The Sea of Trees

I've never considered myself a particularly smart or cultivated person. I should read/have read many more and better books, travelled more and earlier, interacted much more with people that had things to teach, all in all learn much more from everything... cause I've always wanted to have a good understanding of our world. Anyway, and particularly taking into account how the cultural level of our society has dropped in the last decades, I try to think that I could be placed in the "not too idiotic" group of people. However, from time to time something happens that makes me think that maybe I'm much more of a redneck that I would like to think and accept. It has happened lately with my reaction to one film "The Sea of Trees" as it happened more than one year ago with The Last Face, another excellent film.

I watched The Sea of Trees a bit by chance. It was available in the "videotheque" of the multimedia device in the bus carrying me to Madrid. I had plenty of films in my own tablet, but decided to give this one a chance without even checking the wikipedia review. Wow, I loved this film. It felt really powerful to me. One Western middle age guy runs into a Japanese counterpart in The Japanese Suicide Forest where both intended to put an end to their lives... Little by little the story that has brought the Western guy here is revealed. A lost wife, a lost chande for happiness, a lost chance to express feelings, to repair what was not really so broken... and all the remorse that comes with it... A constant reminder of how nothing in our lives can be predicted: falling sick, overcoming it, and suddenly, an abrupt end just when you thought life was showing you its sweet face again... A story of how a real pain can help to erase an unnecessary, self-inflicted past pain and dream of a future... This is a very emotional film, a film to learn from for sure (or more specifically, to study again what I tought was a lesson learned for me and indeed I was starting to forget), a film that hurts, seduces and in the end provides hope, where remorse for the past ends up providing light for the future, easing the wounds that seemed ready to bleed forever...

So well, after watching it I decided to check some reviews, expecting to read how much this work had moved and touched others... but to my surprise most comments were really negative, bordering the insulting... Pretentious, sappy, empty... well, all those are calificatives that could not be further from my experience with this film... then, it's up to you to decide, believe what some cool Cannes critics say, or believe what this boring, uneducated moron says.

Capharnaum

I watched Capharnaum in the American Cosmograph some days ago. When I decided to attend the session I was not particularly excited. The review in the monthly program was good, but not particularly outstanding, but as Lebanon and its chaotic society is always an appealing topic for me I thought I should watch it (also, Toulouse is no longer my primary residence and when I'm there I pretty much feel like going for some indy cinema).

I was just blown away by this masterpiece. Maybe this is the best film that I've watched since Incendies. It's amazing how a handful of artists (this film is ART in uppercase) can transform misery and suffering into beauty and hope, because the daily fight of the SURVIVORS portrayed in this masterpiece is so inspiring. This film is so profoundly humane that really helps us keep alive the humanist inside us. When many of us are fed up of many of those so called refugees that are not escaping from any war (is there a war in Morocco or Albania? ), that were persecutors rather than persecutees (all those that helped the Islamists in Syria and are now fleeding cause hopefully they've lost their bloody war), and just come here with the intent to take as much as they can from our society without providing anything (anything positive I mean) in exchange... it's really good to show the lives of real refugees, people who have lived in the shit for decades (I won't enter to discuss the so difficoult Israel-Palestine affair, but Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon experience a life of misery and hopelessness like few others), and how they fight day after day for their subsistence. It's also good to be exposed to the fair amount of dignity in those migrants like the Ethiopian or Filipino women that work so hard to try to build a better life in such a harsh country like Lebanon. With this kind of migrants there is no doubt about how fucked up their previous lives had to be in order for them to choose such an uncertain path. They are not doing it hoping to live on social benefits for the rest of their lives... like some of those coming to Western Europe in the last years.

The refugee/migrant kids and women in this film are the personification of courage, dignity and solidarity, a solidarity among the poorest where religion, skin color or ethnicity do no exist, just human beings fighting together for survival. These are the migrants that I would love to see replacing all the Islamoracaille that is tearing apart our societies from inside at the same time that they steal from it as much as they can.