Yamustafa!

In this video clip from the very beginning of the movie Midnight Cowboy,  the combined visual and auditory effects deliver the viewer right into the specific reality. In the first shot there is a brief surge of the typical war cries, horse gallops and gunshot noise of the Western genre on a blank screen. The camera zooms out on the huge screen of a drive-thru theater in broad daylight! Then a nostalgic squeak is gradually overridden by a singing voice which takes us into the beautiful banjo arpeggios of the song "Everybody Is Talkin".  In the closing shot for the credits we see the profile of a woman drinking from  a Coke bottle. Enough signifiers. We are in the land of the American dream!  Most people who read the novel, which was in itself a success, believe the movie is a 95% honest novel-to-movie translation. It tells the story of a naive young man (a cowboy from Texas) who moves ea...

But Lots of Dying Everywhere! It's true; an inconvenient truth, though! I am not talking Syria or Iraq but the other man-made disasters that are sending planet Earth into the environmental apocalypse!! Probing into the huge number of cinema/movie festivals around the globe and their close occurences, I stumbled on such festival names as Goya Awards,Nica Awards, Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival or Thessaloniki Int'l Film Festival. Lots of them! But I found myself inclined to narrow my interest to revisiting the non-fictional movies in recent years. The prophetic or premonitional kind of depiction or the exact opposite, the optimistic, life-affirming one!  The reason must be obvious. This is 2012! The year of the ultimate prediction! No matter to what degree what is circulating is just hype. Nature seems to favour this premonitional scary talk by sending a mild winter to Canada but also giving Europe a surprise dumping or setting the ice on fire in Iceland. A...