Res-o-lu-tion. It rhymes with Rev-o-lu-tion. Rhymes with, but not jives with. And that’s just it. As poet-activist Audre Lorde once put it, “You can’t dismantle the Master’s house with the Master’s tools.”Paolo Freire knew this. At a cocktail reception for him at UCLA after he addressed over a thousand students, he stood with his head tilted back to munch off the bottom of a cluster of grapes and remarked to me, “You can’t tell someone who owns three cars that he doesn’t need one.” The wiry, pint-sized Brazilian revolutionary of pedagogy whose books were theories-turned-field manuals for professors and farm…
Author: Diane Sippl
Owl and the Sparrow is a tiny tale, as low-to-the-ground as the little girl who searches for a family she can call her own. Pham Thi Han, who plays ten-year-old Thuy, describes her character as “down on her luck.” So she runs away from her uncle’s bamboo factory, where her work is never good enough, to the big city. A flower girl on the streets of Saigon, she discovers two other castaway hearts, in a man who takes refuge as a zookeeper (Le The Lu) and a flight attendant (Cat Ly) who’s looking for love.Like a modern-day Pip in Vietnam,…
Two filmmakers made impressive breakthroughs this year at Cannes. As the festival celebrated its 60th anniversary, the jury gave the top prize to <B>Cristian Mungiu</b> for <b><i>4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days</i></b>, making it the first time a Romanian won the prestigious Palme d’Or. It also gave the Jury Prize (in a tie with <b>Carlos Reygadas</b> for <b><i>Silent Night</i></b>) to an Iranian woman, <b>Marjane Satrapi</b>, and her co-director, <b>Vincent Paronnaud</b>, for <b><i>Persepolis</i></b>, an animation film based on Satrapi’s graphic novels about growing up during and after Iran’s 1979 revolution. Considering the awards they bestowed, two observations can be made…
For his fourth feature film, Life Is All About Friends (UNNI), a French/British/Indian co-production of Patou Films, Flying Elephant Films, and Maya Films, writer-director Murali Nair cast four boys in the main roles — Master Ajith, Master Sarath, Master Likhil, and Master Noble. They are all students at Sree Krishna High School where he himself once studied. When the camera takes us to Alathur village, to the film’s location in southern India, we discover the boys pulling pranks on their teachers and classmates, spying on girls, ditching class, and boxing or wrestling at every opportunity. But we also find them…