fiend about film

I'm contemplating going to this year's Banff Film Fest. Only because I can't wait until the legendary homage to the year's best films about mountain culture comes to D.C.'s National Geographic in the late winter/early Spring of NEXT year. But I realize I've been extremely negligent about reviewing films I saw at this year's DC International filmfest. You'll have to pardon me as most of the time I was living out of the trunk of my car and found blogging through a blackberry is a real pain.

Ashes of American Flags: Wilco Live
What a great band and what a great documentary on them! The premise is the D.C.-based director felt bad about the last documentary he produced on Wilco, where Jeff Tweedy appeared to be ... well an asshole. When a Q&A was held after the screening, the audience couldn't satiate their thirst for answers on working with the band. Turns out Wilco really is that good live, and very little sound mixing had to be done for the scenes. Additionally the directors provided some great footage of some historic American music venues, sandwiched between panoramas from the bus as they drove into towns, cities, and through the country-side.

The Blind Sunflowers
Really amazing film. I still feel guilt for leaving the film before the Q&A was finished with the Spanish-speaking director, but alas, it was a school night. Not at all a peppy film like the title might make you think, (focus on the Blind). It centers around a family, internally resistant to the Franco regime, but must contend with the outside world while keeping appearances, knowing some of their loved ones are in a struggle to leave.

The Chaser
The most disturbing film I've seen this year. It's not that you don't know who the killer is, but it's just wondering if the so-called 'good' guys will ever catch up. Graphic displays of gory death, I shudder to even think about it. I'm curious to see how the Korean film industry will go global after this one.

Ciao Bella
Cute, really cute and funny. Flick about horny teenagers but with an international twist. Son of a dentist Persian teen and a Swedish gal heart-broken after a summer fling.

Hasan and Marcos
My Arabic school friends and I got so used to screenings every Friday night at Middlebury, we couldn't resist watching this one. I think the audience took it more seriously than it needed to be taken. Yes it's funny, yes it's over the top. And someone correct me, but I thought the politics were a bit over the top too (as in the religious divide it tries to portray).

Ramchand Pakistani
I really enjoyed this film. Incredibly nuanced with balanced portrayals of the affected family members. It is a bit long as many films from the subcontinent tend to be.

Skin
What an incredible film and one of the more powerful I've seen on the subject of race. And how absurd it is, the notion that humans are different because of the color of their skin. Because it's based on a true story, it resonates more to how brutal members of families can be to one another, and much more humankind.

mood on write

I write based on my mood. I also write based on what my fellow bloggers are writing. Travel, adventure, climbing etc. A few posts ago I alluded to being in Jordan like being in prison. But a few weeks ago I found the keys to the garden. Literally. I put the keys on a chain that opened the living room security bar doors, to the very not-desert like lushness of a backyard I rarely use yet the gardener every day dutifully waters and trims once a week. It has a sprucy evergreen in the center, with a few miniature pines that look like they came from Tuscany, and a few small red blossoms trimmed along a serpentine edge of more ever green low bushes. It is filled with rare and uncharacteristic green grass. I found the small key that unlocks the suggestion of a gate between the garden and the street. As I write now, I hear the call to evening prayer, it echoes through the city, haunting, sometimes rude when it occurs at 4 AM.

In the past week, I discovered the Amman climbing scene. A friend from language school last summer introduced me over e-mail to another American,

"you two are nice intelligent women who both told me you brought two suitcases to the Middle East, one filled with climbing equipment."

We've already spent three weekends together. It was this past week that we found one Jordanian, Hakim, going against the grain of his family and culture to cultivate climbing, seen by some Jordanians as an intrusive Western past-time. We praised the routes he opened in the hills up north, he showed us an amazing limestone blue streaked gorge in a small Christian village he started developing two years ago after interviewing locals. They first took him to a cement quarry. His biggest crux to developing routes is getting a battery-powered percussion drill and getting equipment for his burgeoning adventure tourism business.

My climbing partner and I were really excited about Hakim and Jordan's possibilities. One thing stood out about Hakim. He wanted to have Jordanians open routes in their own country. Even though he and other rockclimbing guides further south in Wadi Rum were mentored by European climbers like Tony Howard, and Wilfred, a French climber, it was important for him to name the routes in Arabic, and the first ascensionist to be of Arab origin. Similiarly, Mohammad Hammad in Wadi Rum, known as probably the most skillful climbing guide (and Hakim grudgingly admits too) in the preserve completed many first ascents in the scary soft red sandstone towers. He spoke to me of how the Bedouin mistrust the ropes and how there is resentment towards a French climber who was writing a guidebook and renamed many of the routes in French or English and claimed his own F.A., even though Mohammad and others had done those routes before.

A few weeks ago through the heat and thirst of Ramadan (the Muslim holy month of fasting) in the desert, Mohammad invited us to his house in the village, insisted on us drinking hot tea for strength and fortitude before our day of climbing began, and despite needing rest, drove us himself to the our climbing destination and several hours later sent his younger brother to pick us up. While he readied to bring food to a group of campers and fix a leaky water tank without having any food or water himself, Mohammad also took the time to drop us at a granite sport crag. In thanks, I gave him four Black Diamond Camalots, sizes 2-0.5. He told me that nothing he did prior were worth the Camalots. I disagree, last year in the winter he bailed my friend and I off a climb when we were one rope short of a rappel and then took me climbing for a full day and treated me to camp, Bedouin-style.

Jordan finally feels like it's giving me a way back to myself. And here I am leaving it in a matter of moments ...

almost out

An addendum to the previous post. First, I did experience a climber death in my own close knit community in Washington D.C. I had only climbed with him one day. As I know many climber's by his first name, it was not until I heard the details of his accident, that it was his New Zealand fiancee who was belaying him and witnessed his accident that I remembered. I read from afar the grief of my friends in our community and I too was saddened. And I understood what a terrible summer had passed. The morning I realized, I was also driving a group of friends later to Wadi Mujib, a slot canyon that fed into the Dead Sea. I was trying to remain jovial with the mood of the morning, but I had to blurt out how I felt and the car quieted. They weren't climbers, I don't think they understood it, and such a death to an outsider could only have a negative explanation. I thank them for their silence.