NETFLIX recommendations (4)
Here are my next three Netflix recommendations. Thank you for responding to them and commenting on your experience of seeing them!
Loreak (Flowers) (2014) by Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga
In the production company Moriarti three Basque directors, Jon Garaño, José Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi work together and have so far delivered a series of rather successful films on the award circuit. Their latest is La Trinchera Infinita (The Endless Trench) from 2018, which is also available on Netflix, as well as Giant (2017). But in this fourth series of Netflix recommendations I want to highlight their earlier film Loreak (Flowers) from 2014. Loreak was the first Basque-language film that was selected as Spain’s Oscar nominee for best foreign film.
The Moriarti group’s particular interest is in psychological films. Loreak is a story about love and memory. It deals with three women who live in different ways quite unhappy, unfulfilled lives. It starts with Ane who gets to hear from her doctor that her complaints are caused by her having entered into menopause. Her future looks bleak, being childless, at the side of a non-attentive husband. Then a bouquet of flowers is delivered without a note. And after the first time they arrive every week without her having a clue of whom they come. But she starts to look differently at the world, curious, more outgoing, wondering…
The viewer gets to know that the sender is Benat, a crane operator working for the construction company Ane is working for. The other two women are his wife, Lourdes, and his meddling mother, Tere. When Benat’s car crashes and he is killed, the flowers stop coming. Benat’s wife has her way of mourning, trying to erase everything that reminds of him. Tere tries to connect with Lourdes as a way of honoring her sun. Let me not tell you more. See for yourself how these women are brought together, the emotions they go through, what causes life to close for each one of the three and what causes a new openness to life.
The Butterfly’s Dream (2013) by Yilmaz Erdogan
This Turkish film is a period drama, set during World War II, in a small city on the Black Sea. The regime is oppressive and raids people to work in the coal mines. Tuberculosis is rampant among the poor. This epic story is loosely based on the real lives of two young Turkish poets, forgotten by history. Yilmaz Erdogan is a poet himself, who through this film made posthumously their poetry known to the general public and gave them some name.
The film is about the power of poetry in miserable, strenuous adversities. The two poets keep believing that one day their poems will be published and they remain cheerful although living in poverty and struck by this terrible respiratory disease. They are supported by their teacher, played by Yilmaz Erdogan himself. They compete for the love of a beautiful girl, Suzan, the daughter of a well-to-do, influential man, who after having found out that they have tuberculosis forbids her to meet them and sends her away.
The Butterfly’s dream is a beautiful, elegant film with great photography. It took me half an hour to get into the drama of the story, but slowly got more and more mesmerized by their agony, their sadness and their unfulfilled hopes, but also by their relentless optimism and drive. We follow them all the way to their early death. It definitely gave me a deeper sense of the power of poetry.
Evelyn (2018) by Orlando von Einsiedel
Evelyn is a documentary film made by the UK director Orlando von Einsiedel. Von Einsiedel is known for his prizewinning documentaries about global social issues. On Netflix you also find his Oscar winning documentary short film The White Helmets from 2016 about first responders in the Syrian civil war and his 2014 film Virunga about park rangers in Eastern Congo who try to save the last mountain gerillas while militias come rolling in. All three documentaries are absolutely worth your time and attention!
Evelyn however is a deeply personal film, in which he takes on the processing, together with his family, of the suicide of his younger brother. Realizing that they never really have talked about their deepest emotions, ten years after the death of their brother, they go on a 4-week trek along the places where their brother has been walking. Deeply moving, it teaches us about the need for one another in coping with such a trauma and also indirectly about the role of nature in such a process.
With stunning pictures of the British countryside!
Rinus, April 2020
Photo by Dawid Łabno on Unsplash
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Last night we watched The Butterfly’s dream. Thanks, Rinus for the suggestion. We would have easily passed it over if we had been searching Netflix by ourselves. My historical interest was piqued as I have never thought about Turkey during World War II, and had no clue of the cruel forced labor of its citizens to work in its mines. The film countered beautifully the power of friendship and the shared joy of poetry against the brutal reality and results of working in coal mines. I would suggest viewers notice how coughs and poems are used in moving the story forward. Finally, I loved the role of the professor and his willingness to ignore class differences to mentor such worthy poets.
Thanks for these Rinus. We will try to watch at least one this weekend!
We recently watch the Irishman on Netflix. We had been hesitant to do so due to its length and to my wife’s aversion to gangster movies. Neither of these fears proved to be true. Though there was some violence, Scorsese chose not to dwell on violence once the personality of the protagonist was established. The acting was magnificent. The three principle actors, De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino all gave mature believable performances, and it was truly a treat to witness. I also found the history of the 1950’s and 60’s of the USA compelling as Scorsese took on two of the country’s great mysteries, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa and the assassination of President Kennedy. Finally, De Niro’s character gives much to ponder. He was really an outsider in two controlling worlds. He was caught between his loyalty to a union boss and a mafia boss. He was of the wrong heritage, Irish rather than Italian. He was a natural leader, but he was generally kept behind the scenes. Ultimately, he was an outsider to his own choices as seen in the broken relationships to his daughters. The Irishman is a good reminder of the damage that is done being an outsider to one’s own life.
Last night when we began the film Evelyn (Film Recommendation 4) I was expecting a dry film that would probably drag on as we watched a family walking through England processing their grief. When the film ended, I tearfully responded, wow what great storytelling! I was first attracted to the beauty of the film, especially the overhead shots of the English and Scottish countryside. Secondly, the authenticity of the film is striking. To make an authentic documentary about others is complicated, but here the director does so with his own family coming to terms with their son/brother/friend’s suicide. Only occasionally is there an awareness of the camera’s presence. Finally, the theme of suicide and grief is entered into with such a delicate fineness…no easy answers, no final solutions. I lost a very dear friend to suicide a few years ago and was reminded of the terrible and painful questions of, “What if?”, “Why didn’t they?” and “Why didn’t I?” Yet through the beauty of nature, the movement of the body, a safe community, and the bravery to honestly look at the heart, this documentary shows that emotional bottlenecks can be overcome, leading into a new space for living.
Several days ago I watched the film “Evelyn”. Since then it has been on my mind, but I feel it is receding, and I want to write down some impressions of those moments before they fade away completely. I would say it is an ideal film to be watched, to be savored with friends and to discuss with anyone.
The film is a documentary about an attempt at catharsis, and to try to overcome a family tragedy during the timeframe of a month. This path is, above all, an emotional journey, the longing to cauterize a wound, or at least to be able to live with the grief left by the loss of a sibling, who committed suicide. The feeling of hurt, incomprehension and helplessness are evident, almost solid, and touch the viewer directly and deeply. You feel that you are attending a deep vital experience in its purest form. You are invited to share grief and joy, tension and understanding, an open display of feelings and also, modesty when showing them.
We don’t actually know if the therapy provides the protagonists with the longed-for reconcilement with the trauma, but you would wish it so.
Whenever I experience these displays of the soul in film or book (I am a regular reader of certain diarists), I always find myself perceiving, on one hand, a great feeling of sincerity and immediacy, and on the other hand, considering all the artifice needed to communicate those sensations. In this case it involves, obviously, a script, or at least a predefined idea (what, who, when, where…), without a doubt a budget, the presence of a camera before which the protagonists bare their feelings, cinematographic editing, with shots that we will never see… In sum, I have the impression that all this sincerity is not so direct, that it has a lot of intermediation and we don’t see what really happened, but only a version. In an imaginary history this does not need to be pointed out, but in these other cases I can’t completely circumvent it, even though it is absolutely unavoidable.
Apart from that and in an entirely serendipitous manner, the film has coincided with my reading of Conversations in Tusculum, by Cicero, which deals, in general, with the passions of the soul, a subject that it shares with the film, to some extent.
The two don’t strike me as entirely different from each other. Granted that the perspectives are quite different -one is emotional and the other rational- but they share base assumptions such as the substrate that contextualizes and shows the logic behind one answer and not another.
After reading it I cannot imagine an illustrated and sensitive Roman citizen considering appropriate the exorcising of pain that the film depicts. We could not call Cicero brutalized or morally indifferent, but I doubt that his answer would be similar to the Einsiedel siblings’. Does this mean that Human nature has changed? I do not think so. We are concerned more or less with the same things; it is only our knowledge and our substrate that has changed. Then, does this mean that over millennia humans have developed a greater sensitivity, at least in certain areas? If so, we could ask ourselves if one of them is objectively better than the other. And I think this an interesting question, because it points directly to the root of all that is Human. I have a theory in this regard, but I am going to leave it there, and wait to see if someone wants to follow the thread of this discussion…
Alberto
With a little help from Daniel
Wow, such interesting questions! Is humanity on its way towards something? What can we learn from how humanity has dealt with pain and oppression? What does that say about ‘the root of all that is Human’? Just hope that many more want to step into this discussion!
Has humanity, over millennia, developed a greater sensitivity, a least in certain areas? Anecdotally speaking, the evidence in either direction looks so mixed. The developed world has for centuries referred to the increased velocity and superficiality of life, and yet there are signs of a gathering energy in younger human beings of varied colors and cultures, calling for us to transcend our deeply ingrained tribal tendencies. What a great question. I’m very curious to hear more of your thoughts, Alberto. At least give us some more to chew on!
Well, my plot backfired and the ball is on my court. But apart from the doubts, I have little to offer. Nevertheless, I’ll try to suggest some ideas. I think they are related to the subject and between them, but they are only that, outlines. Let’s go!
In general, I think we can state that we are more sensitive to pain, one’s own and others’. For example, slavery does not seem normal to us, as it did in the times of Aristotle, or Jefferson. It would seem that the number of things that hurt us has increased, and the sphere of well-being is bigger, personally and socially. E.g. any worker today has access to a much better healthcare than the one available to kings and Emperors only two hundred years ago.
We also have a much greater knowledge about «that which is human» than the one available in the Antiquity. One can read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, think about the videos and books of José Mújica, or learn from the ¡Kung Sang people of the Kalahari desert. Therefore, resources such as books, films, knowledge in general, are much more accessible to anyone who wants to approach them.
Despite all this, Humanity as a group of traveling companions seems not to have taken advantage too much of these possibilities. In a good portion of the planet the western way of living has been imposed, directly or in derived forms – the last ones were not always positive. The great challenge would be that the whole humanity affected by it can access the beneficial parts of this system. I would say that the end goal would not be to extend the welfare state in its material aspects so much as to propitiate that every human being can live a full live.
There are several inconveniences for that, being the main one that the system is far from perfect (child exploitation in the XIXth century and the smallpox vaccine could be two of its faces), and everything goes in the package, that very often is distributed asymmetrically.
Another risk is that at this point in history, ideas cannot travel in the vehicle of the gods (they cannot be presented as the Word of God). Or maybe they can? But it could be more complicated to spread a human thought -unable to promise afterlife rewards- than a divine message with expectations of eternity.
I expect here other opinions, not necessarily to try to convince, but to explore ideas, weaving friendships.
To finish, do we know what is the message, or even, do we have a summary, like a creed? Or maybe it turns out that we cannot go much further than suggesting an idea, a direction? Do we know what, but not how?
In addition, there is the problem of evil… But that is another story…
-Alberto, with a little help from his friends…