2008 Films

Observando el cielo / Paradise – Three Journeys in this World

• Observando el cielo (Observing the Sky)

  
  2007. USA. 19 mins. Directed by Jeanne Liotta. Produced by Jeanne Liotta.

  Tracing little more than the movement and texture of the night sky, both the astronomical and the atmospheric, this experimental film truly belongs in a documentary film festival. It is the oldest movie in the world, the one movie that people watched for millions of years before movies were invented. It tells us where we are and what time it is. This film also underscores a big shift in our perception of the world—like an unfixed photographic emulsion, the night sky is disappearing from our view. Boldly unscientific and astonishingly beautiful, with a majestic soundtrack by filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, this film directs our eyes above—to observe the sky. TBW

• Paradise - Three Journeys In This World

  
  2007. Finland. 51 mins. Directed by Elina Hirvonen. Produced by Sari Lempiäinen, Elina Hirvonen.

  "Only death can stop me from going to Europe," says a young man from Chad midway through his story. The despair and displaced idealism in his voice fill the lives of all the characters we encounter in this film, which lays bare the powerful fiction of Europe as imagined by Africans: paradise in an aging land renewed by the labor of young post-colonial hearts and minds and bodies. Some of the migrants, like Bakari, know the price one pays to live in paradise:twenty-five percent of what he earns ends up in the hands of banks that transfer his money to his family in Mali. Visually breathtaking and at times poetic, the film frames its characters' migratory experiences,their ideas and hopes, as well as those of the families they leave behind.PL

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