documentaries galore...

because it's Wellington Film Festival time. There are always so many great things on offer, especially in the doco category. Often the directors are there with a post-show Q&A. Good stuff. I look forward to it each year and scour the thick catalogue trying to narrow down my choices.

It brings me back to scheduling classes at University and reading the course catalogue cover to cover. Repeatedly. Every class had appeal. I am a bit all over the place with my interests so had to make hard choices then too. Man, this is showing my age, but Maria and I would have so much fun planning our schedules and using graph paper and highlighters for color coding to plot it all out. (Yes, I'm a nerd. Don't even get me started on school supplies.)

Anyway this year, Stefanie shared my Film Fest enthusiasm. Jeremy loves it too but he just trusted our judgement. We somehow decided on 3 movies. They were all showing this weekend. Even though I had a lot of work to get done, it was a really nice break. Plus it was good to go to town with Stef.

On to the movies... By the way, I would strongly recommend all three.

Black Gold is a fair trade doco that focuses on the coffee trade.

From the site...As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. In this eye-opening expose of the multi-billion dollar coffee industry, Black Gold traces one man's fight for fair trade.

The filmmaker was there to answer questions afterwards and that was really helpful. It is such a complicated issue but one of the basic messages I left with was that Africa needs and wants fair trade rather than aid. And as a consumer it was good to be reminded of the need to be more aware of what I buy, whether it's coffee, bananas, or scrapbook supplies.

An Inconvenient Truth is an Al Gore doco about global warming. Scary stuff. Great quotation highlighted in the movie:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair

A Lion in the House is a PBS doco that follows five children for six years as they battle cancer at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. The film also shows the traumatic, lifelong affect it has on the families. A serious tear jerker--I haven't cried like that for a long time. It was nice to see some glimpses of my hometown, even if it was masked in sadness. Again the filmmakers were there but we unfortunately had to skip out on the Q&A because I needed to get back to work.

There was a great song during the credits, "When it Don't Come Easy" by Patty Griffin. I'll have to check that out.

I want to keep a list of all the great movies I've seen in the last 6 years at the Film Fest. I sense a layout coming on!