Partners in Health

“Somewhere in my heart, it’s the end of the world.”
Régine Chassagne, daughter of Haitian refugees who escaped the country during the brutal years of the Papa Doc regime and who is  now, together with her husband Win Butler, a leader of the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, wrote a moving personal response to the earthquake for the British paper The Guardian UK.   She mentions and highly recommends an organization called Partners in Health which  has worked in Haiti for nearly 25 years already, and that is dedicated to the long-term improvement of  living conditions and human rights for the people there. They need help with their efforts to bring relief to the countless wounded, homeless, thirsty and hungry beings.

 

Haiti Earthquake

Please donate any money you can. It is a terribly chaotic situation. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams already working on medical projects in Haiti have treated hundreds of people injured in the quake and have been setting up clinics in tents to replace their own damaged medical facilities. Paul McPhun, MSFs operations manager for Haiti, described the current situation for MSF teams on the ground during a press conference on January 13.

Please give to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières; all three of their primary medical centers have collapsed, but they have already set up temporary shelters and are offering emergency care on the ground.

Also, please sign the petition asking President Obama to grant “Temporary Protected Status” for Haitian refugees, something that’s offered to victims of war or disaster from countries including El Salvador, Honduras, Somalia and Sudan. The White House just announced that it was “pausing” the deportation of Haitian refugees, but this doesn’t grant them the legal protections needed to shield them from indefinite detention and forcible deportation. To refuse to give them Temporary Protected Status in the wake of the present disaster would be irresponsible and immoral.

 

Happy New Year –

but don’t hold your breath that much will change.

Mark Fiore is an editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a web site featuring his work.

 

‘Tis the season…

… actually, it’s about “the season” long past, the way I remember it when I grew up in Germany. Not all that many years after WW II, when people didn’t have much money, when there wasn’t much to buy even if one did, when ingenuity and inventiveness more than made up for lack of commercial goods.

When I was a kid, Christmas was magical and full of delight. It started with December 1st, the beginning of the Advent season. I received an Advent Calendar, a little stiff paper picture decorated with sparkling silver glitter. It would show a modest scene of some angels decorating a Christmas Tree, or some deer in a snowy forest. Every day one had to open a tiny window with a star, a candle, a snow man, or a similar symbol behind it. Every opened window would bring us impatient children a little closer to Christmas. Do you remember how long a day used to be, when you were five or six years old?

On the night from the 5th to the 6th Saint Nicholas stopped by and filled our shoes with nuts, apples, foil-covered chocolate, and small presents. Sometimes he would show up in person at some social gathering, but I didn’t like this so much. He was some scary dude, huge and fat, with a white beard and wild white hair. With him came his helper “Knecht Ruprecht”, a skinny, wiry guy who’d caper around, threatening us kids with a bunch of twigs he’d wave through the air. But unlike St. Nicholas, he was funny; one didn’t have to take him all that serious. He was all bark and no bite, pulling little presents out of St. Nicholas’s big sack and handing one to each child.

The Sundays in December were special because that’s when the four candles of the advent wreath would be lit; starting with one candle on the first Sunday, and then two on the next Sunday, and so on. Again, this was a device to shorten this time of waiting, although it would simultaneously make the time stretch like taffy. It felt as if Christmas would never come…

But then, it did. The big event for which we kids had been waiting was Christmas Eve, the evening of December 24th. That’s when the Christ Child would bring the Christmas Tree and the presents. The Christ Child wasn’t like Baby Jesus or some other version of Christ really; it was more like a childlike angel. It (the German language assigns the neutral pronoun “das” [it] to children) spent the whole day in the living room decorating the tree and arranging the presents, so the room was locked from the inside and we were not allowed to enter. Our parents were inside too, helping, and would only emerge to give us a quick bite to eat. This was easily the longest day of the year! Waiting became almost painful, but then, about an hour after sunset, we heard the tinkling of a tiny silver bell — the sign that the doors would open…

And there was the Christmas Tree in all its glory, illuminated by burning wax candles. Electric lamps were turned off, and the room shimmered and glowed with the candle light that was reflected in shiny glass ornaments and silvery tinsel. I remember the moment of awe and delight, when there was nothing else to do but admire the beautiful sparkling tree. And after this moment, of course, the presents demanded attention!

Like all civilized countries Germany celebrates Christmas for two days, with December 26th being a holiday when stores, offices, banks, even movie theaters, are closed. Christmas Trees and decorations are kept up until January 5th, the Three Kings Day. Now, THAT’S the season…

 

Movies to watch: 5. Synecdoche, New York

Rarely if ever have I seen a film that displays so much beauty because it shows the truth — the one with a capital T. Whoever reads this needs to agree with me that Truth is always beautiful, that it has a profound impact, and that a work of art which reveals Truth adds something significant to the world, something enriching. Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut has nothing to do with conventional beauty, and the truth it imparts is quite simple: nothing more or less than the human condition, life between birth and death, its dreams, ambitions, failings, longings, constantly vacillating between grandeur and decrepit misery. In typical Kaufman fashion, this is cloaked — veiled, rather — with complex symbolism and amazingly clever imagery, resembling a House of Mirrors.

Synecdoche, New York is puzzling right away, with its name that one doesn’t know how to pronounce. I had to look it up at Wikipedia, and broadly speaking, it means the substitution of a part for the whole, or vice versa. It is also a clever play with phonetic sounds, because much of the film takes place in the city of Schenectady, New York. We follow the life of theater director Caden Cotard (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the relationships he has with a number of significant people — his estranged wife (an excellent Catherine Keener), his daughter, and two other women he is in love with, among many other people who are part of his life.

Some critics use adjectives such as surreal, confusing, and hallucinatory to characterize this film. I found it actually extremely realistic, in the sense that one’s own life rarely has the linear progression of an Agatha-Christie novel or a typical Hollywood movie. On the contrary, it is full of time-warps, dreams of grandeur, disappointments, frustration, and surprises, with rare moments of pleasure and happiness. The people who are part of Caden’s life seem to be externalized parts of himself, and they get further reflected by the fact that he has them played by actors, including himself. This self-referential repetition is more chaotic and less mechanical (hence, more beautiful) than an image of fractals; at one point, Caden changes roles with the cleaning lady who takes his place as the director of the gigantic play he is staging.

The film is deeply moving because of its humanity and honesty. And if that isn’t enough, it’s chock-full with superb performances, while the intelligent script makes it almost necessary to see this work of art more than once.

 

The Angry Mermaid Award

While the little video is a bit cheesy and simplistic, the intention of the producers is indeed laudable: to bring awareness to the fact that giant corporations hide behind a facade of being concerned about the environment. The most unbelievably outrageous case I’ve seen recently is mentioned in the New York Times on November 25: Michael Mack, CEO of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta, claimed in an interview that compared to pesticides and genetically engineered seeds, “organic food is not only not better for the planet. It is categorically worse.” He also said the federal government has given its seal of approval to pesticides, which according to him “have been proven safe and effective and absolutely not harmful to the environment or to humans.” And — get this — he stated that if consumers do not believe that pesticides are safe then they do not trust their government, according to NYT. “Once you go down that path, I don’t know where the guard rails are,” he said, according to the Times.

Although Syngenta isn’t on the list of corporations that are doing the most to sabotage effective action on climate change, it’s still worthwhile to cast your vote for the Angry Mermaid Award. First, watch the video:

and then go to the website Angry Mermaid Award, read about their eight nominees, and choose the one who you think is the most culpable when it comes to blocking effective action to stem climate change.

 

The artist as impartial witness: Otto Dix

I have a stack of about twenty issues of the German art magazine art, most of them from the early nineties. Gorgeous reproductions, well-written articles, and interesting subject matter keep these magazines relevant and informative; every once in a while I like to pick up one of them and go through it again. So this morning: I wanted something to look at while having breakfast, and I randomly grabbed an issue.

Portrait of Anita Berber, 1925

Its focus was the German painter Otto Dix, one of the founders of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement. His amazing paintings made me want to learn more about him and his art, so I read the main article — only to find out that he was born today 118 years ago, on 2 December 1891! Strange coincidence…

Unlike other expressionist artists, Paul Klee for example who declared that the true nature of things lies behind the visible, the surface, Dix was convinced that outer reality contained everything else. The inner world will be revealed by a faithful rendition of the outer. He didn’t embellish what he saw; on the contrary, he deeply shocked many of his contemporaries with his brutal honesty. Not afraid to paint the ugly, the depraved, the broken, the miserable, the wounded, he held up a mirror that many couldn’t bear to look into.

Prager Straße, 1920

He had joined the First World War because of a compulsion to experience and witness everything, no matter how horrible, but what he saw was so gruesome and disturbing, that he was deeply traumatized for over a decade. The paintings and etchings he produced about his time as a soldier got him in trouble with the bourgeois authorities even before the Nazis gained power; they also firmly established him as perhaps the most powerful and radical anti-war advocate of modern art. I wish that our President would see Dix’s paintings.

To learn more about this artist and to see more of his paintings, please follow these links:
Otto Dix (1891 – 1969)
Otto Dix — German Political Art
Otto Dix Paintings
Otto Dix Gallery
and
Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924

 

Leader of Rwanda militia arrested in Germany

Ignace Murwanashyaka and Straton Musoni, the leader and deputy leader respectively of the Hutu militia known as “Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda” (FDLR), were arrested in Germany on Tuesday on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed this year and in 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, prosecutors said. The Hutu militias are believed to have killed several hundred civilians, raped numerous women, plundered and burned countless villages, forcing villagers from their homes and recruiting numerous children as soldiers. Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which killed 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority, various Hutu militias responsible for the atrocities fled to Congo and organized as “Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda” (FDLR). Ignace Murwanashyaka, who was not involved in the Rwandan genocide, had come to Germany in 1989 where he studied at the university of Bonn and got married after receiving his doctorate. He became the leader of the FDLR in 2001 and allegedly orchestrated a series of unbelievably atrocious acts of murder, massacres, rapes and kidnappings from afar — traveling between his home in Mannheim and Congo in order to encourage his soldiers, to deliver his commands and to organize his forces. When Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame visited Germany in 2008, he strongly demanded that the German government take steps to prosecute Murwanashyaka. With additional pressure from the United Nations, the German authorities have finally reacted and have taken Murwanashyaka and his aide Musoni into custody. Well, that’s a step in the right direction — isn’t it. Unfortunately, it addresses only half of the problem that turns the lives of Congolese civilians into a living hell. Unfortunately, the other half of the problem — which the news reports about Murwanashyaka’s arrest don’t mention — is the Congolese army. According to Human Rights Watch, “Congolese armed forces in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have brutally killed hundreds of civilians and committed widespread rape in the past three months in a military operation backed by the United Nations”. A UN peacekeeping mission operating in DR Congo since 1999, MONUC (Mission of the United Nations Organisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) partners with the Congolese army in order to disarm by force the FDLR. Also, it provides substantial operational and logistics support to the soldiers, including military firepower, transport, rations, and fuel. However, the army causes as much suffering and destruction as the rebels. In retaliation to brutal attacks by the FDLR, Congolese government soldiers are committing gross human rights violations. Attempting to kill rebel combatants, they make no distinction between members of militia groups and civilians. “Some Congolese army soldiers are committing war crimes by viciously targeting the very people they should be protecting,… the UN should be asking hard questions about the role of its peacekeepers in supporting such abusive operations,” said a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, Anneke Van Woudenberg. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly. It surpasses one’s wildest imagination what those poor people have to suffer, being viciously abused by and in the middle of two opposing factions. Murwanashyaka’s arrest will hopefully weaken the FDLR militias, but the individuals responsible for Congolese army abuses should also be investigated, and certainly shouldn’t be supported in any way whatsoever by the UN — an organization which can ill afford to lose its credibility.

 

Do not kill

Not so long ago, a friend told me that she’d go hunting over the weekend. Upon my shocked reaction, she assured me that she wouldn’t shoot any animals herself (leaving that to her hunting companion), but she does appreciate the meat which they’ll share because she’ll help in other ways. I had only ever seen her eating vegetables, and she’s certainly not your typical meat eater, so I had to ask her why she didn’t object to hunting. Well, she said, to her it’s all one big cycle — creatures are born and they die; plants bloom and they wither; one life (a mouse for example) sustains another life (a cat).

I can’t agree with that. Why should it be acceptable to kill an animal, but not a human being? Where is the dividing line, and who draws it? It may seem that a human life is way more precious than the life of a rabbit, but only from a human perspective. Sure, a human is smarter, has more capacities, is immensely superior when it comes to cognition and understanding, but the right to life is independent from such qualities. Otherwise it should be o.k. to kill a paraplegic or an individual with Down Syndrome. In fact, human capacities such as the ability to make decisions based on moral values should make us responsible for the wellbeing of weaker creatures — not eat them.

Something happened today that made me remember the conversation with my friend. When I took my dogs for their walk, we came across the carcass of a dead elk. A pile of furry skin, an almost meatless skeleton, and not far off the head — obviously the left-overs of a successful hunt. A sad sight, even more so because I had seen a live elk not so long ago on the same walk, a majestic elk with huge antlers. I only saw him for a few seconds; my dog started barking and chased him away. The elk could have bashed her head to pulp with his hooves; instead, he bolted. Maybe this was the same animal; not majestic any more, just heaps of garbage. Sad.

In less than two weeks, people will sit down to give thanks, and they will consume almost 50 million turkeys in the process. 50 million deaths — for one day. That’s not only sad, that’s crazy.

 

Movies to watch: 4. Kontroll

This was a total bull’s-eye shot in the dark.

I didn’t know anything about this movie, or about other Hungarian films for that matter, but writer-director Nimród Antal’s feature debut Kontroll, shot entirely in Budapest’s subway system, kept me spellbound. No healthy sunlight ever falls on the motley crew of underground ticket inspectors who are employed to ensure that nobody steals a free ride. Almost inevitably this system creates a game or sport whereby some passengers try to outrace the controllers.

Racing becomes a multi-faceted symbol in this film: it can mean a dangerous dare where the participants put their lives on the line; it can mean trying to escape from one’s past, like in the case of our protagonist Bulcsú who needs this underworld existence in order to come to terms with his former life. And there is Bootsie, a young man as fast as lightning who likes nothing better than to have a bunch of controllers run after him — a tragically meaningless chase. The Underground itself is highly symbolic, with its collection of weird characters being held in a state of limbo, as it were.

Stark contrasts race each other at breakneck speed: from dark, shadowy tunnels we emerge into bright, glaring fluorescent light; from a deadly serious phantom killer who pushes passengers in front of running trains we switch to a sweet girl who always travels in a bear costume. Add to this a fantastic soundtrack by somebody called Neo, and exceptionally beautiful cinematography, and you have a film that has it all: mystery and romance, humor and drama, fantasy and gritty realism. And all this was made with a budget of eight hundred thousand dollars.

If this first film is anything to go by, the name Nimród Antal is something to watch out for.

 

Darwin — a hot potato?

Somebody pinch me, please — surely, I must be dreaming. According to the British Telegraph, a recent film about Charles Darwin (Creation, chosen to open the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September) didn’t find an American distributor because — his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences. Christian websites apparently denounce Darwin as a racist and father of Nazism, declaring that evolution is blasphemy, that the bible is right and God created the Earth in six days. And it’s only some 6,000 years old and not, as scientists claim, 4 1/2 billion years. How do they know this? The biblical record is accepted as a reliable historical basis of interpreting empirical data. I’m not kidding; follow the link at your own risk — you’ll find some mind-boggling nonsense.

But back to the movie which received excellent critical reviews and is based on a book by Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes. It explores the relationship between Darwin and his daughter Annie whose early death deeply affected his views on religion. Apparently, an Indie distributor finally picked up the movie, and it is to be released in the U.S. in January 2010. The controversy surely will increase revenues at the box office.

Still, the fact remains that religious beliefs, and extreme ones in particular, play a huge role in American culture. If you look at some of the comments to the Telegraph article or at the IMDb message boards, your blood starts curdling. What makes this seem so hopeless is the fact that rational arguments, by definition, are useless in the case of belief cults. Theirs is a stupid God, and he always needs to have the last word.

 

Dominoes

Ok, here goes:
The first video shows former Polish president Lech Walesa, who gives the official push that starts the tumbling of the wall of dominoes, accidentally being pushed himself by some reporter…

And here is a “slice of life” from a bystander, showing the excitement when the dominoes fall down — but it’s over so quickly… have to watch the rest on the giant screen…

 

More about the Berlin Wall

Here is a beautiful collection of images and footage with music inspired by Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Wish I could be in Berlin today (well maybe not, I can’t handle crowds). As soon as I find a video of the domino-wall being toppled, I’ll post it here.

 

A rare event in world history

This coming Monday, November 9, marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A rare event because it it was carried by happiness and joy; a peaceful event. Something happened that most people in East- and West-Germany never expected to witness during their life time, and it happened without gunshots, without violence.

The credit for this bloodless victory belongs to the people, those of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc. If there is one politician who deserves praise and applause it is Michail Gorbachev; his reformist ideas of perestroika and glasnost ultimately paved the way for the Wall to collapse.

Read an eyewitness account by a New Zealand journalist, but be prepared for tears! Same goes for the following videos; immensely touching.

 

Movies to watch: 3. My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar Wai

I’m a great fan of Wong Kar Wai, and the fact that some critics trashed My Blueberry Nights made me a bit nervous. But not to worry: while it is not my favorite (that’s Fallen Angels), it stands way above the average Hollywood production. Cinematography (Darius Khondji), music (Ry Cooder), immensely decorative colors, a script with bitter-sweet symbolism — Wong’s trademark style is unmistakable. The acting — well, that’s a different story. He routinely works without a finished script, which gives his actors a lot of room to improvise and shine — or leaves them without needed guidance, as the case may be. Norah Jones should stay with her music (she sings exceptionally well); Jude Law as yet another heart-throb makes you yawn;  I can’t forgive Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener and The Shape of Things, and Natalie Portman who did a great job in Léon,  chose some mediocre roles as well.  In this film, she’s tolerable but not outstanding. That reward goes to David Strathairn as an alcoholic police officer — he by far outshines the other actors.

So yes — by and large, the acting is dull and wooden. And yet, this is a film worth watching; the critics who slam it go on and on with bakery-style metaphors like eye candy when in fact a truly good-looking film is something of a not-to-be-missed delight. No danger of vacuity, when Wong Kar Wai is directing.

 

 

Free speech or identity theft?

Fed up with their party’s dismal voter support, some Connecticut Republicans created 33 websites in the names of Democratic state representatives, and registered fake Twitter accounts for these sites. They sent out posts pretending to be from the Democrats, actually mocking them.

There’s nothing new about fake Twitter accounts. This site collected 65 fake Twitter profiles with “Hilarious Tweets”. Some celebrities, such as Tony La Russa, the coach of a US baseball team, launched legal action over bogus accounts. What is new in the case of the Connecticut Republicans is their use of social network sites and Internet technology. Something that may well have secured Obama’s victory last November, they figure.

However, Twitter, Inc. shut down the face accounts, on the grounds that “[a] person may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others. … Impersonation is against our terms unless it is a parody. The standard for defining parody is, ‘Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke?’ “, according to a Twitter representative. State Republican Chairman Chris Healy interpreted Twitter’s decision as meaning that “…the Democrats were successful in stopping free speech”, displaying his appalling ignorance of the Bill of Rights. What else is new…

Incidentally, the 33 fake websites are still operating. At a quick glance, they look real enough, except for a small note at the very bottom, “Powered by WordPress & Mimbo Paid for and Authorized by the Connecticut Republican Party, Jerry Labriola Jr. Treasurer”. WordPress? Hello??? Don’t you have a similar policy that forbids deception and impersonation?!!

 

A total gem

An animated film can be more powerful than one with human actors, if it’s outstanding. A case in point is Harvie Krumpet by Australian writer/director Adam Elliot which won an Oscar for Best Short Film in 2004. The odds are against Harvie right from the beginning of his life — he has Tourette’s Syndrome, gets struck by lightning, and in his brain is a metal plate (inserted after an accident) that develops magnetic capacities and causes all sorts of metal objects to stick to his head. However, he doesn’t get defeated by life’s blows but maintains a gentle and touching dignity throughout calamities and misfortune. And yes, there’s happiness as well; seemingly short-lived, it could be the strong undercurrent of Harvie’s life that surfaces only sporadically but is always there, beneath appearances.

Harvie collects “fakts” which he keeps in a book he wears around his neck, fakts such as “The bible was written by the same people who believe the earth is flat”, or “There are 3 times more chickens in the world than humans”, or “Fakts still exist, even if they are ignored”. Funny and sad, humorous and moving, the story of our humble and lovable character, wonderfully expressive with the help of stop motion/claymation, seemed to have but one tiny flaw — it was too short, little more than 20 minutes long. To my delight, I just learned that Elliot recently finished a feature-length animated film, Mary and Max, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released at a theater near you on 9 November. Can’t wait!

 

Movies to watch: 2. Slim Susie (Smala Sussie)

This is a witty, fast-paced, quirky dark comedy from Sweden, directed by Ulf Malmros. Erik (Jonas Rimeika), who had escaped the monotony and oppression of his provincial home town by moving to Stockholm a few years back, returns to look for his missing sister. He discovers that underneath the bourgeois facade the town is anything but normal: his former friends and schoolmates have cultivated their individual eccentricities to a degree bordering on caricature; the local video store owner supplies the town with hard drugs; the lone cop is both corrupt and melancholic; a nurse working at the nursing home embezzles money. And his sister Susie (Tuva Novotny, in a sensitive and sweet performance) isn’t how Erik remembers her, either — in clever flashbacks, we learn of an aimless, troubled existence.

Actually, the story line shouldn’t be taken too seriously — it’s pure pulp fiction, and some critics have compared Slim Susie to the Tarantino movie (which actually has a funny part in this one). I don’t quite agree, because it doesn’t display the over-the-top violence of Pulp Fiction and is more wacky. I would compare it to early Tom Tykwer films such as Run Lola Run. But Slim Susie can stand on its own — a great soundtrack, quite clever and funny script, an interesting bunch of oddball characters guarantee an entertaining one and a half hours.

 

Movies to watch: 1. Ben X

Belgian director Nic Balthazar calls Ben X, his film about a mildly autistic teenager, “a film with a message”. It is also highly entertaining, visually stunning, and immensely moving. Ben is a high school student with Asperger’s syndrome who retreats into a fantasy world of computer games in order to cope with the vicious and cruel bullying by his class mates. In a quite magnificent way, the film explores the boundaries between different worlds which can be as solid as brick walls: Ben’s inner world, his perception of himself, is completely and utterly divorced from the reality he finds himself in; he cannot relate to others in a “normal”, acceptable manner. While this may be a bane of the human condition — we all feel to a lesser or higher degree that ultimately, no other person can totally understand who we really are — Ben’s case is painfully extreme. He can’t play the game of being a “cool kid”, and his peers can’t relate to somebody who is different. The fear of standing out, not fitting in, probably contributes to the brutality and cruelty with which some of Ben’s school mates treat him.

Doing a bit of reserch about this movie, I came across the term Happy slapping, a disturbing practice that came up around 2005 and is appallingly popular. It involves a victim who is being deliberately attacked for the purpose of recording the event with a mobile phone. Some incidents have been extremely violent, to the extent that some victims have even been killed. I was rather shocked to read about this practice, and it explained why I found the term “bullying” almost too mild in relation to this movie. The bullies that I remember had their admirers and followers around them, and against this background they felt strong enough to push people around. But it was generally easy to avoid and sidestep them. Basically, they were just plain stupid. In this film, there was a level of psychological cruelty and torment involved that surpassed anything I ever had encountered.

Apparently, the film has done an enormous favor to people who are “different”. In Belgium, for example, three out of four teenagers have seen it, it’s been shown in schools, and discussions about bullying follow the viewing. Parents of mildly autistic children as well as their therapists have commented on the marvelous and accurate portrayal of Ben by Greg Timmermans, a young man who had never stood in front of a camera before. The supporting roles are also well cast, and visually this film is quite remarkable in terms of merging the virtual reality of computer role-playing games (in this case, Archlord) with every-day reality.

The following words of Nic Balthazar sum up the relevance of the movie: “For me the film isn’t really about autism, it’s about what we do as a society to everyone who has a problem functioning and to all the people we call the nerds, the geeks and the dorks because they’re not what everyone else is. It’s the fascism of cool. The fascism of being ‘normal’. That is for me the real theme of the film.”

 

Mes héros…

Some men don’t age at all. Asterix and Obelix, famous French comic book heroes, celebrate their 50th birthday on October 29, and they don’t look a day older than when they first made their appearance on the pages of the French magazine Pilote. Considering their diet, which consists mainly of roasted wild boar, this is quite surprising. Maybe fighting the Romans, their fierce sense of independence, and countless adventures which took them to the furthest corners of the earth, all contributed to keeping them young.

France is preparing an enormous birthday-bash: Asterix gets his own postal stamp, the French air force is producing a video in which airplanes will draw an Asterix head in the sky, and some events will take place in the region of Brittany, where several villages claim to be Asterix’s home.

Plus, Volume 34, Asterix and Obelix’s Birthday — the Golden Book, was published on October 22 and is expected to add several millions to the 325 million copies of their comic books already sold world wide.

Bonne anniversaire, les gars; wish I could be there!