We Will Protect What We Fall In Love With

“I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.”

~ Louie Schwartzberg, from “The Hidden Beauty of Pollination,” TED, March 2011

Strangers No More

This 39-minute film about a school in south Tel Aviv gets my vote for best Oscar-nominated documentary short subject. The principal and teachers of Bialik-Rogozin School enthusiastically embrace the challenges of educating children from all over the world, many of whom have experienced extraordinary violence, loss, and displacement. It is a remarkable and inspiring study of resilience nurtured by providing a safe environment, finding common ground in the midst of dizzying diversity, and igniting passion for learning.

Strangers No More Movie Trailer - Bialik Rogozin School from Simon & Goodman Picture Co. on Vimeo.

Can’t Read if We Don’t Teach Them

 

Lyrics from Shine
by John Legend, for the documentary Waiting for “Superman”

So dark, but I see sparks, if we don't snuff them out.
We gotta let them flame, let them speak their name.
Let them reach up to the clouds.
Can't eat if we don't feed them.
Can't read if we don't teach them.
There's no line if we just hide them.
Don't just let them die.

Let them shine.
Let them shine on.
Let them shine.
Let them shine on.

Stars flicker in the distance, lonely out in space.
They sing out when we're not listening, because we don't see their face.
We can let them die, we can make them high.
Hold the little miracles that live inside.
Let them shine.

Changing All the Time

“For a while, people had this notion that plasticity must be a good thing. It’s a good thing that the brain can change because we can learn new things—and that’s true. But if plasticity is an intrinsic property of the brain, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the way it is…I think we’re now learning that, in fact, the brain is changing all the time, that the brain is changing with everything we think and with everything we experience. And so the challenge is to learn enough about it so that you can guide those changes.”

~ Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School

The Brain That Changes Itself from Andrew Girgis on Vimeo.

Repairing Smiles, Changing Lives

Smile Pinki
Directed by Megan Mylan
In Hindi and Bhojpuri with English subtitles
39 minutes
© 2008 Principe Productions

“Pinki is a five-year old girl in rural India born desperately poor and with a cleft lip. The simple surgery that can cure her is a distant dream until she meets Pankaj, a social worker traveling village to village gathering patients for a hospital that provides free surgery to thousands each year. Told in a vibrant vérité style, this real-world fairy tale follows its wide-eyed protagonist on a journey from isolation to embrace.”

Smile Pinki from Andrew Girgis on Vimeo.

Learn more about Smile Train.

[Thanks, Alex!]

Dangling on the Brink of Extinction

"Shot high above the streets of New York, UP THERE reveals they dying art of large-scale hand painted advertising and the untold story of the painters struggling to keep it alive."

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

Steadily Better

“There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.”

~ Margaret Atwood, from Bad Writing

 

George Saunders, from the documentary: My sense is that it has a lot more to do with the ways that someone is naturally charming. You know, so if you fall in love with somebody and they’re leaving town and you have two days to somehow change their mind, in that kind of life or death situation you bring forth certain traits of your personality. In my case, I would be telling jokes and I would be talking fast and I would be trying real hard to anticipate her reason for leaving and undercut them in a real energetic way. Those are all things that I would do in prose as well. I would definitely try to anticipate the reader’s objection to the story and build in a defense. I would try to be funny; I would try to be fast. So for me, the big breakthrough moment for me, was when I said to myself, ‘The reader is a person who you need to charm. You better bring your good shit. Because they don’t have time to wait around for you to work through your Hemingway phase.’

The Way You Are

“You know how unhappy you would be if you thought that the way you are is not okay? I started out my life like that. I don’t want to end up my life like that.”

~ Bill Withers, from Still Bill

Poetry Blows the Roof Off at CIFF

 

From “Louder Than a Film Festival,” by Clint O’Connor, The Plain Dealer (March 29, 2010):

Poetry, let alone high school poetry, is not supposed to outshine flashy films from around the globe. But "Louder Than a Bomb," a documentary about the inspiring teens of a huge poetry slam in Chicago, thrilled the audiences and judges at the 34th Cleveland International Film Festival.

The movie, which had its world premiere here, won both the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for best film, and the Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Film Competition, which honors movies about social justice and activism, and includes a $5,000 prize for co-directors Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs.

More…

On Your Way to Wonderful

Still Bill

 

"It's okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful, you're going to have to pass through all right, and when you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're gonna go."

~ Bill Withers, from “Still Bill: Documenting a Soul Icon,” All Things Considered (March 4, 2010)

Short Attention Span Culture

tte
Visit the digital_nation site to learn more and about this program, watch it online, and join the conversation.

Into the Cathedral

 

“Under the ice, the divers  find themselves in a separate reality where space and time acquire a strange new dimension. Those few who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often speak of it as going down into the cathedral.”

~ Werner Herzog, from his 2007 film, Encounters at the End of the World

[Thanks Kit!]

Hands

Dłonie (Hands)
by Maciej Jurewicz

A short documentary about silence.

 

@jscarroll

Touch the Sound

“Award-winning director and cinematographer, Thomas Riedelsheimer,  takes us on an journey through a universe of sound with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They map a world of the senses — images and sounds. Hearing images, seeing sound. With Evelyn, we experience sound as palpable and rhythm as the basis of everything that is.”

~ From the Touch the Sound web page

The Commercialization of Childhood

Bad Writing

 

“Filmmaker Celebrates the Best of Bad Writing,” by Ani Vrabel, Paste Magazine (May 29, 2009)

Making an Effort to Be Understood and to Understand Others

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

 

[Thanks Jonathan Carroll!]

Between Reality and Fantasy

“It’s all about going from reality to dreams and subconscious. It’s about memory—lost memory. And animation is perfect for that because you can really stream the events easily, go from one dimension to another with no interference at all. It looks like one story line. And I do believe that life in general is this story line that goes between reality and fantasy all the time.”

~ Ari Folman, discussing his animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir, with Studio 360’s Kurt Anderson (12.26.08).

The Order of Myths

• Official site
• Metacritic

Man on Wire

“To me it’s so simple that life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise in rebellion, to refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge and then you are going to live your life on a tight rope.”

~ Phillippe Petit

• Official site
• Metacritic
• To Reach the Clouds: My high wire walk between the twin towers by Phillippe Petit