the Shining Path had been active. The two remaining splinter groups were a collective in Huallaga Valley led by Comrade Artemio and the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP) led by the Víctor and Jorge Quispe Palomino brothers.


title: Shining Path

text: Although the organization's numbers had lessened by 2003, a militant faction of the Shining Path called "Proseguir" ("Onward") continued to be active. The group had allegedly made an alliance with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the early 2000s, learning how to use rockets against aircraft.


title: Shining Path

text: On 20 March 2002, a car bomb exploded outside the US embassy in Lima just before a visit by President George W. Bush. Nine people were killed, and 30 were injured; the attack was suspected to be the work of the Shining Path.


title: Shining Path

text: On 9 June 2003, a Shining Path group attacked a camp in Ayacucho and took 68 employees of the Argentinian company Techint and three police guards as hostages. They had been working on the Camisea gas pipeline project that would take natural gas from Cusco to Lima. According to sources from Peru's Interior Ministry, the rebels asked for a sizable ransom to free the hostages. Two days later, after a rapid military response which involved a signals intelligence aircraft from the Brazilian Air Force, the rebels abandoned the hostages; according to government sources, no ransom was paid. However, there were rumors that US$200,000 was paid to the rebels.


title: Shining Path

text: Government forces have captured three leading Shining Path members. In April 2000, Commander José Arcela Chiroque, called "Ormeño", was captured, followed by another leader, Florentino Cerrón Cardozo, called "Marcelo", in July 2003. In November of the same year, Jaime Zuñiga, called "Cirilo" or "Dalton", was arrested after a clash in which four guerrillas were killed and an officer was wounded. Officials said he took part in planning the kidnapping of the Techint pipeline workers. He was also thought to have led an ambush against an army helicopter in 1999 in which five soldiers died.


title: Shining Path

text: In 2003, the Peruvian National Police broke up several Shining Path training camps and captured many members and leaders. By late October 2003, there were 96 terrorist incidents in Peru, projecting a 15% decrease from the 134 kidnappings and armed attacks in 2002. Also for the year, eight or nine people were killed by the Shining Path, and 6 "senderistas" were killed and 209 were captured.


title: Shining Path

text: In January 2004, a man known as Comrade Artemio and identifying himself as one of the Shining Path's leaders, said in a media interview that the group would resume violent operations unless the Peruvian government granted amnesty to other top Shining Path leaders within 60 days. Peru's Interior Minister, Fernando Rospigliosi, said that the government would respond "drastically and swiftly" to any violent action. In September that same year, a comprehensive sweep by police in five cities found 17 suspected members. According to the interior minister, eight of the arrested were school teachers and high-level school administrators.


title: Shining Path

text: Despite these arrests, the Shining Path continued to exist in Peru. On 22 December 2005, the Shining Path ambushed a police patrol in the Huánuco region, killing eight. Later that day, they wounded an additional two police officers. In response, then President Alejandro Toledo declared a state of emergency in Huánuco and gave the police the power to search houses and arrest suspects without a warrant. On 19 February 2006, the Peruvian police killed Héctor Aponte, believed to be the commander responsible for the ambush. In December 2006, Peruvian troops were sent to counter renewed guerrilla activity, and according to high-level government officials, the Shining Path's strength has reached an estimated 300 members. In November 2007, police said they killed Artemio's second-in-command, a guerrilla known as JL.


title: Shining Path

text: In September 2008, government forces announced the killing of five rebels in the Vizcatan region. This claim was subsequently challenged by the APRODEH, a Peruvian human rights group, which believed that those who were killed were in fact local farmers and not rebels. That same month, Artemio gave his first recorded interview since 2006. In it, he stated that the Shining Path would continue to fight despite escalating military pressure. In October 2008, in Huancavelica Region, the guerrillas engaged a military convoy with explosives and firearms, demonstrating their continued ability to strike and inflict casualties on military targets. The conflict resulted in the death of 12 soldiers and two to seven civilians. It came one day after a clash in the Vizcatan region, which left five rebels and one soldier dead.


title: Shining Path

text: In November 2008, the rebels utilized hand grenades and automatic weapons in an assault that claimed the lives of 4 police officers. In April 2009, the Shining Path ambushed and killed 13 government soldiers in Ayacucho. Grenades and dynamite were used in the attack. The dead included eleven soldiers and one captain, and two soldiers were also injured, with one reported missing. Poor communications were said to have made relay of the news difficult. The country's Defense Minister, Antero Flores Aráoz, said many soldiers "plunged over a cliff". His Prime Minister, Yehude Simon, said these attacks were "desperate responses by the Shining Path in the face of advances by the armed forces" and expressed his belief that the area would soon be freed of "leftover terrorists". In the aftermath, a Sendero leader called this "the strongest [anti-government] blow... in quite a while". In November 2009, Defense Minister Rafael Rey announced that Shining Path militants had attacked a military outpost in southern Ayacucho province. One soldier was killed and three others wounded in the assault.


title: Shining Path

text: On 28 April 2010, Shining Path rebels in Peru ambushed and killed a police officer and two civilians who were destroying coca plantations of Aucayacu, in the central region of Haunuco, Peru. The victims were gunned down by sniper fire coming from the thick forest as more than 200 workers were destroying coca plants. Following the attack, the Shining Path faction, based in the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru and headed by Florindo Eleuterio Flores Hala, alias Comrade Artemio, was operating in survival mode and lost 9 of their top 10 leaders to Peruvian National Police-led capture operations. Two of the eight leaders were killed by PNP personnel during the attempted captures. The nine arrested or killed Shining Path (Upper Huallaga Valley faction) leaders include Mono (Aug. 2009), Rubén (May 2010), Izula (Oct. 2010), Sergio (Dec. 2010), Yoli/Miguel/Jorge (Jun. 2011), Gato Larry (Jun. 2011), Oscar Tigre (Aug. 2011), Vicente Roger (Aug. 2011), and Dante/Delta (Jan. 2012). This loss of leadership, coupled with a sweep of Shining Path (Upper Huallaga Valley) supporters executed by the PNP in November 2010, prompted Comrade Artemio to declare in December 2011 to several international journalists that the guerrilla war against the Peruvian Government has been lost and that his only hope was to negotiate an amnesty agreement with the Government of Peru.


title: Shining Path

text: On 12 February 2012, Comrade Artemio was found badly wounded after a clash with troops in a remote jungle region of Peru. President Ollanta Humala said the capture of Artemio marked the defeat of the Shining Path in the Alto Huallaga valley – a center of cocaine production. President Humala has stated that he would now step up the fight against the remaining bands of Shining Path rebels in the Ene-Apurímac valley. Walter Diaz, the lead candidate to succeed Artemio, was captured on 3 March, further ensuring the disintegration of the Alto Huallaga valley faction. On 3 April 2012, Jaime Arenas Caviedes, a senior leader in the group's remnants in Alto Huallaga Valley who was also regarded to be the leading candidate to succeed Artemio following Diaz's arrest, was captured. After Caviedes, alias "Braulio", was captured, Humala declared that the Shining Path was now unable to operate in the Alto Huallaga Valley. Shining Path rebels carried out an attack on three helicopters being used by an international gas pipeline consortium on 7 October, in the central region of Cusco. According to the military Joint Command spokesman, Col. Alejandro Lujan, no one was kidnapped or injured during the attack. The capture of Artemio effectively ended the war between Shining Path and the Government of Peru.


title: Shining Path

text: Comrade Artemio was convicted of terrorism, drug trafficking, and money laundering on 7 June 2013. He was sentenced to life in prison and a fine of $183 million. On 11 August 2013, Comrade Alipio, the Shining Path's leader in the Ene-Apurímac Valley, was killed in a battle with government forces in Llochegua.


title: Shining Path

text: On 9 April 2016, on the eve of the country's presidential elections, the Peruvian government blamed remnants of the Shining Path for a guerrilla attack that killed eight soldiers and two civilians. Shining Path snipers killed three police officers in the Ene Apurimac Valley on 18 March 2017.


title: Shining Path

text: In a document 400 pages in length recovered from a mid-level Shining Path commander and analyzed by the Counter-Terrorism Directorate (DIRCOTE) of the National Police, the Shining Path planned to initiate operations against the Government of Peru that included killings and surprise attacks beginning in 2021, the bicentennial of Peru's independence. Objectives were created to first attack public officials, then regain lost territory and then finally overthrow the government.


title: Shining Path

text: Into the 2020s, Shining Path has existed in remaining splinter groups. The last remaining group, called the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP) of about 450 individuals remained in the Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) region, reportedly making revenue by escorting cocaine traffickers and are reportedly led by two brothers; Víctor and Jorge Quispe Palomino. The MPCP has attempted to recharacterize themselves to distance itself from the original Shining Path groups that had attacked rural communities in the area, describing Abimael Guzman as a traitor. According to InSight Crime, Shining Path's stronghold in the VRAEM, headquartered in Vizcatán, is a similar strategy as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.


title: Shining Path

text: Following a five-year intelligence operation that began in 2015 and was codenamed Operation Olimpo, 71 alleged members of the Shining Path's United Front and People's Guerrilla Army were arrested on 2 December 2020. Alfredo Crespo, the secretary general of MOVADEF and Guzmán's former lawyer, was included among those arrested. Operation Olimpo included 752 military personnel and 98 government prosecutors that utilized evidence obtained through wiretapping, undercover agents and surveillance. Those arrested were charged with operating shell operations to initiate terrorist activities in Callao and Lima.


title: Shining Path

text: The official ideology of the Shining Path ceased to be "Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tse-tung thought" and it was instead referred to as "Marxism–Leninism–Maoism–Gonzalo thought" – according to some authors as the organization grew in power, a cult of personality grew around Guzmán.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path declared itself to be feminist and many women took up leadership positions. In the organisation, 40% of the fighters and 50% of the members of its Central Committee were women.


title: Shining Path

text: Although the reliability of reports regarding the Shining Path's actions remains a matter of controversy in Peru, the organization's use of violence is well documented. According to InSight Crime, Shining Path would kill their opponents "with assassinations, bombings, beheadings and massacres" as well as "stoning victims to death, or placing them in boiling water".


title: Shining Path

text: After the collapse of the Fujimori government, interim President Valentín Paniagua established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the conflict. The Commission found in its 2003 "Final Report" that 69,280 people died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict. The Shining Path was found to be responsible for about 54% of the deaths and disappearances reported to the commission. A statistical analysis of the available data led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to estimate that the Shining Path was responsible for the death or disappearance of 31,331 people, 46% of the total deaths and disappearances. According to a summary of the report by Human Rights Watch, "Shining Path... killed about half the victims, and roughly one-third died at the hands of government security forces... The commission attributed some of the other slayings to a smaller guerrilla group and local militias. The rest remain unattributed." The MRTA was held responsible for 1.5% of the deaths. A 2019 study disputed the casualty figures from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, estimating instead "a total of 48,000 killings, substantially lower than the TRC estimate", and concluding that "the Peruvian State accounts for a significantly larger share than the Shining Path."


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path has been accused of violence against LGBT people. Between 1989 and 1992, the Shining Path and the MRTA killed up to 500 "non-heterosexual" people. According to one woman who was kidnapped by the Shining Path in 1981, a homosexual man's penis was cut into pieces before he was murdered. The Peruvian government did not reveal the name of the victim. The Shining Path defended its actions by saying that LGBT individuals were not killed because of their sexual identity, instead, they were killed because of their "degrading and promiscuous practices" and "the people" requested that they be executed. These killings continued throughout the twentieth century.


title: Shining Path

text: The Shining Path has denied such allegations, stating, "It is probable that the PCP has executed a homosexual, but rest assured that it was not done because of their sexual orientation but because of their position against the revolution... Our view is that homosexual orientation is not an ideological matter but one of individual preference... Party membership is open to all those who support the cause of communist revolution and the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, regardless of what their sexual preferences may be."


title: Shining Path

text: On 23 May 2021 in San Miguel del Ene, a rural area in the Vizcatán del Ene District of Satipo Province, 18 people were killed (ten men, six women and two minors) by the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), a successor and opponent of Shining Path. The Ministry of Defense said that the attack was perpetrated by the Shining Path faction led by Comrade José. It gave the death toll of 14 people. Along with the corpses, some of which were burned, leaflets signed by the MPCP were found, featuring the hammer and sickle and defining the attack as a social cleansing operation. According to the leaflets found in the attack location, the perpetrators call upon to "clean VRAEM and Peru" of outcasts, "parasites and corrupts" as well as "homosexuals, lesbians, drug addicts" and "thieves".


title: Shining Path

text: American hard rock band Guns N' Roses quotes a speech by a Shining Path officer in their 1990 song "Civil War", as saying "We practice selective annihilation of mayors and government officials, for example, to create a vacuum, then we fill that vacuum. As popular war advances, peace is closer."


title: Shining Path

text: American rock band Rage Against the Machine released a music video for their 1993 song "Bombtrack" as a response to the arrest of Abimael Guzman the previous year. The video expresses support for Guzman and the Shining Path, featuring various clips of the organization's activities, as well as showing the band in a cage to mimic Guzman's imprisonment.


title: Tajiks

text: Tajiks (, "Tājīk, Tājek"; ) are a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia, living primarily in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.


title: Tajiks

text: As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term "Tajik", which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Eastern Persian, Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker), and Dīhgān (cf. ) which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turks and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period.


title: Tajiks

text: The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley (Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan) and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e., the Pamir Mountains (Mountain Badaḵšān, in Tajikistan) and northeastern Afghanistan (Badaḵšān). Historically, the ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran. While agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran also resulted in the rapid urbanization of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion. Several surviving ancient urban centers of the Tajik people include Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand, and Termez.


title: Tajiks

text: Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians, and possibly other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. According to Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, and ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks. In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them."


title: Tajiks

text: The geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is often considered historically and currently to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau.


title: Tajiks

text: During the Soviet-Afghan War, the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami founded by Burhanuddin Rabbani resisted the Red Army and the communist Afghan government. Tajik commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, successfully repelled nine Soviet campaigns from taking Panjshir Valley and earned the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" ().


title: Tajiks

text: The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks (see Bregel, Atlas, Maps 8–10) consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region (Bartol'd [Barthold], "Tadžiki," pp. 455–57). Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty also referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century. By the eleventh century (Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb, Qutadḡu bilig, lines 280, 282, 3265), the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the Samanid Dynasty), and subjects (from Ghaznavid times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran, now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63).


title: Tajiks

text: The word also occurs in the Tonyukuk inscriptions as "tözik", used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area. These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in Yemen. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize Transoxiana.


title: Tajiks

text: According to the "Encyclopaedia of Islam", however, the oldest known usage of the word "Tajik" as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī also used "Tajik" as a reference to Persians.


title: Tajiks

text: The Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan, as well as in northern and western Afghanistan, though there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. Tajiks are a substantial minority in Uzbekistan, as well as in overseas communities. Historically, the ancestors of the Tajiks lived in a larger territory in Central Asia than now.


title: Tajiks

text: Tajiks comprise around 84.3% of the population of Tajikistan. This number includes speakers of the Pamiri languages, including Wakhi and Shughni, and the Yaghnobi people who in the past were considered by the government of the Soviet Union nationalities separate from the Tajiks. In the 1926 and 1937 Soviet censuses, the Yaghnobis and Pamiri language speakers were counted as separate nationalities. After 1937, these groups were required to register as Tajiks.


title: Tajiks

text: According to the World Factbook, Tajiks make up about 27% of the population in Afghanistan, but according to other sources, they form 37%–39% of the population. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica they constitute about one-fifth of the population. They are predominant in four of the largest cities in Afghanistan (Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Herat, and Ghazni) and make up the largest ethnic group in the northern and western provinces of Balkh, Takhar, Badakhshan, Samangan, Parwan, Panjshir, Kapisa, Baghlan, Ghor, Badghis and Herat.


title: Tajiks

text: In Afghanistan, the Tajiks do not organize themselves by tribes and refer to themselves by the region, province, city, town, or village that they are from; such as "Badakhshi", "Baghlani", "Mazari", "Panjsheri", "Kabuli", "Herati", "Kohistani", etc. Although in the past, some non-Pashto speaking tribes were identified as Tajik, for example, the Furmuli.


title: Tajiks

text: In Uzbekistan, the Tajiks are the largest part of the population of the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and are found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan. According to official statistics (2000), Surxondaryo Region accounts for 24.4% of all Tajiks in Uzbekistan, with another 34.3% in Samarqand and Bukhara regions.


title: Tajiks

text: Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community comprises 5% of the nation's total population. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms. During the Soviet "Uzbekization" supervised by Sharof Rashidov, the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave the republic for Tajikistan, which is mountainous and less agricultural. It is only in the last population census (1989) that the nationality could be reported not according to the passport, but freely declared based on the respondent's ethnic self-identification. This had the effect of increasing the Tajik population in Uzbekistan from 3.9% in 1979 to 4.7% in 1989. Some scholars estimate that Tajiks may make up 35% of Uzbekistan's population.


title: Tajiks

text: Chinese Tajiks or Mountain Tajiks in China (Sarikoli: , "Tujik"; ), including Sarikolis (majority) and Wakhis (minority) in China, are the Pamiri ethnic group that lives in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China. They are one of the 56 nationalities officially recognized by the government of the People's Republic of China.


title: Tajiks

text: According to the 1999 population census, there were 26,000 Tajiks in Kazakhstan (0.17% of the total population), about the same number as in the 1989 census.


title: Tajiks

text: According to official statistics, there were about 47,500 Tajiks in Kyrgyzstan in 2007 (0.9% of the total population), up from 42,600 in the 1999 census and 33,500 in the 1989 census.


title: Tajiks

text: According to the last Soviet census in 1989, there were 3,149 Tajiks in Turkmenistan, or less than 0.1% of the total population of 3.5 million at that time. The first population census of independent Turkmenistan conducted in 1995 showed 3,103 Tajiks in a population of 4.4 million (0.07%), most of them (1,922) concentrated in the eastern provinces of Lebap and Mary adjoining the borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.


title: Tajiks

text: The population of Tajiks in Russia was about 200,303 according to the 2010 census, up from 38,000 in the last Soviet census of 1989. Most Tajiks came to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, often as guest workers in places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg or federal subjects near the Kazakhstan border. There are currently estimated to be over one million Tajik guest workers living in Russia, with their remittances accounting for as much as half of Tajikistan's economy.


title: Tajiks

text: There are an estimated 220,000 Tajiks in Pakistan as of 2012, mainly refugees from Afghanistan. During the 1990s, as a result of the Tajikistan Civil War, between 700 and 1,200 Tajikistanis arrived in Pakistan, mainly as students, the children of Tajikistani refugees in Afghanistan. In 2002, around 300 requested to return home and were repatriated back to Tajikistan with the help of the IOM, UNHCR and the two countries' authorities.


title: Tajiks

text: The dominant haplogroup among modern Tajiks is the Haplogroup R1a Y-DNA. ~45% of Tajik men share R1a (M17), ~18% J (M172), ~8% R2 (M124), and ~8% C (M130 & M48). Tajiks of Panjikent score 68% R1a, Tajiks of Khojant score 64% R1a. The high frequency of haplogroup R1a in the Tajiks probably reflects a strong founder effect. According to another genetic test, 63% of Tajik male samples from Tajikistan carry R1a.


title: Tajiks

text: An autosomal DNA study by Guarino-Vignon et al. 2022, analyzing 5019 individuals (3102 ancient and 1915 modern), revealed that Iranian peoples, specifically the Tajiks and Yaghnobis, show strong genetic continuity with ancient Indo-Iranian samples from pre-Turkic Central Asia, including Iron Age samples from Turkmenistan. The authors found that Tajiks stayed largely unaffected by outside geneflow, and show continuity with ancient Indo-Iranian samples from Tajikistan and from modern Turkmenistan since the Iron Age, but have slightly higher affinity with "Baikal hunter-gatherers" and "South Asians" than Ancient Central Asian samples. In conclusion the authors summarized that Tajiks display ""a long-term continuity since the Iron Age with only limited recent impulses from other Eurasian groups"".


title: Tajiks

text: The language of the Tajiks is an eastern dialect of Persian, called Dari (derived from "Darbārī", "[of/from the] royal courts", in the sense of "courtly language"), or also Parsi-e Darbari. In Tajikistan, where Cyrillic script is used, it is called the Tajiki language. In Afghanistan, unlike in Tajikistan, Tajiks continue to use the Perso-Arabic script, as well as in Iran. However, when the Soviet Union introduced the Latin script in 1928, and later the Cyrillic script, the Persian dialect of Tajikistan came to be considered a separate (Persian) language. Since the 19th century, Tajiki has been strongly influenced by the Russian language and has incorporated many Russian language loan words. It has also adopted fewer Arabic loan words than Iranian Persian while retaining vocabulary that has fallen out of use in the latter language. In Tajikistan, in ordinary speech, also known as "zaboni kucha" (lit. "street language", as opposed to "zaboni adabi", lit. "literary language", which is used in schools, media etc.), many urban Tajiks prefer to use Russian loanwords instead of their literary Persian analogs.


title: Tajiks

text: The dialects of modern Persian spoken throughout Greater Iran have a common origin. This is due to the fact that one of Greater Iran's historical cultural capitals, called Greater Khorasan, which included parts of modern Central Asia and much of Afghanistan and constitutes as the Tajik's ancestral homeland, played a key role in the development and propagation of Persian language and culture throughout much of Greater Iran after the Muslim conquest. Furthermore, early manuscripts of the historical Persian spoken in Mashhad during the development of Middle to New Persian show that their origins came from Sistan, in present-day Afghanistan.


title: Tajiks

text: Various scholars have recorded the Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist pre-Islamic heritage of the Tajik people. Early temples for fire worship have been found in Balkh and Bactria and excavations in present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan show remnants of Zoroastrian fire temples.


title: Tajiks

text: Today, however, the great majority of Tajiks follow Sunni Islam, although small Twelver and Ismaili Shia minorities also exist in scattered pockets. Areas with large numbers of Shias include Herat, Badakhshan provinces in Afghanistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in Tajikistan, and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Some of the famous Islamic scholars were from either modern or historical East-Iranian regions lying in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and therefore can arguably be viewed as Tajiks. They include Abu Hanifa, Imam Bukhari, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawood, Nasir Khusraw and many others.


title: Tajiks

text: According to a 2009 U.S. State Department release, the population of Tajikistan is 98% Muslim, (approximately 85% Sunni and 5% Shia). In Afghanistan, the great number of Tajiks adhere to Sunni Islam. The smaller number of Tajiks who may follow Twelver Shia Islam are locally called Farsiwan. The community of Bukharian Jews in Central Asia speak a dialect of Persian. The Bukharian Jewish community in Uzbekistan is the largest remaining community of Central Asian Jews and resides primarily in Bukhara and Samarkand, while the Bukharaian Jews of Tajikistan live in Dushanbe and number only a few hundred. From the 1970s to the 1990s the majority of these Tajik-speaking Jews emigrated to the United States and to Israel in accordance with Aliyah. Recently, the Protestant community of Tajiks descent has experienced significant growth, a 2015 study estimates some 2,600 Muslim Tajik converted to Christianity.


title: Tajiks

text: Tajikistan marked 2009 as the year to commemorate the Tajik Sunni Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa, whose ancestry hailed from Parwan Province of Afghanistan, as the nation hosted an international symposium that drew scientific and religious leaders. The construction of one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Qatar, was announced in October 2009. The mosque is planned to be built in Dushanbe and construction is said to be completed by 2014.


title: Tajiks

text: The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Civil War in Afghanistan both gave rise to a resurgence in Tajik nationalism across the region, including a trial to revert to the Perso-Arabic script in Tajikistan. Furthermore, Tajikistan in particular has been a focal point for this movement, and the government there has made a conscious effort to revive the legacy of the Samanid empire, the first Tajik-dominated state in the region after the Arab advance. For instance, the President of Tajikistan, Emomalii Rahmon, dropped the Russian suffix "-ov" from his surname and directed others to adopt Tajik names when registering births. According to a government announcement in October 2009, approximately 4,000 Tajik nationals have dropped "ov" and "ev" from their surnames since the start of the year.


title: Tajiks

text: In September 2009, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan proposed a draft law to have the nation's language referred to as "Tajiki-Farsi" rather than "Tajik." The proposal drew criticism from Russian media since the bill sought to remove the Russian language as Tajikistan's inter-ethnic "lingua franca". In 1989, the original name of the language (Farsi) had been added to its official name in brackets, though Rahmon's government renamed the language to simply "Tajiki" in 1994. On 6 October 2009, Tajikistan adopted the law that removes Russian as the "lingua franca" and mandated Tajik as the language to be used in official documents and education, with an exception for members Tajikistan's ethnic minority groups, who would be permitted to receive an education in the language of their choosing.


title: TEC-9

text: The Intratec TEC-9, TEC-DC9, KG-99 and AB-10 are a line of blowback-operated semi-automatic pistols. They were developed by Intratec, an American subsidiary of the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB. Introduced in 1984, the TEC-9 was made of inexpensive molded polymers and a mixture of stamped and milled steel parts. The simple design of the gun made it easy to repair and modify. The TEC-9 developed a negative reputation for its association with organized crime, street gangs and mass shootings in the 1990s, with it most notably being used during the 101 California Street shooting and the Columbine High School massacre. However, it was a commercial success, with over 250,000 being sold.


title: TEC-9

text: Interdynamic AB, a Swedish firearms manufacturer based in Stockholm, designed the Interdynamic MP-9, intended as an inexpensive 9mm submachine gun based on the Carl Gustav M/45 for military applications. The firearm was initially intended for adoption by the South African apartheid government, though it was rejected and shipped to various other nations. Ultimately, Interdynamic did not find a government buyer.


title: TEC-9

text: As a result, the weapon was taken by lead designer George Kellgren to the United States domestic market as an open-bolt semi-automatic pistol, redesigned to eliminate its collapsible stock and vertical foregrip features per the National Firearms Act of 1934 and marketed under the subsidiary Interdynamic USA brand. Still, the design was deemed too easy to convert to an automatic weapon. Due to this, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) forced Interdynamic USA to redesign the firearm into a closed-bolt system, which was harder to convert to an automatic weapon. This variant was called the KG-99, and was popularized when it made frequent appearances on the popular television show "Miami Vice", where it was legally converted to full auto by Title II manufacturers.


title: TEC-9

text: The KG-9 and KG-99 have an open-end upper receiver tube where the bolt, recoil springs, and buffer plate are held in place by the plastic/polymer lower receiver frame. This design only allows for 9mm ammunition, and if a heavier grain ammunition or hot loads are used, the plastic lower receiver will fail or crack, rendering the firearm unusable. Later versions of the TEC-9 and AB-10 had a threaded upper receiver tube at the rear and a screw-on end cap to contain the bolt, recoil spring, and buffer plate even if removed from the lower receiver, solving the problem of lower receiver failure when using hot ammo.


title: TEC-9

text: Following the 1989 Cleveland School massacre, the TEC-9 was placed on California's list of banned weapons. To circumvent this, Intratec rebranded a variant of the TEC-9 as a TEC-DC9 from 1990 to 1994 ("DC" standing for "Designed for California"). The most noticeable external difference between the TEC-9 and the later TEC-DC9 is that rings to hold the sling were moved from the side of the gun with the cocking handle to a removable stamped metal clip in the back of the gun. In 1993, the weapon was the subject of further controversy following its use in the 101 California Street shootings That same year, California amended the 1989 Roberti–Roos Assault Weapons Control Act (AWCA), effective January 2000, to ban handguns having features such as barrel shrouds. During the 1990s the TEC-9 also developed a reputation for its use by American street gangs and organized crime syndicates, who were attracted to the large capacity 32-round magazines and low cost of the firearm.


title: TEC-9

text: The TEC-9 was produced from 1985 until 1994, when the model and TEC-DC9 variants were banned nationally in the United States, among the 19 firearms banned by name in the now-expired 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). This ban forced Intratec to cease their manufacture, and forced them to introduce a newer model. The following year Intratec introduced the AB-10 ("AB" standing for "After Ban"), a TEC-9 Mini without a threaded muzzle/barrel shroud and sold with a smaller 10-round magazine instead of 20- or 32-round magazines. However, the AB-10 still accepted the larger capacity magazines of the pre-ban TEC-9 models, and were often acquired by users in place of the standard magazine. In 1999, the TEC-DC9 Mini was notoriously used by Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, ending with him taking his own life.


title: TEC-9

text: The TEC-9 was also used in the 1990 drive-by shooting at Nashville, Tennessee West End Synagogue by Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Leonard William Armstrong.


title: TEC-9

text: In 2001, the Supreme Court of California ruled that Intratec was not liable for the 1993 101 California Street attacks, and that same year Intratec was dissolved and production of the AB-10 model ceased. Although still found on the used firearms market and legal on the federal level since 2004, the TEC-9 and similar variants are banned, often by name, in several US states including California, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.


title: TEC-9

text: Quantities of an illegally-made 9mm machine pistol were seized in Europe in 2017. Despite being improvised weapons (and not developed by Intratec) they were nonetheless marked as "Intratec TEC-9", believed to possibly have been done as a means to improve the street value of the weapon.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Mr. Nobody is a 2009 science fiction drama film written and directed by Jaco Van Dormael and starring Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham, Rhys Ifans, Natasha Little, Toby Regbo, and Juno Temple. It tells the life story of Nemo Nobody, a 118-year-old man who is the last mortal on Earth after the human race has achieved quasi-immortality. Nemo, memory fading, tells a doctor and journalist about his three main loves and his parents' divorce and the subsequent hardships he endured. The speculative narrative frequently changes course to investigate the alternate life paths that could have resulted from his making different decisions in his life, focusing on when he is nine, fifteen, and thirty-four. The film has nonlinear narrative that incorporates the multiverse hypothesis.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The world premiere of "Mr. Nobody" was at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Golden Osella and the Biografilm Lancia Award. Critical response to the film was generally positive, and it was nominated for seven Magritte Awards, winning six, including Best Film and Best Director for Van Dormael. The film was mostly funded through European financiers, and was released in Belgium on 13 January 2010. Since its original release, "Mr. Nobody" has become a cult film, noted for its philosophy, cinematography, personal characters, and Pierre Van Dormael's soundtrack.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: In 2092, humanity has conquered mortality through the endless renewal of cells. The world watches in fascination as the 118-year-old Nemo Nobody, the last mortal on Earth, edges towards death. No record can be found of his past and his memories are confused, so Dr. Feldheim, a psychiatrist, uses hypnosis to help Nemo remember his life. Curious to know about the world before quasi-immortality, a journalist also interviews Nemo, whose recollections primarily come from three points in his life: age 9, age 15, and age 34. Nemo makes contradictory statements, describing events from his past as having unfolded in multiple different ways, and explains that, before birth, children remember everything that will happen in their lives. At the moment of conception, the Angels of Oblivion erase the children's memories, but he says the Angels forgot about him, allowing him to "remember" different possible futures for himself.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: At age 9, after his parents' divorce, Nemo says he was forced to choose whether to leave with his mother or stay with his father, and he describes what happened both when he managed to catch and board his mother's train at the last second, and when he failed to do so and was left behind.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Nemo moves with his mother to Montreal. When he is a rebellious teenager, a new girl, Anna, comes to his school, and he is immediately smitten. One day at the beach, Anna asks if Nemo would like to swim with her and her friends. He insults her friends and they hardly see each other again.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: In an alternate timeline, Nemo admits to Anna that he cannot swim, and the two spend time together. Nemo learns that Anna is the daughter of his mother's new boyfriend, and then husband, Harry, and the stepsiblings begin an affair, pledging their lives to one another. When Harry and Nemo's mother get divorced, Anna goes to New York with her father, and the teenagers lose touch. Years later, Nemo, who still hopes to someday see Anna again, works as a pool cleaner. One day, he and Anna pass at a train station and the pair immediately recognize each other. After a passionate reunion, Anna announces she is not ready to immediately resume the relationship. She gives Nemo her number and asks him to call her in two days and meet at a lighthouse in a local park, but he loses her phone number when a sudden downpour makes her note illegible. Nemo waits at the lighthouse every day, but Anna does not come.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: In one possible life, Anna and Nemo are married with children. Nemo works at a television studio narrating educational videos. One evening, while returning home, he hits a bird, loses control of his car, plummets into a lake, and drowns.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Nemo stays in England with his father, who later becomes disabled. As a teenager, he works in a shop and spends his free time writing a science fiction story about a journey to Mars. At a school dance, he meets Elise and falls in love. A few days later, he goes to her house and sees her with her 22-year-old boyfriend. Frustrated, Nemo speeds away on his motorcycle, has an accident, and is hospitalized in a vegetative state. Though he cannot move or speak, he can perceive the world through his senses and detects his parents' reunion at his bedside. He imagines his fingers are on the keyboard of his typewriter and continues to work on his story.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: In another timeline, Nemo speaks with Elise at her house. She tells him that she is in love with her boyfriend, Stefano, even though she knows he does not love her, but Nemo does not back down. He keeps assuring her of his feelings, and Elise eventually gives in. A few years later, she and Nemo get married. In one version of this timeline, Elise dies on their wedding day in an explosion. Nemo, in a reality mirroring his sci-fi story, takes her ashes to Mars and spreads them on the planet's surface, which he had promised to do when they were teenagers. Aboard the spacecraft on the way back to Earth, he meets Anna, but, before they can say much to each other, the ship is destroyed by asteroids. In another version, as an adult, Nemo works at the same television studio as he does in the timeline where he married Anna, and one of his coworkers drowns in the lake. The coworker's widow is Anna, whom Nemo feels he has seen before. Another timeline has Nemo and Elise married with three children, but unhappy, as Elise suffers from borderline personality disorder and chronic depression. She has attacks of hysteria and, despite Nemo's attempts to save their marriage, ultimately leaves him to pursue Stefano.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Alternately, after being rejected by Elise, teenage Nemo resolves to marry the first girl who dances with him at the next school dance, who turns out to be Jean. Though they marry and have two sons and he becomes rich, Nemo grows unhappy and bored, so he puts all of his assets in Jean's name and leaves his family. Now making all of his decisions randomly via coin toss, he goes to the airport and tells a chauffeur that he is Daniel Jones, the man the chauffeur is waiting for. He is taken to a hotel, where he is murdered while taking a bath, and his body is dumped in the woods by the assassins, who question whether they have killed the right man.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: As well as the many paths that Nemo's life could take or has taken, adult Nemo is also seen to repeatedly awaken in an artificial, surrealistic environment dominated by argyle patterns. Following clues that he finds scattered throughout this world, he arrives at a dilapidated house, where he finds a DVD player hooked up to a television. In a strangely interactive video, 34-year-old Nemo is told by 118-year-old Nemo that this is a universe where Nemo Nobody was never born and his consciousness is stuck in some sort of limbo. The old Nemo states that he is experiencing the story from the end and the adult Nemo must stay alive until 5:50 a.m. on 12 February 2092.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Before his death, old Nemo tells the journalist that neither of them exist—they are figments of the imagination of 9-year-old Nemo at the train station as he struggles to choose between his parents. This is an impossible decision, but he knows it will define his life from then on, so the young boy is trying to determine which is the correct choice by tracing various potential outcomes of each. Ultimately, he takes a third option: he leaves both parents and runs away towards an unknown future.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: On his death bed, Nemo recalls a reunion with Anna at the lighthouse. The calculated time of his death arrives, and his last word, "Anna", is broadcast to the world. The universe ceases to expand and begins to contract. The flow of time having reversed, old Nemo comes back to life and begins to cackle joyously. The other dead Nemos also come back to life, and Nemo's parents get back together. 9-year-old Nemo reverse-runs to 9-year-old Anna and reverse-skips rocks with her.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Director Jaco Van Dormael makes a cameo appearance as Brazilian Man, and Pascal Duquenne, one of the stars of Dormael's previous film "The Eighth Day", also has a cameo.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The idea of parallel lives had been explored in earlier films such as "Run Lola Run" (1998) and "Sliding Doors" (1998), which influenced Jaco Van Dormael's writing of "Mr. Nobody". Unlike those films, however, this one has philosophical underpinnings inspired by scientific tomes on chaos theory and the butterfly effect, pigeon superstition, and the space-time continuum. Van Dormael stated: "My starting point was a 12-minute short I made in 1982 called "È pericoloso sporgersi". A kid runs behind a train with two possible choices: to go with his mother or with his father. From there we follow two possible futures. I started one version based on the fact that a woman jumps or doesn't jump on a train. Then "Sliding Doors" by Peter Howitt came out, followed by "Run Lola Run" by Tom Tykwer. I had to find something else. And that's when I realised that the story I was trying to tell was not binary, that I was above all interested by the multiplicity and complexity of choices. With this screenplay I wanted to make the viewer feel the abyss that is the infinity of possibilities. Beyond this, I wanted to find a different way of telling a story. I wanted the gaze of the child on his future to meet the gaze of the old man he has become on his past. I wanted to talk about complexity through cinema, which is a simplifying medium. While reality around us is more and more complex, the information is more and more succinct, political speeches are more and more simplistic. What interests me is complexity. Not the simple answers, which are reassuring but bound to be false."


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Describing the scale of the film, the director said: "My producers don't like me saying it, but it's really a big-budget experimental film about the many different lives one person can live, depending on the choices he makes. It's about the infinite possibilities facing any person. There are no good or bad choices in life. It's simply that each choice will create another life for you. What's interesting is to be alive."


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The film is Van Dormael's first feature since "The Eighth Day" in 1996. He began trying to make "Mr. Nobody" in 2001, but production on the project, his first English-language feature, did not start until 2007. Regarding the decision to not film in one of the languages of his native Belgium, the director said: "The story came to me in English. It's a story set over very long distances and time frames. One of the strands of the plot is about a kid who must choose between living with his mother in Canada or his father in England. There are also some incredible English-speaking actors I wanted to work with." Van Dormael began preparing for production on "Mr. Nobody" in February 2007, and Sarah Polley was the first actor to be cast. Jared Leto was later cast in the primary role of Nemo Nobody.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The production budget for "Mr. Nobody" was €33 million (US$47 million), making it the most expensive Belgian film ever made. The budget was approved before casting was done based on Van Dormael's involvement and the strength of his script. Half of the budget was provided by the film's French producer, Philippe Godeau, through his production company, Pan-Européenne, and the other half was provided by distributors Wild Bunch and Pathé. Production took place throughout 2007, lasting 120 days and traveling to Belgium, Germany, and Canada. Scenes were filmed on location in Montreal, Canada, and at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin, Germany. Van Dormael said: "I think the film needed that for these multiple lives. Each time a new style of setting is required. And each life is filmed in a different style, with a different grammar for the camera, the colours, the decor. At the same time, if all the styles have to be very contrasted, they knock together by fusing." The three lives that Nemo Nobody experiences were separated by color-coding and musical cues. Each life's design was also based on the work of British photographer Martin Parr.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Van Dormael hired visual effects supervisor Louis Morin, known for his work in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), to create visual effects for "Mr. Nobody". All five hundred visual effects shots were produced in Quebec by local companies. Modus FX announced having delivered 121 digital visual effects shots for the film. The company was entrusted with complex sequences that could not be captured on film, some involving the digital reproduction of entire cities, villages, and other-worldly settings, and others involving complex transitions between the different worlds and multiple lives of Nemo Nobody. Their post-production contributions involved 37 digital artists and technicians across a six-month period. A long list of software (including Autodesk's Softimage and Maya, Side Effects' Houdini, and The Foundry's Nuke) and the creation of a multitude of in-house tools, programs, and techniques were required for the shots delivered.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Like Jaco Van Dormael's previous films, the score for "Mr. Nobody" was written by his older brother, Pierre Van Dormael. For the film, Pierre worked on simple themes and out-of-sync loops, "a mixture of superficial simplicity and underlying complexity." He wrote themes that overlapped to form new ones, each theme continuing to exist while being mixed with the others. The director did not want the music to be overtly emotional, so he and Pierre chose a minimalist orchestration, more often than not just a single guitar. Jaco said: "We wanted the instrument and the player to be felt. This stance actually sums up the whole adventure: a maximalist project with a minimalist approach." "Mr. Nobody" was the last film Pierre worked on before his death in 2008, and his music won the Magritte Award for Best Original Score in 2012.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The soundtrack features songs by Pierre Van Dormael, Buddy Holly, Hans Zimmer, Otis Redding, Eurythmics, Pixies, Wallace Collection, Nena, Ella Fitzgerald, and The Andrew Sisters, as well as versions of "Mr. Sandman" performed by The Chordettes, The King Brothers, Emmylou Harris, and Gob, and recordings of compositions by Erik Satie and Benjamin Britten, among others.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: "Mr. Nobody" can be seen as a tale about choice. Nemo, a nine-year-old boy, has been thrust into a position where he must make an impossible decision—to choose between his mother and father. In the seconds preceding the rest of his life, he wonders where each choice will take him. The forces of the universe working to bring about total chaos are counteracted by this boy's overactive imagination. The dilemma that causes the film's main problem (not knowing the future), once solved, makes it all the more difficult: "I don't know the future, therefore I cannot make a decision. Now that I know the future I still cannot make one." The eloquent interplay between philosophical lifestyle and what forges reality is epitomized by the way the film constantly jumps between scenes of the young boy, the adolescent, and the mature man. The film takes a four-dimensionalist view of the nature and existence of life in the universe, with each decision branching off to create an entirely separate alternate universe. "Mr. Nobody" raises many ontological arguments about the subjective nature of time and investigates how actions have universal consequences, and how every single choice, irrespective of its simplicity or complexity, can make, alter, or change a lifetime.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The film also makes substantial use of chaos theory, string theory, and the butterfly effect to accentuate the lack of control that humans, as individuals, possess. There are numerous scenes, at each stage of his life, where Nemo is subject to the whims of chance, often plunging into water, a place where humans lack control, as a visual symbol of the powerlessness attributed to the human condition. The theories are used to compound reality in the film, a reality in which time always moves in one direction—the smoke never goes back into the cigarette. Then, at the end, when it seems the universe is on the precipice of ultimate chaos, making use of the Big Crunch theory, time halts and begins to reverse. This brings the freedom from choice Nemo had been seeking, for, as Nemo says in the film, "as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible." The tale of Nemo Nobody reflects a life of choices, whether or not we made the correct choices, and what would happen if we could go back and change them. In the end, Mr. Nobody, at age 118, states that it doesn't matter what we choose, because each choice, once made, has just as much significance as any alternate choice would have. The film portrays a life where we are all subject to chance, the dimensions by which we construct our reality (height, length, width, and time), and the imagination of our former selves, and, once the boy Nemo knows the outcome of a given choice, he instinctively opts for another.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The different colors used in the film have symbolic meanings. Each of the three main storylines has its own unique hue that highlights its originality and unlikeness to the others. The color differentiation can be traced as far back as Nemo's childhood, where his possible future wives, Jean, Elise, and Anna, sit on a bench, wearing yellow, blue, and red dresses, respectively. In his life with Jean, Nemo seeks material well-being and independence, and yellow—the color of life and wealth—emphasizes this. Choosing Elise, Nemo experiences the consequences of depression and despair, which are themes associated with the color blue. Finally, the true love and passionate relationship between Nemo and Anna is symbolized by the red color of Anna's dress. It is also noteworthy that the unborn Nemo is shown living in a white world, as white contains all colors of the visible spectrum, which supports the allegorical message of the film that all things are possible until a choice is made. At the end of his life, Nemo is a decrepit old man and lives in a white surrounding (room, clothes, doctor), indicating that the fate of the protagonist leads him back to his origins—the point at which everything is possible.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The idea of a child learning about their whole life in the womb only to have an angel take the memory away is a reference to the Jewish concept of Lailah, the Angel of Conception, and it also bears a resemblance to the Myth of Er as found in the Republic.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: A longer, work-in-progress version of the film was not accepted for competition at the Cannes Film Festival. This cut was offered an out-of-competition berth, but producer Philippe Godeau rejected that offer. The decision by the Cannes Film Festival to not exhibit the film created a national controversy. Ultimately, the film's world premiere occurred at the 66th Venice International Film Festival on 12 September 2009. Six days later, "Mr. Nobody" screened as a special presentation during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was also screened at the Sitges Film Festival and the Stockholm International Film Festival before its theatrical release.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: "Mr. Nobody" opened in 36 theaters in Belgium on 13 January 2010 and grossed USD $227,917 its opening weekend, placing fourth at the Belgian box office and posting a per-theater average of $6,331. Its second weekend, the film dropped 21.9% in revenue, earning $178,098. It went on to gross nearly $1 million in the country, becoming one of the ten highest-grossing films of 2010 in Belgium.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The film was released in 150 theaters in France on the same day it premiered in Belgium. It had a disappointing opening weekend in the country due to the mixed response from French critics, and finished in eighth place at the French box office, earning $640,517. After its second weekend of release, it was at the bottom of the top ten and had grossed a cumulative $1,051,211 in France.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The American premiere of the film occurred at the Los Angeles Film Festival on 25 June 2011, nearly two years after its first screening. The Consul General of Belgium, Geert Criel, held a second showing of the film in the United States on 21 December 2011 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. Magnolia Pictures released the film in select theaters in the United States on 1 November 2013.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The film' was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in France by Pathé on 21 July 2010. There were two versions of this release: a standard edition that included a making-of documentary, a trailer, and a photo gallery as special features, and a special edition that included the director's cut of the film, which has 1 re-cut, 23 extended, and 12 additional scenes integrated into the film and runs about 16 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: The Warner Home Video Dutch release of the film includes a making-of documentary, deleted scenes, and a photo gallery as special features.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: On 11 January 2011, the film was released in Canada on DVD and Blu-ray through Entertainment One. This release includes a making-of documentary deleted scenes as special features.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Optimum Home Entertainment released "Mr. Nobody" on DVD and Blu-ray in the United Kingdom on 12 September 2011 with a making-of documentary and a trailer as special features.


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Upon its premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, "Mr. Nobody" was positively received with a ten-minute standing ovation from the audience. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film garnered a 68% approval rating from 31 critics and a weighted average rating of 6.58/10; the site's consensus reads: ""Mr. Nobody"s narrative tangles may bedevil as much as they entertain, but its big ambitions and absorbing visuals make for an intriguing addition to director Jaco Van Dormael's filmography." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received a score of 63, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Jennie Punter of "The Globe and Mail" praised the film, stating: "Van Dormael holds this fractured fairy tale together by giving it an emotional core and delivers two hours of time travel with a playful spirit and at a mostly hyperkinetic pace, sprinkling it with amusing side journeys and sometimes letting a scene unfold at a more natural tempo." Bruce Kirkland of Jam! gave the film four stars out of five and wrote: "Expect the unexpected. Try to answer the unanswerable question that writer-director Van Dormael poses. It is a worthwhile exercise." He also described Leto's acting as a "marvelously full-blooded, brain-spinning, tour-de-force performance." Ken Eisner from "The Georgia Straight" summarized the film as "a dazzling feat of philosophical fancy, and it attempts nothing less than the summing up of an entire life, and an epoch or two, with its free-spinning take on recent human history as projected into possible futures."


title: Mr. Nobody (film)

text: Niels Matthijs, writing for Twitch Film, stated that "It's astounding how van Dormael turns each scene into a unique little cinematic event. There is hardly filler here, no scenes to drag out the running time or to fill some gaps in between other climaxes. Every scene matters and every scene is made to look like it matters. The director uses all means to his disposal to keep the viewer engaged and interested in the life of the main protagonist, Nemo Nobody." Fred Topel, writing for Screen Junkies, praised the film's artistry, saying: "All of Nemo's lives are painful. No matter what he chooses, he experiences heartbreak, death of loved ones, his own death, and clinical depression. My future seems brighter, but the film makes the strong point that every experience is worthwhile. The goal isn't to choose the easiest path. It's to live." Chris Holt from "Starburst" magazine wrote that ""Mr. Nobody" is a film that is remarkable by its very existence and that in itself is something to be happy about. You may love it you may hate it, but you can bet that you will never forget it." "Exclaim!"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s Robert Bell called the film "a powerful movie about what it means to be alive."