AIFF 2012: From Miss India to Kenyan Runners

  [Check the AIFF 2012 Tab above for what's on today.]

I saw two films Thursday:

Things I Don't Understand  seems to fit well here at What Do I Know?  I'm too tired to write usefully about the film now.  It shows again Saturday night at the Bear Tooth.  There are a lot of characters with issues, including a musician who turns down a paying job as a coffee bean because he has to be true to his art.  You can see the trailer at the film's website.   The small Alaska Experience theater was full - about 30 people.

The World Before Her - is an Indian-Canadian documentary that looks at the boot camp to train the dozen or so finalists for the Miss India contest and a nationalist Hindu camp for young women.  The juxtaposition of the new and old India makes for a stark contrast.  For me the most interesting characters were the young woman of ambiguous gender and her father.  She is the trainer at the fundamentalist camp and pushes the campers hard as she espouses an extreme Hinduism.  Yet  she does not plan to get married and describes herself something like half woman and half man.   Her father will have none of this because a wife's place is in the house. 

Then I went off to the film-maker reception at the Spenard Roadhouse where I talked to a few film makers.   Mark Mudry is in the video below.  His film Where Dreams Don't Fade, about Kenyan runners, will be screened

Friday Dec. 7 at 10pm at the AK Experience Theater  and
Sunday Dec. 8 at 7pm at Out North