Here is a summary of the 3 movies we saw friday.
Friday started with
CSA (Confederate Stated of America) - a brilliant alternative history documentary in which the southerners won the civil war and slavery wasn't abolished. Parts were from real history and parts were made up to fit the story. CSA and nazi Germany - for example - were allies during the war although CSA never actually went into it. In the film, the confederate president advices Hitler to keep the jews as slaves rather than just kill them. The documentary comes with fake TV ads for products that actually existed for not so long ago. The cigarette brand Niggerhair - for example. I couldn't imagine such a brand actually existed so I thought the movie maker just had made it up but it turned out to be for real. The brand existed to sometime after WWII when it changed to Biggerhair! Just one example from a great movie.
Friday went on with
Uncovered : The War on Iraq - interviews with people close to the Bush administration or with good understanding of the administration. The picture of a group of politicians that willingly used propaganda to made sure that the war on Iraq started is stunningly clear from this film. Although I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 I would take the movie at hand more serious in terms of reliable facts.
Last fridayly film for us was
Masjävlar - which means something like
Fucking people from Dalarna. A touching movie about coming home and not feeling home at all.
I experienced documentary movie
The Corporation yesterday. It was an extremely interesting piece describing the inherent structural problems with the corporate way. The corporation is the equivalent of a psychopath if you just look at the absense of common values. The corporation has one purpose - to maximize profit. To get there it easily sets aside moral issues if the monetary gain is high enough and the risk of discovery is low enough. Tragic but true.
Today is film free but tomorrow we will see 3 movies. Our eyes will probably be sore afterwards. Too bad the festival ends on sunday.
At last - here is a roundup of all the movies seen this far at
Stockholm Film Festival.
We started thursday last week with thai movie Baytong (2003) about a monk. His sister is killed in a terrorist train bombing and he leaves the monastery to take care of his niece while finding the absent father. Picturing life in a normal thai city it is a intriguing movie with many facets of understanding.
Then friday we saw Happines (1998) by Todd Solondz - a good miserable movie where noone is entirely happy and the most normal everyday persons turns out to be monsters while those that appear to be nuts... well, you get the idea.
And yesterday, italian movie, La Spettatrice (2004), directed by Paolo Franchi, perhaps the best this far. It is set in Torino and Roma and tells the story of Valeria, a longing person that travels with the object of her longing, Massimo, at the same time as traveling inwards. She gets employed by Flavia, Massimos partner, in order to get closer to him, and there you are in a vicious circle described with restrained italian passion.
Coming up is a set of documentaries - more about those later....
Thinking that the mediterranean way is boring? India may be an alternative that adds som spice. Why am I writing this? I saw 2001 movie
Moonson Wedding, winner of the Venice gold lion, yesterday. It splendidly paints an image of a warm, partying, intensive, sad and happy indian family. Not without problem, surely, but very different. (And different is good - believe me.) An arranged wedding turns out to be rather nice after all. In the shadows of the preparations moves a parallell track where the wedding arranger and the maid of the huge family. All is in there - the nervous father, bathroom smoker mother, unmarried cousin, nasty uncle, images of Delhi, wedding day monsoon - what else could you want?
Finished reading
Iain Banks The Wasp Factory. A dark story about a young man called Frank that brilliantly makes a normal impression allthough having murdered 3 kids as a child himself. A brilliant novel with many levels of understanding. Religion, gender, normality, hopes, sincerity. All embedded in a story of a broken family. A story that is told by Frank himself giving us his and only his perpective on stuff. This is my favourite Banks novel out of the 4 I have read this far. Now I will dive into more of his early work.
Being busy creating the new site
Seek My Bowl - featuring one symbol every week. The two first weeks have been about
elephants and
donkeys as a nice background to the presidential elections of the United States.Next weeks symbol is harder to find. It should be connected to the donkey in some way....
Well - anyway I created a
news blog for the site as well using the splendid functionality of
blogger. It turned out rather nice.
