If you walk the path along Venice Beach, you'll come across the skateboard park.
Skateboards first appeared along the beaches of Southern California, particularly Venice. As a junior high student back then, I joined the others nailing half a roller skate to one end of a 2x4 and the other half to the other end. We didn't have a lot of control. My street was one of the better hills. One block to the south wasn't steep enough. One block to the north was too steep for most. I survived the steep one a couple of times. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You can read more about the history of skateboards from the Hermoso Beach Museum site.
Skate boarding has come a long way since then as have the places people ride them.
Tuesday it got up to 75˚F and we spent a couple of hours at Venice Beach near the end of Rose Avenue.
Friday, when I biked down there, the fog blocked the view of the ocean from the bike trail.
We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday. And passed this bit of graffiti on the way. We also passed an Indian grocery store.
This is just a part of the loooooooong spice shelf. One of the reasons that Indian food is so good - lots of spices and thousands of years experimenting how to prepare them.
We also passed Johnie's Coffee Shop. It's an example of Googie architecture - but I didn't know that when I took the picture or I would have taken a better picture of the whole place. My interest was that this coffee shop had been turned into Bernie's Coffee Shop. LAist has a January 31, 2019 story by Jessica P. Ogilvie about this transformation:
"Johnie's Coffee Shop was built in 1956 by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, masters of the space-age Googie style. The restaurant came to be known for its striking design and by the 1980s, began making appearances in films like Miracle Mile, The Big Lebowski, American History X, Reservoir Dogs and City of Angels. In 1994, it was purchased by the Gold family, an entrepreneurial L.A. clan whose patriarch, David Gold, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores.
In 2013, Johnie's was designated an historic cultural monument, and for a short while, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority debated turning it into a Metro stop for the purple line."
That Metro stop is still being built kitty-corner from Johnie's/Bernie's. The article goes on to tell the history of how it became Bernie's.
2 1/2 blocks from where I lived as a kid. Now it's the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum. Fortunately the kept the historic facade of the building. They used to have elaborate Christmas display windows right at that corner.
We ended up checking out the Motion Picture Museum, but passing for now. Instead we went to the Art Museum that is on the (now, there used to be a street between them) adjoining block. But I'll save the museum for another post.
Some of the apartment buildings on the street where I used to live. Ours didn't have such fancy entrances.
It was a hazy day which gave these buildings in Century City a surreal look as we drove home. (None of the pictures in this post were edited except cropping.)
And I'm adding on this picture (below) of the LA airport. I commented in an earlier post about the unsatisfactory taxi/Uber/Lyft parking lot that's a distance from the terminals. The whole terminal traffic situation is beyond awful. There are places where you can pick up arriving passengers. But during Christmas vacation the three to four lanes are jammed. You aren't supposed to be stopped unless you are actively picking up a passenger. But it's near impossible to time when the car gets to the terminal to match when the passenger gets to the curb. I pulled over at Terminal 5 with the expectation I'd move up to Terminal 6 when my daughter and family got out. If a cop told me to move on, I could stop again at Terminal 6. (I have been told to move on at LAX in the past, but no cops were sighted Saturday.) If I got told to move on at Terminal 6, I'd have to go around the whole airport again. I'm not sure what the solution is. They're building a skytrain (which i assume will be similar to what they have in San Francisco) to get passengers out of terminal area. I'm not sure it's just bad design. More, just that LA's population grew so much. They do have a target date to do something - the 2028 Olympics will be in LA. The Metro line is also supposed to be all the way out to the airport. The problem has been the taxis and other interests didn't want the Metro to get to the airport, I'm told.
The airport was much easier to navigate back in 1967 when I drove a Yellow Cab out of the airport for several months between graduating from UCLA and returning to the second summer of Peace Corps training. Those were good times - mornings at the beach playing volley ball and body surfing, evenings driving a cab. I learned a lot about LA. I'd never realized how many bars there were until I drove a cab.
To the left us at this spot is the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) 'theme building."
"To truly immerse oneself in the world of Googie, a visit to the "Theme Building" at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is an absolute must. Completed in 1961, this architectural marvel resembles a futuristic flying saucer perched upon four curving legs. With its observation deck, it was once a popular spot for locals and travelers to admire the planes taking off and landing at LAX. The Theme Building perfectly encapsulates Googie's out-of-this-world charm and stands as a testament to an era when the skies were no longer the limit." from LA Explained Blog
I had a high school graduation dinner there with a dozen or more friends. The restaurant is long gone.
That's the question raised in a book I picked up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle during Thanksgiving.
I've just started reading Sarah Bakewell's How To Live or A Life of Montaigne. The picture puts the book into the context of the life I'm living at this moment, which, I hope will make more sense after you've read a couple of excerpts.
"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Péirgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592."
I no longer assume that people reading something like the end of the last sentence will automatically determine how long Montaigne lived (not quite 60 years), or the historical context (he was born forty years after Columbus reported the existence of a part of the world that Europeans hadn't known existed. Or maybe some descendants of Vikings knew but others didn't. I don't take this for granted because long ago I realized that things I do aren't necessarily the same things that other people do. Though I expect that regular readers of this blog figured that out before I mentioned it. Or would have if I hadn't placed this parenthetical paragraph here. The author will offer some more historical context in the following.
"Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it. Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements. Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done; he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book."
Again, if I didn't know what religious civil war was being referred to, I would have stopped reading and looked it up. Here's a link to give you more about the French religious wars of the 16th Century. Meanwhile further south, the Spanish Inquisition was going on. I think the fact that he lived in difficult times makes the book more interesting to us today as we slide into our own version of an inquisition to rid the country of immigrants and other 'undesirables' in the eyes of Trump's people.
"A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father's contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life. He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:"
At this point author Bakewell lists a number of his titles. I'll skip that. I'm not trying to copy her book, but rather to focus on ideas I found stimulating. This was just the context. And you'll note that while she says he lived in difficult times, the fact that he went on with his life as a nobleman and ran his estate as well as served as the mayor of Bordeaux, suggests that despite the wars, he was privileged enough for them to be irritants rather than serious interferences into his life. But this musing is based on the words in that paragraph, not further research, so take it with a grain of salt.
"He used [his] experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big questions that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: 'How to live?'
"This is not the same as the ethical question, 'How should one live?' Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life - meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself."
And now we'll get to some of the questions he pondered. And I hope you will find them to be pretty close to ones we ponder today.
"A down-to-earth question, 'How to Live?' splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions. Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence: how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated. But there were smaller puzzles, too. How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant? How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him? How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor? How do you guard your home? What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom? If you overhear your daughter's governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene? How do you deal with a bully? What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?
In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need."
Okay. That's your appetizer. I haven't read further in the book than this, but I thought that this book probably has lessons for the current world. Though as I read it again to type the words into the blog, I also wonder whether the author is phrasing things in a way that sound perhaps a little too contemporary.
I much prefer reading books that are not being reinterpreted today, so that the contemporary applications are ones I see, not ones that are spoon fed to me. But since I haven't read the rest of the book yet, or anything Montaigne wrote, don't blame Sarah Bakewell yet. Though her opening paragraph was about people being fixated on telling the world, through the internet, their every action and thought.
But I'm being overly careful (some would say picky). I'll give you a better informed opinion later when I've finished the book. But I think the book might help people overcome the temporal bias that we in the present are far more advanced than people in the past. Technically that may be true, but as human beings capable of thinking, or moral contemplations, of understanding human behavior, and advanced concepts, the ancient people were just as capable as we are, given what humans understood about how the world worked. Though many had a better lived understanding of how nature operated than many, if not most Americans today.
A final note. I'm not blogging as much as before, in part because life is keeping me busy on other things. And I have too many things I want to write about. If I don't get back here sooner, have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukah, or Kwanza or Solstice, or whatever celebration you observe this time of year.
You don't need to read this. I just need to get it out of my system.
[UPDATE Monday, Dec 16, 2024: We each got a $75 discount code for for future flights. This is fine with us since Alaska is our basic airline.]
We had tickets (from Anchorage) to Seattle for 10:35am getting to Seattle at 3:11pm (You lose an hour going Anchorage to Seattle)
Then an LA leaving at 4:56pm arriving in LA at 7:45pm
The first delay notice was to 11am departure.
Then 12:20pm
Then 3:00 pm
We had this experience about a year and a half ago trying to catch a non-stop to Chicago. After many delays, the flight was cancelled and we had to fly through Seattle about 10 hours late.
At this point we've been on the phone to Alaska Airlines changing our LA flights. Then we got a notice that the LA flight was cancelled. We were still in Anchorage.
There was an announcement that another flight was taking off to Seattle at Gate 6. We walked to Gate 6 and asked if we could get on it. It was almost noon. We could. And we got two seats together. But we had to get on right away and couldn't redo the LA flight from Seattle.
Alaska had also sent us four $12 vouchers for today at ANC or SEATAC.
When we landed at 4:30pm I texted Alaska Airlines and they quickly had us rebooked on a 5:58pm flight to LA. Just enough time to use our coupons to get some yakisoba and board the plane.
In the end, we landed in LA an hour later than originally scheduled.
LAX a couple of years ago banned taxis and Lyft and Uber from the terminals and put them in their own spot. So you can't get out of the terminal and grab a cab. There are shuttle busses or you can walk. When we've waited for the shuttle it's been a long wait, so we walked about 25 minutes. Then there was a long line waiting for cabs. It's a poor solution to the jam of Uber and Lyfts that caused them to do this.
But we're here, at my mom's house and the kids and grandkids are due when their schools are out. So I'm not really complaining. Just reporting.
It seems that Alaska is able to quickly change things by phone, but people waiting at the counters seemed to have more difficulties. And when our flight was changed to 3pm, why couldn't they move us to the other flight that had some empty seats and was leaving 3 hours earlier? If we hadn't walked over, the plane would have left with at least two empty seats if not more.
So I'm impressed with being able to book online or by phone so quickly. And I realize that things happen and planes need repairs that delay them. Though at one point I had to delete my app and then download it again because it stopped showing the changes we'd made.
Our original flight didn't leave until 3:15pm. We got to LA an hour after the original flight landed in Seattle.
I'd also add that that if you are MVP, you get a phone number that seems to be answered much faster than the regular phone number. We haven't flown that much in the last few years - not enough to get MVP - but Alaska has extended so called elite flyers status during COVID. This year they let you get to that magic 20K miles using miles gained through use of your Alaska Airlines VISA card.
And the people who answer the phone are soo polite and competent.
The second set of shorts is marked "SOLD OUT" on the website.
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Alaska Shorts #2 – SOLD OUT
Word Spaghetti – 4:02
Born of the Ice – 15:46
Matt and Megan Don’t Give A Fuck About Speed… Dating – 12:22
The White Raven – 22:46
Moving over to the Bear Tooth Theater
1:00 PM: SPOTLIGHT SELECTION SHORTS #2
The Yellow Sponge is The Dish Sponge – 16:39
Not Afraid – 9:15
Stalking the Bogeyman – 9:25
A Beginners Guide to Giving Up – 12:00
Summer’s End – 20:00
Play Date – 12:44
Puppy Love – 11:24
4:00 PM:Drum Song and Other Native Alaskan Shorts
Drum Song – 49:18
Reclamation – 5:00
Tides of Tradition – 9:47
Usugilix Awakun – 11:14
Gath & K’iyh: Listen to Heal – 9:05
I'm not a regular FaceBook user and I only just checked at the AIFF FB page. They have this announcement:
[UPDATE: Awards Ceremony at 8:30 at Alaska Experience Theater Sat Dec 14. See also here.]
I'm guessing they might announce winners there.
SUNDAY
Sunday's main scheduled film is Hockey Town at the Bear Tooth is sold out. It's about the Anchorage Wolverines. I suspect all the players have at least ten people coming to cheer the film and that's why it sold out before the festival even started.
Sunday will be the day you can catch some of the best films of the festival as festival winning films will be prescreened at the Museum.
The website says:
"Encore Presentation of Top Festival Films (Times and Films TBA)"
The printed schedule says:
11:00 am Local Favorites
2:00 pm Best Shorts
4:00 pm Best Narrative Feature
6:00 pm Best Documentary Feature
All at the Museum
I don't see an award ceremony listed anywhere, though there is a final night dinner (see poster at the end of Saturday above.) Maybe they'll announce winners there. But check out the Sunday schedule online page.
Two more days of festival. Well only one more for us. Not that long ago, the Festival website said the festival was Dec. 6-14 and we made our plane reservations for December 15. Then the more recent edition of the website moved it to December 15.
This festival has been filled with crazy good documentaries - Champions of the Golden Valley, Ultimate Citizens, Porcelain War, 76 Days Adrift, The Empathizer, Diving Into the Darkness - and I heard Unearth was also great. And I thought Queen of the Ring was also quite good, but not quite at the level of those others.
Today we saw two more: So Surreal: Behind the Masks and The Cigaret Surfboard. The basic 'discovery' in Surreal, was how Yupik Alaskan Native masks along with Native Masks from British Columbia had a huge influence on the surrealist artists early in the 20th Century. This was something I'd learned some time ago. But the film combined a number of themes - the spiritual meaning and use of Alaska Native masks, the history of how the churches and white government banned the ceremonies in which masks were used and confiscated them, how the Surrealists discovered these masks and were inspired by them, and a detective tale of where some of the masks were today and how to get them repatriated. The magic of the film is how seamlessly all these themes were intertwined.Perry Eaton (center) and Drew Michael, both Alaska Native mask makers featured in the film, talk afterward about masks and the film.
But I also was very pleasantly surprised by how good Cigarette Surfboard was. I'm biased. I grew up near Venice Beach, and while I was too lazy to lug a surfboard around (they were big heavy monsters back in those days, and none of my friends were surfers) I was an avid body surfer growing up.
This film starts out with Taylor talking about how cigarette butts are the most numerous item when people are cleaning trash off the beach. (I had encountered this once long ago when I helped pick up trash with a Covenant House mentee in downtown Anchorage. So many cigarette butts.)
Not only is the tobacco full of chemicals, but the filters are not biodegradable. So Taylor decides to make a surfboard using cigarette butts to draw attention to the pollution they cause. The first one - in the photo - was two heavy. But he got it down in weight and then got professional surfers to use the boards as a way to get the environmental message across. The basic question people seemed to ask when they saw these boards was "It must take forever to collect all the butts." They get told, "Not really, they're everywhere."
So this is an environmental movie and a surfing movie. We see lots of people riding the waves on their cigarette surfboards.
Taylor also visits surfers in different parts of the world. In Ireland one former surfer decided flying around the world to go surfing, while fun, was not environmentally defensible, and he switched to sustainable farming that won't harm the ocean. In southwest England, a group of surfers had successfully lobbied - with surfboards at Parliament - to end the practice of dumping raw sewage into the ocean.
I'm falling behind. Last night's showing of Diving Into The Darkness was fantastic, highlighted by the fact that the director and person highlighted in the movie were there - Nays Bahai and Jill Heinerth.
But I'm swamped today and so I'm taking the easy way out by just posting a copy of the AIFF program for Friday,
It was a full house at the E Street Theater Wednesday night for The Strangers' Case. The film is packaged with five chapters: The Doctor; The Soldier; The Smuggler; The Poet; and The Captain. They all converge in this story that starts out (after an opening scene in a Chicago hospital) in a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. The doctor goes home to a birthday party and a bomb blast. The soldier is upset when ordered to shoot a group of men accused of being terrorists, because it include a boy who wrote graffiti. The smuggler sells spots on a boat from Turkey to Greece, cash only, no guarantees. The poet is a refugee who is trying to get his family to Greece. The captain is in the Greek Coast Guard who goes out everyday to look for and rescue boat people. You can see the trailer in the previous post.
The only actor I knew was Omar Sy, the great French actor who's played in television series and many movies. It was particularly poignant given that Assad's regime in Syria was overthrown just this week. A film you should look out for.
At the film was Ash Avildsen, whose own film, Queens of the Ring, plays tomorrow night. I asked him for a quick intro to his film at after the showing of The Strangers' Case. It's below. At the end you can see his demonstration of appreciation for The Strangers' Case.
[I'll add the video tomorrow morning. It's still uploading to Youtube and I need some sleep.DONE!]
I've seen so many really good films. The documentaries are particularly strong this year, though The Strangers' Case is a narrative feature. I'm hoping that having Omar Sy in the film will help it get wide distribution.
Thursday's Schedule
9:00 AM: Sonic Storytelling: Music Licensing and Artist Collaboration in Film Alaska Experience Theater
A decade after high school, three old classmates reconnect and reevaluate their lives while hiking a mountain in Alaska.
Vessel – 17:44
Derive – 18:38
Yazidi Women: From Victims To Survivors – 7:06
The Icefield: An Expedition Memoir – 26:46
Sunflower Girl – 13:08
Julian – 6:53
4:30 PM – 6:30 PM: Alaska Teen Media Institute Presents After-School Special – Event Tickets
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM: Alaskan Feature: Uphill
There's not a lot out there about this film. It seems pretty new. TMDB has the bare minimum - but it includes the image I'm using, the actors, and a budget ($15,000).
The DuckDuckGo search engine offers this under Plex.
"Uphill (2024) release date is Thursday, December 12 starring Adam D Boyer, Victoria Summer Felix, Matthew Rush and directed by Adam D Boyer. A decade after high school, three old classmates reconnect and reevaluate their lives while hiking a mountain in Alaska."
It doesn't actually say that if you go to the Plex link. But if it's true, this is the world premier in Anchorage this evening.
If you've gone to any of the AIFF films, you've seen Jill Heinerth swimming underwater in dark caves, and telling us it's the closest thing she can think of to being on another planet. Wikipedia tells us:
"Jill Heinerth (born 1965) is a Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer and film-maker.[4] She has made TV series for PBS, National Geographic Channel and the BBC, consulted on movies for directors including James Cameron, written several books and produced documentaries including We Are Water[5] and Ben's Vortex, about the disappearance of Ben McDaniel. . .
In 1998, Heinerth was part of the team that made the first 3D map of an underwater cave.[8] Heinerth became the first person to dive the ice caves of Antarctica, penetrating further into an underwater cave system than any woman ever[5][dead link] In 2001, she was part of a team that explored ice caves of icebergs[9] where she and her then husband Paul Heinerth "discovered wondrous life and magical vistas" and experienced the calving of an iceberg, documented in the film Ice Island.[10]"
The AIFF2024 program tells us that the 2024 Explorer's Achievement Award goes to Diving into the Darkness. This is a new award, but I heard tonight that Jill Heinerth is in Anchorage and will be at the screening to receive the award.
I'm conflicted over whether I should post the trailer here, just because it's been played before every single film/program I've been to at this festival. Instead, here's a link to the film's website and you can go watch it yourself. If you haven't seen the trailer, you should.
As our friendship deepened, I discovered that Jill's story was profoundly deep, both literally and figuratively, and how the personal side of her story was immensely captivating. Yet, this remarkable story had largely remained confined to short video formats. Given my unique position at the intersection of the filmmaking and diving realms, I found the call to tell her story irresistible. What followed was a year of intense collaboration, a creative partnership that would prove invaluable as we tackled the herculean challenges of principal photography.
I had no intention of being a passive observer while my colleagues risked their lives to capture the story on film, especially when it came to the underwater sequences. So I undertook the gruelling journey of
becoming a certified cave diver on a rebreather, something which had never been done before amongst
film directors. I descended alongside the cast and crew into the depths of the caves, well beyond the reach of recreational divers. It was an arduous yet exhilarating experience to dive, work, and learn alongside some of the world's most renowned cave divers. Despite the monumental difficulties and inherent risks in directing a crew of cave divers, I would embark on this adventure again without hesitation.
8:00 pm (still at the Bear Tooth) Queen of the Ring
"From writer/director Ash Avildsen and based on the book by Jeff Leen, Queen of the Ring tells the incredible true story of Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards), a single mother from a small town who went on to become the first million-dollar female athlete in world history. Mildred was a woman determined to make a name for herself as a female wrestler at a time when it was illegal across most of the United States, becoming a three-time women’s world champion from the 1930s through the 1950s despite all the challenges. At the same time, her personal life was not without its challenges, especially once she meets promoter Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas), with whom she falls in love, gets married, becomes aware that he’s cheating on her with several of the other female wrestlers on his roster, and decides to stay married as a business arrangement, so that she doesn’t get screwed out of her own money. Through everything, she perseveres, becoming a pioneer in the sport that she loved. . .
"How did this project come your way? Was this just an audition that came up?
RICKARDS: I received the script in my inbox. There was no audition, just a talk with (writer/director) Ash [Avildsen] and questions about whether I had wrestled. The answer was no. And how comfortable I was with physicality, which was very comfortable. I felt very capable of this woman. I’m really grateful that Ash sent me and gave me this opportunity because I wouldn’t have known who this woman was. And I had never gotten to go under such a physical transformation for a character before, one that was not only energetic, but had to have the body structure to find the energy. It has really opened up my eyes, in terms of my process and acting. It just makes me hungry for more. It’s a cycle."
Grammar note: I wasn't sure where the apostrophe should go in The Strangers' Case. Before or after the final s? I checked the program and put it before the final s. But that makes it singular, which, after seeing the movie didn't make sense. There were a lot of 'strangers.' And I see now that the trailer spells it Strangers'. So I've fixed it.
The program also misled me on this last film. The title in the program is Queen of the Ring. But the title on the trailer is Queens of the Ring. Colider also has it singular. So I've changed it where I can find it, but it takes too long for me to upload video to YouTube to change it on the video tonight.
[Update: Dec. 12, 2024, 11:52pm: I saw Queen of the Ring tonight, and the title on the film was QUEEN, no S. So I've changed what I could. Editing the video and uploading it again will take a bit more time. Also, I left an 'l' out of Ash Avildsen's name. But I've fixed that too.]
[ACS has been promising fiber optic for two years now, but until then I'm stuck with painfully slow internet.]
"Beloved French actor Omar Sy stars in the debut feature from longtime producer Brandt Andersen in The Strangers’ Case, a searing and international ensemble that is world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. [That was last February]
Sy stars along with Yasmin Al Massri in the film, which is an extension of Andersen’s Oscar shortlisted 2020 short Refugee also starring Sy and Al Massri. It’s playing as a Berlinale Special Gala title later this week.
The film follows the chain reaction of events involving five different families in four different countries after tragedy strikes a Syrian family in Aleppo: a doctor (Al Massri) and her daughter, who come home following a chaotic shift at an Aleppo hospital; a soldier who witnesses heinous crimes towards men, women and children in the service of the Syrian regime; a smuggler in Turkey (Sy) who tries desperately to make ends meet for his young son while also trying to save enough money to afford his own escape; a poet from a Turkish refugee camp who barters for space on an overcrowded boat with his young family; and a Greek coast guard captain who spends his days and nights rescuing sinking lifeboats full of migrants."
"The international scope and grueling human cost of the global refugee crisis lends itself to contemporary epic filmmaking of a particularly sober stripe, as seen mostly recently in Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” and Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated “Io Capitano.” Shorn of their ripped-from-the-headlines urgency, such stories of humans crossing vast distances and facing hostile odds in pursuit of a better life are as old as time itself. A muscular, assured debut feature from U.S. producer-turned-director Brandt Andersen, “The Strangers’ Case” stresses the sprawling scale of the situation with a chaptered structure that pivots between multiple involved parties in the refugee’s journey, from warmongers to traffickers to rescuers to the displaced victims themselves. . .
“The Strangers’ Case” is titled for a prescient, Shakespeare-written speech from the play “Sir Thomas More,” in defence of those displaced from their country and barred from others: “Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth?” Brandt’s debut hasn’t quite the Bard’s poetry, but the plaintive conscience is present and correct."
333 W. 4th Avenue (NW corner of 4th & C St. – enter on C), Anchorage, Alaska 99501
9:00 AM: Documenting Reality: The Truths and Trials of Non-Fiction Filmmaking
There are a lot of shorts programs today. Sunday had some excellent shorts that I'll try to highlight in a later post. I'll be doing my elementary school volunteer time in the morning so I'll miss the morning shorts programs.
"This project shines a light on the often fraught relationships and opposing perspectives that are still so prevalent between 2nd-gen Vietnamese and their immigrant parents. I was inspired to make this film after comparing my own connection to Vietnam with my mother's, who still refuses to go back. . ."
I find this kind of cross-cultural films fascinating. Looking at the kids of immigrants going back to the country their parents fled from 30 or 40 years later. Maybe because I went to Germany as a student 25 years after my mother fled Germany which was 30 years after my father had gotten out.
Bear Guardians - "Bear Guardians is a portrait of a father and daughter wildlife rescue team that cares for sun and moon bears in Cambodia. Follow their work with two amputee bears who have lost limbs from being caught in snare traps."
Now switching to the Bear Tooth Theatrepub
5:30 pm: SPOTLIGHT SELECTION SHORTS #1
Ripple - 14:27
Mecanica - 16:00
Why Dogs Howl - 4:51
Esperance to Fremantle 17:45
The River 14:10
Revenge of the Language Master 6:50
Black Silk - 16:02
8:00 PM: Narrative Feature: The Way We Speak – Event Tickets
The teaser for this has been shown before a lot of the programs this weekend, and it's a bit cryptic. It feels like it was put together by people who knew what the film was about, but it left me scratching my head and not sure I wanted to see it.
So I've found this interview with one of the actors, Peter Fabian. (He was Howard Hamlin in Better Call Saul.)
We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday. And passed this bit of graffiti on the way. We also passed an Indian grocery store. 
