Here are we waiting for you

Just to recommend you a great documentary. Yes, we can understand ourselves through the stories we tell. Synopsis
According to director Marcelo Masagão, his film is a “documentary memory” of the 20th century. It consists largely of archive footage: excerpts from classic films, news reports and photographs, complemented by photos and footage that Masagão made especially for the film. Great themes that have shaped the 20th century come up: wars, industrial development and modern art. The film consists of short chapters that center around the lives of all kinds of people, both great and unknown. The general framework of the film is formed by images of a cemetery somewhere in Brazil. We see photos of tombstones with portraits of the deceased, to which the filmmaker adds fictitious names and years of birth and death. Masagão builds his scenes around these images, linking the lives of all these individuals to the history of the century they lived in. These stories are not presented as a chronological enumeration of facts. Instead, the film has the capricious structure of a dream or a memory, with unexpected leaps in time, associative editing, and suggestive music by Wim Mertens. There is no voice-over, but words nevertheless play an important role through text that appears in various places in the frame. From the site http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=62876eb0-d5c4-4697-8cb3-8003c0e65256

See also http://eyesonbrazil.com/brazilian-films-the-list/

The Story of Stuff

Today, with over 15 million views and counting, The Story of Stuff is one of the most watched environmental-themed online movies of all time.

 

A site that worth a visit http://www.storyofstuff.org/

 

A Day at the Beach

Wonderful and historical pictures of an ordinary day in the lives of people who are definitely not ordinary. Visit the link http://goo.gl/8ebkh

Let the Great World Spin

This photo came to me through Facebook. It impressed me so much how these men could feel perfectly at ease in such space. I had the immediate thought that perhaps they wouldn’t feel so comfortable at their own homes, so at peace. Sharing with each other what they have to share, only their friendship and fellowship, with some beer and cigarettes and laughter. While they are there upon the city,  city life goes on and nobody pays attention to them apart from the photographer. Then, the moment is registered forever. Their harmony, the feeling of belonging of these men to the city that hosts them, protects them and at the same time explores their workforce as it happens in every place. However, similarly to the movie ‘Dead Poets Society’ these men seem to whisper ‘carpe diem’. A whisper that creeps inside my ears directly to my soul.

By one of these fortunate coincidences of life, when the top picture found me at Facebook  I was reading the fantastic book ‘Let the Great World Spin’, by Column MacCann, which brings  exactly this sensation of life going on in its infinite ways without our noticing, passing by our distracted, indifferent eyes. The book starts in 1974 when the tightrope man defied human laws and the laws of physics and dared the first step. Philippe Petit walked a tightrope wire between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. From this point on the story unfolds itself bringing numerous characters of the city with their anonymous dramas that compose the immense mosaic of a world that won’t stop spinning. The sight of Petit’s face in this pic produces the same effect of a piercing question: ‘Can’t you see me? What are you gonna do of your day?

Well, I’ll put one foot in front of the another and keep going.

The first chapter of this book is available on http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Free-Book-Download-Let-the-Great-World-Spin-by-Colum-McCann

You can also find additional information about the documentary Man on Wire on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155592/ and finally, you can join a very interesting discussion about this book on http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/546-let-the-great-world-spin-mccann?start=3

Santos Dumont – documentary

 

56 UP

The Up Series is a series of documentary films produced by Granada Television that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The documentary has had eight episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years) and the documentary has been broadcast on both ITV and BBC. In a 2005 Channel 4 programme, the series topped the list of The 50 Greatest Documentaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series
I would like to recommend this.