Asakiyume mita

Last week I saw No Other Land (2024; Oscar-winning documentary on destruction of a group of small hamlets in the West Bank, filmed from 2019 through 2023).

In it, at one point the father of Basel Adra (one of the two main young men making the documentary) takes several of the children in the extended family to school in a van. (The school is later destroyed.) The children are chanting in the van, they say--

We have grass; it exists.
We have a mountain; it exists.
We have a chicken house; it exists.
We have a rock; it exists.

There may have been other things they say--those were the ones I scrawled down in my notebook in the theater.

This could be something similar to playing "I spy with my little eye" ("I spy with my little eye something striped!" and then people guess what you see). Or part of a nursery rhyme or something that doesn't rhyme when you translate it into English.

But to me, watching that movie, it felt like a verbal way of touching, and touching base with, things that are really there and won't disappear. It felt like a spell, even.

Although the chicken house does, in fact, get bulldozed.

mallorys_camera put me onto La Chimera, the story of a haunted English archaeologist working with a gang of small-time Italian tomb robbers (tombaroli), digging up Etruscan artifacts and selling them to Spartaco, an mysterious black-market art dealer. It was so moving--I saw it alone first (but not quite alone: I took the photo I have on my desk of Lloyd Alexander and showed him the last few minutes of it, because I knew, knew, knew that he would understand and love the ending ). Then I got wakanomori to watch it with me, then I put my dad onto it.

mallorys_camera speaks about the film beautifully here, but the line I want to seize on in what she writes is this:

Its sense of place is strong as is its sense of temporal duality, a feeling that the past is so strong, nothing is there to stop it from consuming the present.

The dead and the living are equally present. Arthur, the Englishman, is balanced between their worlds. Except actually their worlds aren't even really separate.

Things keep changing, depending on the light they're in, depending on whose hands they rest in, depending on who's just spoken, depending on the season. Tomb robbing seems, prima facie, a bad thing, but when you see the small, ancient items of daily life in the hands of the tombaroli and their friends, it doesn't feel that way. It's like the items are living again and cherished again--until a character named Italia (great name for someone speaking out about the theft of the patrimony of the country, but also ironic! Because she's from Brazil) calls direct attention to the enormity of what they're doing:

What are they going to do? Steal from the souls? ... Those things aren't made for human eyes.

And then your vision swings around to desecration, destruction. Light hits ancient paintings of birds and a sheen of something, some magic or divinity, melts away from them. Ordinary people ("they weren't all pharaohs," one of the tumbaroli points out) speak plaintively of their missing grave goods ("There was also a golden fibula ... it meant a lot to me").

It's a very sensual film. You feel the cold. You feel the wet. You feel the warmth and light. The sound of birds is always with you.

Some words that are spoken near the end of the movie, by a character who's transformed an abandoned building, really lingered with me:

It didn't belong to anyone or it belonged to everyone ... [This is] only a temporary setup. But life itself is temporary.

It's a current film, so you have to pay to see it, but it is so, so worth it.

If you enjoy a good heist movie and have Netflix, I highly recommend iNumber Number: Jozi Gold**(directed by Donovan Marsh), a heist flick out of South Africa. It gives you a very entertaining foursquare of lawful/chaotic good/evil alignment, humor, fun characters, truly luminous cinematography in a most likely unfamiliar landscape (unless you're from South Africa). (Also violence, but less than in American films.) The protagonists are cop buddies Shoes (straight arrow, gentle family man) and Chili (has vigilante tendencies) who fail in the initial 15 minutes to take down the Hyena Man (bonus larger than life CG hyena) and so are sent down to The Basement by their corrupt boss--whereupon the rest of the plot, involving a Robin Hood gang, a 1972 mint sold for scrap, a dictator's son, that hyena, and an orphanage, unfolds.

( the foursquare )

I think the film must have been shot mainly at sunrise and sunset, because it's filled with a golden light that's perfect for a film about a gold heist.


And I was struck by its meditation on the weight--in all senses of the word--of gold. In the first chase scene, Chili is pursuing the Hyena man while lugging around a bag of gold nuggets. He finally leaves it with a guy in the poor neighborhood he's running through with the admonishment not to open it (!!) When he comes back...

( I used to be the best drill op )

Light, by contrast, has no weight, but transforms. As does fire.


But mainly the film's just propulsively fun, with a great sense of style and a good sound track. And you get to hear Zulu spoken.

What will you do with your one wild and precious krugerrand?


**Not to be confused with iNumber Number: Avenged, an earlier flick with the same main characters.

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because it's a wetland, there are sections with plank walkways to keep you above the water. For one of them, the beams are laid out lengthwise, and when you walk on them, it's musical, like a marimba (you have to turn your sound up to hear; it's a not-great 10-second phone video):



The creator signed it:


The other walkways have the planks laid out crosswise--they don't give the same music (but are fine for walking on!)


I saw an odd but funny and entertaining movie on Netflix, Army of Thieves (2021). In it, a young German bank clerk who has been mastering safecracking in his spare time is recruited to break into a series of bank vaults designed by a master locksmith and themed on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas. (The vaults are named Reingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.) For each vault, the guy tells the story of that opera, and the music plays in the background, and then you get an image of all the gears and tumblers moving as he goes into a trance, listening to the clicks and slides and whirs. So cool! And the rest of the gang are hilarious characters. I feel like sartorias would enjoy it.

Weirdly, the movie is a prequel to a zombie film, Army of the Dead. This film is not a zombie film at all! Is this a thing that happens often? A prequel that's a totally different genre from the original film? The only way zombies figure in Army of Thieves is that you hear news stories about this zombie outbreak in Nevada, and sometimes the hero has bad dreams about zombies. I think he's the only carryover from one film to the other...

I just saw the Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost (2021; dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman), and whoa. It's pure resistance poetry from beginning to end; it fights the gender binary; it braids pessimism and resilient hopefulness, and it's *beautiful*. The music, the colors--and the languages! Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English. Amazing.



Here's how one review summarizes it:

When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

It's a pretty stream-of-consciousness film, but you don't need to be able to connect all the dots to love the experience.

My Tetun classmate alerted me to this film on healing in Timor-Leste. It's beautiful in every way: as a respectful inquiry into other people's ways of living and dealing with injury and illness, as cinematography, and as a meditation on what healing and care is. As the introductory text on Vimeo says,

The film asks viewers to consider what we understand health and wellbeing to mean, showing how healing is intimately entangled with forms of belief and care grounded in deep connections between people and their environments.

The directors interview a number of healers, including one doctor from what they call the formal sector. Everyone shares their thoughts and personal history so generously--including three smiling little girls, who talk about the little remedies their mother has taught them.





This is something we can all relate to! Put aloe on a burn, put jewelweed on poison ivy (if you live in the US), put a dock leaf on a nettle sting (if you live in the UK). And probably all of us have others--I remember being told sugar would draw out a splinter, for instance, and to gargle with hot salt water if I had a sore throat.

More broadly, though, the US medical system is alienating in every way that the healing practices described here are affirming. I'm not saying everything about traditional healing is perfect--humans are still humans, and any system is open to human failure, and Timorese people themselves (as the directors talk about in a scholarly paper on the same topic) are uneasy about the possibility for charlatans. ... But of course US medical practice has its charlatans too.

( I felt a powerful longing... )

I think the thing I felt most strongly in the film was the sense of connection between and among everything, the sense that a single act of healing reaches back into families and down into the earth.

Link to the film is here. It's 30 minutes.

Wakanomori and I watched this early Kurosawa film just now, and wow--what a story, what actors, what cinematography. There's a scene in the middle, where the tired down-and-outers at an all-night bar start singing the Japanese-language version of Auld Lang Syne, that shows a love of humanity that brings tears to your eyes--it's as stirring as when everyone sings the Marseillaise in Casablanca, though for completely different reasons.

It stars a very young Toshiro Mifune as an artist (Ichiro Aoi [correction! It's Aoe]) and Yoshiko Yamaguchi ** as a singer (Miyako Saijo) whom paparazzi photograph in a compromising position, although there's nothing between them.

It's not what it seems!


The scandal rag Amour prints a racy story, to their mutual distress, and Aoe announces his intention to sue. Enter Takashi Shimura as down-at-the-heel attorney Otokichi Hirata [Correction: Hiruta, omg where am I tonight], who begs Aoe to hire him for the case. A less appealing entrance you can't imagine: he coughs a wet cough, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and complains about having stepped in raw sewage out in the street--and then empties out his boots and wrings out his socks, right in the room.



Aoe's model and friend Sumie (Noriko Sengoku) warns him not to hire Hiruta, but Aoe sees something good in his eyes. After Aoe meets Hiruta's bedridden daughter Masako (Yoko Katsuragi), he's even more sure he wants to hire the lawyer.

But Hiruta is a very compromisable and soon compromised man. So what will happen?

There are aspects of the film that seem like they'd push it to sentimentality. You could see Masako that way, for instance. But the bits of dialogue designed to show her goodness feel so entirely like they belong to a real person that for me at least, she escaped that fate. (At one point the subtitles have her say "my imagination keeps me busy," but what she actually says is more like "I daydream about so many things that I'm positively busy/rushed")

But what really prevents the film from being sentimental is its clear-eyed, understated recognition of how hard it is to be human in a cold world, and the incredible affection and respect you can feel flowing from Kurosawa, via Aoe, toward everyone (with the exception of the publisher of Amour, who forfeits his right to respect through his self-interested lying and manipulation). The people in the bar scene I mentioned earlier could have come out of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

( faces )

It's also notable and noticeable that there's no romance in the movie (though you can imagine one springing up after the film ends)--it means that other emotions and types of love stand forward.

I highly recommend it. It's available through Netflix DVD or on YouTube. sovay, the refined lawyer Dr. Kataoka seems tailor made for you. Although he's the publisher's attorney, he's an honorable man.


Posters advertising the salacious story near the beginning and at the end of the film:






**Actress who was born in Japanese-colonized Manchuria, made Japanese propaganda films during the war, was an actual singer and later a member of parliament, and who died in 2014 at age 90.

A 14-minute film that follows two Oakland teens, who talk about writing, reading, being Black, growing up in Oakland, etc. I enjoyed spending time with these two and their family and friends and seeing the city, and I think you will too. They're part of the better world we're reaching for. We'll reach it. We'll build it together.

I decided to buy some street-art-quality chalks and see how long they last (answer: not long! This would be an expensive hobby...)

And I drew this...



The nice thing about chalk art is you can keep on tinkering with it. I might add more red to the face.

I also ended up decorating my jeans:



The healing angel and her significant other are living across our household and the significant other's household (yes: we know--we consider ourselves all one infection/virus family), and yesterday evening they were over, and we all watched Frozen II together, which was relaxing. I enjoyed seeing the sisters' different hairstyles, and the songs were fun. The plot was a little lurchy, but it seemed like it advanced both sisters further along good-for-them trajectories and that it gave young fans more of what they liked.

Then the healing angel and her significant other retired to the healing angel's room, and Waka and I watched the Easter vigil streamed from our church. In addition to the priest, there was a cantor and some readers--the cantor sang the Exsultet, which gladdened my heart.

In 2012, I was briefly a skateboarder. I loved the speed and grace and daring of it--I wanted to touch that and live that.

That time was brought back to me so vividly tonight watching Skate Kitchen (2018), which I requested from Netflix DVD because of osprey_archer's excellent review) of it. The film coveys the feel of skateboarding beautifully (and also the dangers of it--part of why I quit: I loved the daring but wasn't up for the injuries), and I loved the posse of girls--real-life members of the Skate Kitchen, an all-girl skate collective in New York City. The director apparently met members of the collective while riding the subway, and she used Rachelle Vinberg, who plays the main character in Skate Kitchen, in a 2016 short film, That One Day.

The scenes of New York City's skating haunts are ones I remember from a video of skateboarding I found and posted back in 2012--it made the movie feel extra real to me.

The trailer pretty accurately captures the feel of the film:



And osprey_archer, the quote you were trying to find is the voiceover at the start of the trailer (and the scene with the little girl is in the trailer too). You're right: it's beautiful.