Archive for the ‘film’ Category
16
Aug
2010
How To Be Alone
Dancing with yourself, how to talk to statues, and what squirrels have to do with love.
Modernity offers a curious paradox of connectedness and loneliness. Our perpetually networked selves cling to constant communication in an effort to avoid the deep-seeded sense of loneliness we so dread. Somewhere along the way, we forget — or maybe never even learn — how to be alone, how to stay contented in our own company.
Poet and singer-songwriter Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman address this forgotten art in How To Be Alone — a beautifully hand-illustrated, simply yet eloquently narrated visual poem full of all these things we so often need to tell ourselves and believe, yet so rarely do.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it. If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it. There is heat in freezing, be a testament.”
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10
Aug
2010
More Shoes: A 5,000-Kilometer Dream Pursuit
From Madrid to Kiev, or what chasing a dream across time zones can teach us about aspiration.
In 2006, after spending a lifetime dreaming about filmmaking but instead droning through an endless string of office jobs, Lee Kazimir did something crazy. He took the advice of Werner Herzog (how’s that for a segue from yesterday’s pickings?) literally.
Every day, my dream of becoming a filmmaker seemed further and further away. My days didn’t change, only my neckties did. Until I read a book of interviews with Werner Herzog. In this book, Herzog says that if you want to learn filmmaking, you should skip school. Instead, he says, you should make a journey alone, on foot, for 5,000 kilometers, and the experiences you have on this journey will teach you everything you need to know.”
So Kazimir embarked upon on of the possible routes Herzog suggests, Madrid to Kiev, and decided to walk the distance. More Shoes is Kazimir’s record of that journey — sometimes comic, sometimes profound, and consistently fascinating
When you come up on foot, you are never denied anything you need. Strangers would invite me into their homes, give me hot meals and cold drinks. They gave me beds to sleep in.”
In a way, Kazimir’s journey is one we all, at one point or another, aspire to take — one of chasing a dream across borders and time zones, against odds, and over unpredictable hurdles.
For the rest of 2010, both parts of the feature-length film will be available online for free, but we encourage you to grab a copy of the DVD and support the bravery and spontaneity of a filmmaker who, like very few of us ever do, actually got up and did that crazy, outlandish thing that would bust him out of an existential rut.
We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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