Deathly Thoughts/ Dreams Lie Deeper

In 2010 an accident in New Zealand's Pike River Mine claimed 29  lives. I didn't know much about the tragic event but through twists and turns had the privilege to see an internal screening of a documentary produced around that incident. Dave Dobbyn is a Kiwi musician who has been around since the 70s, and he has been commissioned to write a song on that event. As part of the process Dave visits the site and the families, hears their stories and its all captured nicely on film, to be shown later this year on TV possibly. The film ends in a live performance of the song. Dave wrote beautifully and the composition also lends to its emotional qualities, accompanied by a huge choir as well. Its a well made film.

Throughout the screening however I constantly kept thinking about the kinds of events I and we saw in

the year 2013 at the end of which I came to New Zealand. Its probably no use singling out 2013, as we usually experience death as a serial event, our roads claiming more lives usually than anything else I suppose. The school kids returning from a football match, the 6 boys beaten to death, and as a finale to my last year at home, the demise of the garments workers of Rana Plaza. We wouldn't have the budget to commission that many songs, or documentaries, our problems lie elsewhere.

Hope you enjoy the song above, its one Dave Dobbyn sang to the families once while he was still figuring out the song about the 29 men. Watch out for the documentary, its titled "Dreams Lie Deeper".

Related:

In memory of the Pike River miners

Road Accidents in Bangladesh: An Alarming Issue

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Runaway/Udhao - Upcoming movie

I recently through the online social spheres came across a trailer for a movie titled "Runaway". As is custom here, we always have a bangla title, and an English title. The bangla title here is "Udhao", which better translates to "Vanish" or "Disappear". Its is also custom that the titles in the two languages don't exactly translate into each other. However, there was nothing customary about what the movie promises in its trailer. The story looks mighty interesting and the trailer was also well made.


(Details on Facebook.com/RunawayTheFilm)

I blogged earlier about the movie producer/actor Ononto (or Ananta) who has now produced three movies I can count (Khoj: The Search, Goti: The Speed, and Hridoy Bhanga Dheu: Heart Breaking Blow) was on a television show giving an interview. From that I have actually grown some respect for the guy. He is young, and apparently a successful businessman, and he talked about his business sense playing a role in his role as a producer and director. He explained why the lax and inefficient FDC was not the place for him, since he wanted an efficient and strict work-plan, team and environment for making his movies. He may not be well educated, that could be just how things had turned out for him, but his speech is very direct - stating matters very simply, and he made a lot of sense! These are often missing from people with a lot of education gleaming from their speech. The man in the centre with a gun below, is the man!

Related:
Released Full-length Movies By Year(FDC Stats)
Interview with Ananta on The Speed: Do or Die
Movie Review with Pictures  

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Politics of Love

Three campaigners sit by a bar at the end of a day, and discuss how their campaign efforts are not working out. One of them says its always a politician's need to be loved that propels them to presidencies. Those that do not have that need, do not become presidents.

This is the scene out of a movie called Game Change, which is adapted from a book by the same name. The movie goes through the US Republican camp's desperate efforts to rise above the Obama-mania of the time by hiring the "mavericky" Sarah Palin.

I am very interested in the psyche of politicians, especially, being where I am, where every 5 years, the definitions of heroes and villains are almost drastically reversed. Like a bad soap opera, the drama never ends and couples are breaking up and then making out once again! That need to be loved, however rings true. And sometimes you see this aspect depicted in Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where the Queen takes the counsel of a magic mirror who assures her that she is in fact, the 'fairest' of them all. One time that mirror said she was not, the queen was ready to go to the point of murder, to get her position back.

Not so much a fairy tale.

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Children's Stories

Not everyone's stories are told. Some have their stories told over and over again.

www.picturebalata.net/

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Pimp My Ride

Ittadi showcased Mr. Leepu's handiwork a long time ago, which I can remember I saw as a schoolkid! He made a car for himself, in the shape of something close to a Lamborghini! how sweet is that?! Well, opening the Daily Star website today I came across a story featuring him, and how he was asked to make two different looking cars in 8 weeks by the Discovery Channel! Well, good to see him getting some exposure abroad! Too bad our govt. is too slow to pick up on anything (news news news huh?).


The Story

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Back from a trip

As usual, i forgot the name of the place we went. The trip was a part of a course we have which deals with narrativity, and thus character building and all that. So on this trip we were to assume the roles that we had some time to develop over the past few weeks. Firstly however we were broken down into groups, so that each group had a theme, and then we developed the characters with relation to those themes.

Anyway, there are pics from that trip on my flickr site and the place was just soooo beautiful, I shall urge all to look at the pics from there.

Meanwhile, as far as beauty and photographs go, I would like to point out this link too:

http://www.parkeharrison.com/index.html

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Net Art: Chain Story

We have started our second Art Workshop, and its on Net Art. Alberto arranged a very fun and vibrant first day as always, beginning with an introduction to the world of net-art, many links and categorized to
Art On The net
Art Through The Net
Art Of The Net.

Now again we are being made to do something for ourselves in groups along these lines. Ivan, Valeria and I are a team this time and we played with the idea of Chain Stories in emails, kinda like Chain letters, along with a phony "..forward this to 10 people or you die" sort of ending (I am saying phony cause some of those actually work! :p). Then we decided to start a story on a blog site, and hand the username and password of the site in the site itself so that people can log in and write their portion of the story. The starting is totally different (a person waking up in a strange place after a possible accident at sea) to the title we gave it (And the music played on).
And so far there have been 3 continuations i think... pretty good. We have been trying to get the links circulated among friends and family so that people are gathered for collaboration.

So the link to that blog is this HISTORISKS
There you can read the story so far... :) and to contribute... Go to Blogcity
and login -
Username: historisks
Password: historias
(included on the main page of the blog, in the About Me section).

Go there and put your imagination and creativity to work, no rules, plus u can link images to use as illustrations. Just one warning, refresh the story first to see if someone already updated anything before you are posting.... Enjoy.

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