Winged Migration

Le Peuple Migrateur, known as Winged Migration in the United States and Canada, or The Travelling Birds in the United Kingdom, or The Travelling Birds: An adventure in flight in Australia, is an Academy Award nominated 2001 documentary film directed by Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats and Jacques Perrin (who was also one of the writers and narrators) showcasing the immense journeys routinely made by birds during their migrations.

The movie was shot over the course of four years on all seven continents. Shot using in-flight cameras, most of the footage is aerial, and the viewer appears to be flying alongside birds of successive species. They traverse every kind of weather and landscape, covering vast distances in a flight for survival.Much of the aerial footage was taken of "tame" birds. The filmmakers raised birds of several species, including storks and pelicans, from birth. The newborn birds imprinted on staff members, and were trained to fly along with the film crews. Several of these species had never been imprinted before. Film was shot from ultralights,paragliders and hot air balloons, as well as trucks, motorcycles, motorboats, remote-controlled robots, and a French Navy warship.(Wikipedia)

The making of this film is a story in itself and has been made in to a documentary "Peuple migrateur - Le making of, Le ".The documentary tells the story of the (french) people that dedicated 4 years of their lives to raise and take care of a number of different groups of birds. Because they raised the birds from the moment they left their eggs, the birds regarded them as their mother/father. This allowed the movie makers to films the birds in flight because the birds would follow their parents when they went flying in an ultralight plane. I really liked this documentary because it shows the dedication and love of a small group of people for "their" birds. The stories that these people tell of the what happened during the shooting of their film in Vietnam are touching!(IMDB)

The Road to Guantanamo

The Road to Guantanamo is a 2006 docu-drama directed by Michael Winterbottom about the incarceration of three British detainees atGuantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The film tells the story of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul(the 'Tipton Three'); three young British men from Tipton in the WestMidlands who were captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in2001 and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, without charge or legal representation, for nearly three years. As well as interviews with the three men themselves and archive news footage from the period, the film contains a dramatised account of the three men's experiences following their capture, the subsequent handover to the United States military and their detention in Cuba. The Tipton Three were all released without charge in 2004.

The Color of Paradise

Another gem of a movie from Majid Majidi, the maker of "children of Heaven"."The Color of Paradise" is a fable of a child's innocence and a complex look at faith and humanity. Visually magnificent and wrenchingly moving, the film tells the story of a boy whose inability to see the world only enhances his ability to feel its powerful forces.

At an institute for blind children in Tehran, parents are arriving to pick up their children for summer vacation. But long after the other children have left with their families, 8-year-old Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) is still waiting for his father to show. Mohammad contentedly passes the hours exploring the fertile spring earth at the perimeter of the school grounds. Underneath the damp leaves, he discovers a helpless baby bird. He uses his extraordinary sense of hearing to locate the mother bird's nest and returns the bird to the safety of its home.More

Children of Heaven

(Persian: بچه‌های آسمان) A 1997 Iranian film, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1998. It deals with a brother and sister and their adventures over a lost pair of shoes, while also touching upon the more serious subject of the political situation in Iran as well as class differences between the rich and the poor and daily urban life.

Ali takes his little sister Zahra's shoes to the shoemaker to be repaired, but loses them on the way home. The siblings decide to keep the predicament a secret from their parents, knowing that there is no money to buy a replacement pair and fearing that they will be punished. They devise a scheme to share Ali's sneakers: Zahra will wear them to school in the morning and hand them off to Ali at midday so he can attend afternoon classes. This uncomfortable arrangement leads to one adventure after another as they attempt to hide the plan from their parents and teachers, attend to their schoolwork and errands, and acquire a new pair of shoes for Zahra.

Ali enters a high-profile children's footrace in hopes of receiving the third prize of a new pair of sneakers. He accidentally places first and wins another prize instead. The film ends with Zahra finding out that she will not get a new pair of shoes, but an epilogue explains that Ali eventually achieves the larger-scale success of having a racing career. However a quick shot of their father's bicycle at the end of the movie shows what appears to be the pink shoes Zahra had been focusing on earlier, implying she got the shoes after all.

A Scene From The Film

Apu Trilogy

Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apu Sansar (1959)— trace the life of a Bengali family and their son Apu, as he moves from childhood in a rural village, through his youth in Benares where the family later moves, to manhood and marriage in Calcutta.

The Apu Trilogy, which made Satyajit Ray India’s first internationally recognised director, helped to redefine cinema for the most serious Indian filmmakers at this time and influenced and encouraged many others internationally. Such was the power of Ray’s work that Japanese master director Akira Kurosawa remarked: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

Ray was born in Calcutta 1921 to a family of distinguished intellectuals and grew up surrounded by art, literature and music. His father and grandfather, who were closely associated with India’s social reformist Brahmo Samaj movement and its leading poet and dramatist Rabindranath Tagore, were printers and publishers who also wrote and illustrated children’s stories and poetry.

Increasingly passionate about movies, Ray helped establish the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, organising special showings of Hollywood, European and Russian films. He began writing film reviews and in 1948 published a short but perceptive comment entitled “What is Wrong with Indian Films”. It criticised the predominance of saccharine sweet musicals and religious mysticism in Indian cinema and declared: “The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the moviemaker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”

Soon after writing this essay, Ray met French film director Jean Renoir who encouraged him to begin making his own films. In 1950 the talented 29-year-old illustrator was sent to London for six months to work in the advertising agency’s head office. Ray spent most of his spare time there watching movies—more than 90 odd films—including Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and several other Italian neo-realist cinema classics.

The Bicycle Thief, Ray wrote in a 1951 essay, was “a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of the cinema” and the “simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production make it the ideal film for the Indian filmmaker to study.”

“The present blind worship of technique emphasises the poverty of genuine inspiration among our directors,” Ray continued. “For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment. The filmmaker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, and not [Cecil B.] DeMille, should be his ideal.”

Ray had been commissioned in 1945 to illustrate a children’s edition of Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), the popular semi-autobiographical novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandhipadhyaya. Inspired by de Sica’s film, Ray decided to make the novel the subject of his first film and spent the two-week boat trip from London back to India preparing shooting sketches and a basic plan for its production.
Pather Panchali, which is set in the early 1900s, has a relatively simple plot. In fact, the film largely consists of a series of short, loosely-connected vignettes tracing out the life and times of a poor Brahmin family in rural Bengal and the birth and childhood of their only son Apu. Head of the family, Harihar (Kanu Banerji), who dreams of being a poet, has brought Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerji), his pregnant wife, and Durga (Uma Das Gupta), his daughter, from Benares back to the ancestral rural home. The young family also takes care of an aged aunt, Indir Thakrun (Chunibala Devi).

Pather Panchali follows the trials and tribulations of this poor family: the first conscious experiences of Apu (Subir Banerji), his early school years and close bond with his sister Durga, and their adventures in the nearby forest and fields. The underlying strength of the film is Ray’s unsentimental but intensely artistic exploration of many universal themes. He carefully examines the interaction of life and death, the aged and the young, and makes subtle references to the tensions between rural and city life and how it is being changed by new technology—in this case electricity and the railway.

In one memorable sequence, which also cuts to the last difficult moments of Indir’s life, the children, who have been quarrelling, are playing in fields far from home and come across some high tension electricity pylons. Fascinated by the humming sound of the wires they walk on through long grass, see the smoke of a distant train and then run to the railway tracks. The train, which has previously been an occasional background sound in their lives, is seen in all its power, the hope of a better life beyond their immediate environment. Their quarrels are forgotten in their fascination with the train but on the way back home they stumble across Indir who has collapsed and is dying in the woods.

Pather Panchali has some extraordinarily joyous moments combined with periods of deep sadness, including the death of Indir, and then the tragic loss of Durga, who catches a fever after a dancing in the monsoon rains and dies just before her father’s long-awaited return.

The success of Pather Panchali allowed Ray to begin work immediately on Aparajito (The Unvanquished), also based on a Bandhipadhyaya novel, which was completed in 1956 and won the Golden Lion award at the 1957 Venice Film Festival. This film is more complex in terms of plot and characterisation compared to Pather Panchali and set new standards for Indian cinema actors.

Set in the 1920s, Aparajito begins in the holy city of Benares on the Ganges where the family, still in shock over Durga’s death, had moved. Harihar is attempting to maintain Sarbajaya, his wife, and the 10-year-old Apu (Smaran Ghosal) by reciting Hindu scriptures and selling religious trinkets to pilgrims visiting the holy river. While the family is still poor and Harihar’s health is declining, he is happy to be reunited with his wife and son, who is animated and excited about city life. Tragedy strikes, however, when Harihar catches a fever and collapses one day after climbing the steps from the river and dies soon after.

Having lost her husband and only daughter, Sarbajaya decides to relocate to her uncle’s village in Bengal where Apu resumes his education at the local school. The central focus of Aparajito is the changing relationship between Apu (now played by Santi Gupta) and his mother. The years go by and Apu wins a scholarship to a Calcutta college and leaves the village. Sarbajaya is proud of her son but concerned about who will care for her in his absence.

The final part of the film alternates between Apu’s life with his school friends in Calcutta and what he considers to be boring vacations in the quiet village with his mother. Apu is unconscious of his mother’s loneliness and disdainful of village life. Sarbajaya, who scolds him for not writing to her enough, is torn by her isolation and the recognition that the young man must make his own way in the world. As in Pather Panchali, the train is a potent symbol in the film: for Apu it is his lifeline to the outside world; for Sarbajaya it is a vehicle of hope that carries Apu back to the village for his brief vacations.

Angry and confused, Apu blames the baby for his wife’s death and refuses to take any responsibility for the child and wanders the countryside in a state of deep despair. Five years later he decides to visit his son. Although his in-laws are bitter and the child rejects him at first, father and son form a bond and Apu resolves to take full care and responsibility of the young boy.

It is difficult to exaggerate the artistic beauty of the Apu Trilogy, which has some astonishingly poetic and haunting imagery that resonates long after specific details of the films’ plots have faded from the one’s more immediate memory. Apu and Durga’s discovery of the train outside their village or Durga’s joyous dance in the first monsoon rains in Pather Panchali; Sarbajaya’s emotional pain as she tries to come to terms with her son’s longer absences from home in Aparajito; and the extraordinary intimacy of the newly-married Apu and Aparna in Apu Sansar.

Another one of the many indelible moments in Apu Sansar is Apu’s interview with the manager of a small factory. The job? Handwriting labels for food jars. The interview concludes and Apu is taken to the workroom and looks into the dark and dirty hellhole. Nothing is said and the camera barely moves. The blank gaze of a worker says more than a thousand words of dialogue, not just about this soul-destroying job, but the system that produces this misery.

The greatness of these films, however, lie not just in the lyrical cinematography, honesty of the actors’ performances and the intense music of Ravi Shankar, but in the universal themes Ray deals with and his underlying optimism. Despite the extraordinarily tragic moments in the trilogy, and there are many, Ray always provides a sense of hope that no matter how great the difficulties confronting his characters the struggle for genuinely caring human relations can overcome all adversity. Commenting on the initial success of Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Ray declared in 1958: “Personally I have been lucky with my first two films, but what is really important and exciting is not the immediate gain, but the ultimate vindication of the belief that I hold dearest as an artist: art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards.” (Richard Phillips)

Pather Panchali - The Train Scene

Meetings with Remarkable Men

It's the story of G. I. Gurdjieff's passionate quest through the Middle East and Central Asia for answers to the question of the meaning of life. As a boy, Gurdjieff is influenced by his father, a man of remarkable character who nurtures in his son a need to understand the mystery of human existence. A brush with death and other extraordinary, inexplicable events heighten Gurdjieff's sense of wonder about the meaning of human life, but no one can answer his questions. Inspired by the discovery of scrolls containing hidden knowledge, Gurdjieff surmounts unforeseeable danger which culminate in the discovery of a secret school where he learns to integrate all the principles of an esoteric teaching. The film concludes with rarely seen sequences of Sacred Dances directed by Jeanne de Salzmann, who was given the responsibility of teaching them by Gurdjieff. The film, by renowned director Peter Brook, was made on locations in the rarely photographed forbidding mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, and has been widely acclaimed for its unique beauty. "Ravishingly beautiful" -Newsweek "Masterful direction that gives significance and an irresistible emotional charge to every move and expression." - Le Figaro.(Storytellingmonk.org)

Sacred Dances video from the movie

Amelie

Nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay, this magical French comedy is a story of a painfully shy waitress working at a tiny Paris cafe, Amélie who makes a surprising discovery and sees her life drastically changed for the better! From then on, Amélie dedicates herself to helping others find happiness ... in the most delightfully unexpected way! But will she have the courage to do for herself what she has done for others?

All About Anna

A Danish film released in 2005, directed by Jessica Nilsson and starring Gry Bay and Mark Stevens, All About Anna tells the story of Anna, a single woman who seeks to maintain an active sex life while staying clear of romantic relationships. When a former boyfriend shows up, she starts wondering how much longer she can maintain her emotional independence, and if that's even what she wants. At the same time, she is offered a job as costume designer on a French theatre, where two local stage actorsoffer new amorous temptations.(wikipedia)
This slick chick flick with realistically explicit sex scenes comes from Denmark

This slick chick flick with realistically explicit sex scenes comes from Denmark — where modern movie porn more or less began... (http://www.myspace.com/allaboutannathemovie)

Ikiru-"to live"

"Life is brief, fall in love, maidens...Before the crimson bloom fades from your lips...Before the tides of passion cools within you...For those of you who know no tomorrow...Life is brief, fall in love, maidens...Before our raven tresses begin to fade...Before the flames in your hearts flicker and die...For those to whom today will never return..." (Theme Song)

Ikiru (生きる) is a 1952 Japanese motion picture written and directed by the acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ikiru looks at the struggles of a Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning.

Takashi Shimura, who played in many of Kurosawa's films (most notably as the leader of Seven Samurai), as Kanji Watanabe. Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades.
After realizing he has gastric cancer, giving him less than a year to live, Watanabe attempts to come to terms with his impending death. He tries to find escape in the pleasures of Tokyo's nightlife, but after one night realizes this is not the answer.
Worth noticing in the night club scene is Watanabe's theme song, which he sings to the horror of those watching him. The song is a ballad encouraging young women to find love. In the Japan of the 1950s, the post-war reality of significantly fewer eligible men sometimes required young women who hoped for families to accept men Watanabe's age (or older) as spouses.( Wiki)

Turtles can fly

"Turtles Can Fly," the first feature film set in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is Bahman Ghobadi's claim to fame. The Kurdish-Iranian director's third film bittersweetly chronicles the life of a village waiting for war to erupt. While adults watch events unfold on American cable-news channels, children try to make a few bucks collecting land mines. Their self-proclaimed leader, a boy called Satellite, falls in love with the enigmatic and ever-escaping Agrin, who flees the brutality of war with her armless brother and a blind toddler in tow. But tragedy, it turns out, isn't so easily outrun.(Marie Valla)

Music Video for "Turtles Can Fly"



"Another head hangs lowly, child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we mistaken"

Three Colors trilogy

“A monumental work that blends cinema, philosophy and music in a seamless whole” (Paul Newall in The Galilean Library) see more

"the collective title of three films directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, two made in French and one primarily in Polish. Blue, white, and red are the colors of the French flag in left-to-right order, and the story of each film is loosely based on one of the three political ideals in the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality, fraternity." (wikipedia) see more

In Blue Binoche is Julie de Courcy, a woman who loses her composer husband and their daughter Anna in a car crash at the opening of the movie. Fleeing her old life and her lover Olivier, she tries to start over, taking an apartment in a working class area of Paris.

White is the story of Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser living in Paris and married to Dominique Vidal, a French coiffure. She leaves him because of his failure to consummate their union. The movie begins with a number of humiliations, as Karol loses his marriage, his finances and his dignity through the divorce hearing and his (now ex-) wife immediately taking a lover.

In Red Valentine is a young model living in Geneva. Because of a dog she ran over, she meets a retired judge who spies his neighbours' phone calls, not for money but to feed his cynicism. The film is the story of relationships between some human beings, Valentine and the judge, but also other people who may not be aware of the relationship they have with Valentine or/and the old judge.

9 Songs

A 2004 British film, directed by Michael Winterbottom. The title refers to the nine songs played by eight different rock bands that complement the story of the film. The film was controversial on its original release due to its sexual content, which included unsimulated footage of the two leads having sexual intercourse and performing oral sex as well as a scene of ejaculation. (wikipedia) see more