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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 9, 2020 19:40:36 GMT
The documentary La Cravate totally gobsmacked me. It is about a young supporter of the Front National during the presidential campaign of 2017. You should immediately hate him, but you can't. He's a nice guy with all of the wrong ideas, but as the story unfolds, you understand why everything went wrong. It was basically our fault for not helping him when he needed support. Since his life went wrong, it was basically normal to blame everything on the usual people -- immigrants et al.
I thought that he was incredibly courageous to allow himself to be filmed in every aspect of his life by leftist filmmakers, and I will even tip my hat to the Front National for allowing the cameras to follow him almost all the time. They never do this, but I suspect that the Amiens section of the party was not under strict surveillance at the time. His total dedication is shown, as well as his hope to rise in the party. But then he is passed over for other newcomers and he becomes disenchanted, although it doesn't change his political views. He finally admits a dark incident from his past, and things become clearer. At first he says "don't put this in your film" but later he changes his mind which is why it is part of the film.
Since the documentary was made, he has left the Front National to join a useless dissident splinter group, but after 90 minutes, I feel that I could sit down with him and discuss politics, and that is something that I always thought would be impossible.
Unfortunately, there are no trailers available with subtitles.
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 9, 2020 20:45:59 GMT
Sounds most intriguing. I also found the concept (don't speak French) as you explain it particularly pertinent, having just taken an online test to determine my political leanings. More than one of the questions addressed precisely that idea of how much the government owes its citizens in terms of support, both economic and otherwise.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Feb 9, 2020 21:12:59 GMT
We watched The Serets of the Museum too. Love it!
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Post by lugg on Apr 24, 2020 8:36:49 GMT
I've not watched it yet - saving it up for a rainy day when I need some cheer . Has anyone else watched it?
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Post by bixaorellana on May 22, 2020 17:35:42 GMT
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Post by lagatta on May 22, 2020 18:58:26 GMT
That latest Michael Moore film has received strong criticism from climate scientists.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 18, 2020 22:03:08 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 13, 2020 23:09:10 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 14, 2020 4:39:53 GMT
I had read that article in The Guardian. I vaguely recalled Biosphere 2 but I would have never imagined that most of those people are still together.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 14, 2020 5:26:49 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 8, 2020 0:14:59 GMT
This is a most moving story about a young woman finally meeting her birth parents in China ~
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Post by lugg on Aug 8, 2020 10:56:34 GMT
This is a most moving story about a young woman finally meeting her birth parents in China ~ I watched this earlier ; very emotional but heart-warming. I can understand the adoptive parents worries and reluctance. A friend of mine who adopted two girls as babies is in a similar position. One thing that astounds me about them and this young girl is how resilient they are given their first few weeks / months spent in orphanages receiving very poor care in the main.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 21, 2020 13:21:37 GMT
I thought that the Franco-Austrian documentary Epicentro was absolutely amazing and I was rather surprised that Bixa and I did not appear in it, since it was filmed in just about every place that we went. It never tells you what you should think and just lets the people talk, mostly schoolchildren. You can see how certain things have been drilled into them, just like children in every other country, but there was a remarkable obsession with Teddy Roosevelt and the USS Maine in 1898. "People thought he would free us from Spain, but he just wanted to come and claim our country for himself." They could even explain amendments in the 1902 Cuban constitution that turned over all power to the Americans.
But it is always so amazing what people dream about. One adult woman in the street says that she would like to visit America. "I would like to go to Disneyland. It looks so nice, and I would like to see the characters in person, Mickey, Donald and the Barbies that my daughter loves so much." One person would like to go to France, but how do they see the country? "I think it is like a tall building, but I don't know if the climate is hot or cold there." So much for geography...
The patriotism of the population is always amazing. To have so little and to be so proud...
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 21, 2020 16:01:06 GMT
Wow wow wow! I've watched the trailer twice already & will undoubtedly raptly watch it again until I can get my hands on the documentary. It does indeed seem that some of those scenes were shot over our shoulders. It brought back how much walking & looking we did -- so many scenes were instantly recognizable. I snapped the corner at :26 and imagine that you probably have a similar picture somewhere. I'd love to know how much of the documentary was filmed outside of Havana. I believe that sugar refinery is passed by the train going south out of the capital and I think I hear a train in the background there. I wonder if they got down to Santiago de Cuba, which as you know is one of my goals. Love your review. Thanks for this!
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Post by bjd on Aug 21, 2020 16:23:41 GMT
Just the other day I looked all through Kerouac and Bixa's photos of their trip to Cuba in 2017. I would love to see this documentary.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 21, 2020 16:34:25 GMT
The French trailer has a lot of totally difference scenes. It should also be mentioned that the singing woman with the guitar is Oona Chaplin.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 21, 2020 16:40:03 GMT
Geeez -- thanks for that! It was driving me crazy that she seemed so totally familiar, but I couldn't make the leap to identifying her. Also thanks for the French trailer, which is quite different to the first one. Bjd, how gratifying to know that you went back to those old threads! Maybe one day we'll be saying, "Next year, in Havana!"
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Post by htmb on Aug 30, 2020 20:52:59 GMT
A couple of years ago I was outside a building in the Bowery area of New York City taking photos, but had no idea what had been inside. I remember coming out of the subway, into an area I didn’t know, and the wind, whipping down the wide street, almost blew me over, it was gusting so hard. It took me awhile to get my bearings but I found the neighborhood fascinating, and this was an area to which I’d planned to return this past spring until the pandemic got the better of us. Instead, I’ve just watched this documentary of a slice of Jay Maisel’s life. I found it to be inspiring, frustrating, eye-opening, emotionally moving, and overwhelming all at the same time.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 30, 2020 20:58:32 GMT
Ohhhhhh ~ thanks for that!! I had not heard of this documentary & now am dying to see it. The trailer alone is worth watching several times for those glorious, singular, soaring photographs.
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Post by htmb on Aug 30, 2020 21:11:57 GMT
I think you’d really enjoy the documentary, Bixa.
Here’s another video about him.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 30, 2020 21:25:22 GMT
Thank you! I just watched a little bit so far. Looks beautiful, for one thing, and I'm definitely going to enjoy seeing all of it.
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Post by lugg on Sept 6, 2020 19:04:59 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 6, 2020 21:46:03 GMT
Thanks ~ that looks riveting!
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 8, 2020 14:46:43 GMT
I saw the Swiss documentary Madame and can't even begin to describe it. It is a love letter to the filmmaker's grandmother, who was clearly a remarkable woman. "They married me to the guy when I was 16. I never loved him. The first night he undressed and I just ran out the door. I slept on a bench by the lake." And then "He raped me until he got me pregnant. That's just the way it was." And indeed the grandmother tells her anecdotes without any bitterness because "that's just the way it was." But she was different -- she got divorced as quickly as possible back when it was something that brought complete shame to every family in ultra conservative Switzerland. She started a successful girdle company which supplied corsets and other equipment to the crowned heads of Europe, but then she went into antiques and later she had a restaurant.
And yet the movie is not really about her even though she is omnipresent. I have seen documentaries like this before and am always astounded at people who can keep every family photo, every 8 mm or super 8 film that was ever made and of course lots and lots of photos all through his youth. On top of that, he seemed to have every telephone message that his grandmother (and probably everybody else) ever left him. This obviously dates back to when answering machines had those tiny cassettes in them, and I know that some people wanted to keep every cassette rather than erasing them and reusing them.
If we all had such family archives, many of us could probably make equally fascinating movies of our family history, but only about 0.1% (or less) ever do such things. And there were also his diaries, lots and lots of diaries...
So Stéphane Riethauser grows up in front of us. The fact that his father wanted to be a filmmaker (but ended up being a banker or some such -- after all, this is high class Geneva) provides even more family archives.
Okay, I'll skip right along. The kid knew he was "different" but being different was unacceptable. So he was a right wing firebrand, properly homophobic, but it gnawed away at him. When the dam finally broke and he told his parents, they were astounded, which is also an indication of how hard he tried to be "normal" since parents (or at least the mother) are supposed to have ESP about this. He had properly had girlfriends and fucked them, he followed all the rules. And now this.
Should he tell his grandmother? She is already 85 years old. It might kill her. You never know...
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 15, 2020 18:21:23 GMT
I was very impressed by the latest movie by Sébastien Lifshitz, Adolescentes. He recorded the lives of 2 teenage girls (best friends) from age 13 to age 18. I frankly cannot understand how this is possible, to enter homes and classrooms and follow people around for 5 years, but I guess that what they say about such things is true -- if you hang around long enough you become invisible and are forgotten. One of the girls is chubby and low class while the other one has parents who push her to achieve. But this does not affect their own relations where they talk about the same cute boys and get fed up with their teachers for various reasons.
You see them change as they age -- and their parents change, too -- there is a boyfriend and sex, and then the boy dumps her ("he did it over the phone! It was so tacky."). The mother, the poor trashy mother, tells her daughter "I never thought that you should do that at age 16" but she has no control over her daughter's life. I think that it was this mother who moved me the most. She had an IQ of not more than 80 and could barely put a sentence together, but she wanted all the best for her daughter. The other mother was much more traditional, a well educated civil servant who was constantly on her daughter's back, pushing her in directions where the daughter did not want to go.
During these 5 years, there were the Charlie Hebdo killings and then the Bataclan massacre, and these were discussed in class with not always the best reactions by the students. And then there was the presidential election. The poor girl was devastated by the loss of Marine Le Pen and her friend was relieved that Le Pen lost, "but I don't like Macron either."
I found this movie really amazing in all of its honesty. It was 2h15 long, but I wouldn't have minded a little more.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 19, 2020 11:27:38 GMT
The North Macedonian documentary Honeyland arrived in France a bit late, but that doesn't make it any less astounding.
That's just the setting as it all begins. Soon a wild Turkish family moves in with their old trailer and a herd of cattle. They have the filthiest children in the world who obviously run rampant. Hatidze observes them scornfully at first, but they more or less become friends. The Turks are fascinated by her beekeeping techniques, particularly since it appears to be quite profitable. She can take the train to Skopje (only 20km away) to sell her production and buys necessities like hair dye and bananas in exchange. Anybody who has ever cared for an old toothless woman knows how important and appreciated bananas can be.
The Turks would like to make some honey money, too. They buy beehive boxes and the other necessary equipment and soon wreck everything because they are greedy and don't take Hatidze's advice like leaving the bees at least half of their honey every time you collect some. The Turks' bees are soon starving, so they attack Hatidze's hives, and all of her bees die, too. Then their cattle start to die, at least 50 calves, so they finally gather up their stuff and move on... Hatidze's mother finally dies, too. If this were a normal movie, it would already seem tragic, but this documentary was filmed over a period of years, so everything and everybody who dies really dies.
It is not the sort of documentary that you can shrug off.
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Post by mickthecactus on Sept 19, 2020 12:30:14 GMT
That sounds good.
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Post by htmb on Sept 20, 2020 15:20:00 GMT
I thought this was a moving and interesting documentary about Italians who aided Jews during WWII. It’s based on the book It Happened in Italy by Elizabeth Bettina. One of those unsung heroes featured is Italian cycling champion Gino Bartali, a 1938 and 1948 Tour de France winner.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 5, 2020 5:37:36 GMT
That looks fascinating and must have many harrowing moments in it.
This is what I found tonight by what combination of accidents, I don't know. I certainly wasn't looking for any part of it, although I adore Sue Perkins and am drawn to any information about the US/Mexico border. I just finished watching part one, which is fun, moving, and sad in equal measures. I'm saving part two for tomorrow, wherein Sue will arrive at the part of the border where I used to live. This video goes directly on to the second part ~
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 7, 2020 21:00:25 GMT
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