Festy

The Fribourg film festival started yesterday! It's an annual thing, with a general theme of movies from asia and south america and africa. Last year, while anticipating this year's festival and when I was much crappier at french than I am these days, I was a bit worried that it might all be a bit french (language) and inaccessible for me, but happily I have discovered that pretty much all the movies are shown in their original languages and sub-titled into english. Wackily enough, there is also the offer of simultaneous translation into french for many films, which involves a translator sitting in the back row of the theatre, and her french translation of it all being available on headphones that you can get upon your entry to the theatre. Which is something I've never seen before at the movies, and no doubt extremely handy. And also kind of annoying, because in quieter moments (like when there is text on the screen and no sound) you can hear her muttering away in the background.

So far we've seen Terminal Island (an american flick from the 70s or so, which is in the festival under a "revanches de femmes" theme, although I'm not really sure if the women in the film were actually the agents of their own revenge or if they were there more to take their clothes off a lot and be rescued by their menfolk (rescued from the other menfolk, whose intentions were nowhere near as gallant).

And then we saw Garapa, a doco about malnutrition and starvation in the slums of Fortaleza (a town in northeast Brazil). Which was relentlessly depressing, as you'd imagine, and really interesting. "Garapa" is the name of the sugar water that people give their children to drink when they have no other food available, which seems to be an awful lot of the time, in spite of the government's "zero hunger" programme which seems to involve giving money for food and/or milk for children under a certain age. While the lack of work/money/food is obviously a major problem, one of the more interesting bits of the doco for me was near the end when the filmmaker asked his subjects if they wanted to have more children (more than the 11 that one family already had!). Some of them sort of said "no", but overall the mood was more one of resignation; that there's nothing you can do to prevent it, that you're equally likely to have another baby whether or not you use contraception, and that if you do have more children, you will always find a way to feed them. But of course that way is frequently with nothing more than sugar and water, which really isn't doing anyone any good. Lordy it was depressing.