Zach Wahls speaks about family in the Iowa House of Representatives. Let’s hear what this 19-year-old young man has to say.

Way to go! =)

Thanks to those who let me know my doc wasn’t playing!

After a week trying to figure out what I was doing wrong —if anything— and trying to adjust it in all ways you can possibly think, and having tried so many different plugins I can’t remember them all, I gave up on self-hosting it for now. Unfortunately, it did not work here.

Today I was finally able to make the video work on You Tube. But not as a full HD, as it was shot. I had tried to upload it before but after I uploaded it, I saw a YouTube message saying a problem with the codecs was to blame for the audio being out of sync. Not exactly what you expect after you anxiously waited for it to upload. Right?

Anyways, if you haven’t seen it yet you can now check my “Detroit, I Love You” extreme-short-documentary.  I hope you enjoy and leave a comment!  =)

I grew up watching “Punky” and I remember stopping playing and going home early just to watch a new episode.

And to think today little Punky is a grown up woman who is already a mother of two… WOW.

Time really flies. Sort of depressing, in a way… =/

This semester, one of the classes I’m taking is focused in creating documentaries. Documentaries never were something I was interested in doing, but I always loved watching them.

As part of the requirements for the class I had to create this short doc (not that I myself consider this a doc, but whatever!). I always hated how teachers try to mold the students according to their own visions and opinions and try to create “one-size fits all” projects. But this project was way more fun than I had envisioned. Maybe because of the people I had to interview, maybe because of the nice footage I got to film, or maybe just because it was so much fun putting it all together.

I have been thinking of the next project way before I started shooting this one. Just thinking of the next project is making my head go crazy with so many possibilities. I already gave the teacher my proposal but I’ve been thinking of something smaller, simpler, and more local than what I thought at first. Gotta ask the teacher if I can change it…

Without much further ado… my first doc (that I don’t really consider a doc, but you already know that, right?):

“Detroit, I Love You”

Spoiler warning: as much as I’ve tried not to tell much about the movie, some details and parts of the story are contained in this review. Beware!

“The Help” is an excellent adaptation of a novel by Kathryn Stockett that focus on the lives of two black women in the 1960s and their friendship with a white young aspiring writer, during the Civil Rights movement. The screenplay was written by Tate Taylor, who also directed the movie. Emma Stone stars as Skeeter Phelan, a southern society girl who comes back to her hometown in Mississippi after finishing her studies. She sees in the way the help is treated in town an opportunity to tell those stories from the blacks’ point of view. She wants to tell the stories of those black women who cook, clean, and raise whites’ babies, she wants for them to tell their secrets. However, in 1960s Jackson, there’s no free speech, and what she wants to do is against the law.

The character Aibileen Clark, splendidly played by Viola Davis, is also the narrator of the movie. Through Aibileen’s perspective we get to know her story and the story of her best friend, Minny Jackson. The movie uses the history of that era in the US as a backdrop to unfold each character’s own personal drama, and the racism is a character of some sorts. The separation of the races plays on the screen, clearly showing how the “separate but equal” doctrine was a joke that only an ignorant blindfolded could really believe in.

The character Hilly Holbrook, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is the villain in the movie. Hilly depicts with clarity the meanness of some citizens of that time period. She is an unkind, vain, and vicious woman. She is the leader of the ladies of society in the Mississippi town of Jackson, and she takes full advantage of it, making people act and things go the exactly way she wants. She is so vicious he even threatens her childhood friend Skeeter. Through her character, we can see how many whites thought of blacks as less of a person as themselves. As if the whites  were some sort of godly entity, and the blacks should be grateful to have the opportunity to serve them.

“The Help” enlightens people of today about a certain chapter of the American history that many avoid talking about. I believe this movie also serves to inform us of, as well as depict, the unfairness treatment that the black people had to go through in this country. As a foreigner, in my school days I have learned only the basic of major events in  American history. We learn about the segregation, the riots, the fights for freedom, but nothing in-depth. The details and insights this movie provides are countless and invaluable, especially to people like me.

In one part of the movie, right after Aibileen finds out that the civil rights activist Medgar Evans had been gunned down, Minny Jackson says that the negroes are trapped and their kids are trapped in that life, too. After this, their friends, also maids, all agree to tell their stories. In their own way, they were rebelling against the status quo. Thus, Skeeter gets all the testimonials she needs in order to get published.

The movie also shows how some of the blacks and whites could become closer when there was no prejudice between them. After being fired from Hilly Holbrook’s house, Minny Jackson, marvelously played by Octavia Spencer, accepts a job as a maid at Celia Foote’s house. Celia is married to Johnny Foote, Hilly Holbrook’s old boyfriend. And this fact alone is enough for Hilly to prevent Celia’s from ever being a part of the Jackson society. Celia and Minny strike up an unlikely friendship.

The fact that the movie is told from the perspective of the black maids give us an penetrating look at their world, their thoughts, their emotions. They were given a voice, and they were ready to talk. I highly recommend this movie.

 
To find more information on this movie, go to its website.

I remember I was working. Someone who was at the second floor of the store where I worked told us we should turn on the TV, the one we kept on the first floor. We were five young adults watching it together.

Our eyes were glued on the TV screen. The first plane had just hit the first tower. A sense of powerlessness, of unreality and disbelief hit us. It simply was not possible.

And then came the second plane. And the likelihood of it being a terrorist attack was out to the public. We didn’t know what to say. After all, this was something that only happened in a movie, right? None of us had seen anything like it before. We were hoping that everyone  would get out unharmed, that the building would be evacuated quickly.

And then it happened. The impossible, the unthinkable happened: the towers collapsed. An oppressive mix of feelings came over me. Distress, pain, sadness, disbelief. So many feelings for so many reasons…

As long as we don’t put a face, a name, on people they are kind of in the abstract of our mind. Of course I knew that thousands of people had died on that day, but initially they were only an indefinite number.

With each passing day, the numbers of lives lost in the tragedy were raising, and those lives were also taking shape, getting names, and then their life stories were being told on TV and in newspapers.

It was a family man who left three young children to be raised by his wife, a firefighter who lost his life trying to help someone out of the building, a woman who could not get out because she problems walking, it was the bride who would never marry…

There were so many lives lost on that day. They were the children, the fathers, the mothers, and the significant other of those people who were left behind to deal with an insurmountable situation. How do we overcome the loss of a loved one? It’s the kind of pain that you do not overcome. You can learn to deal with it, to live with it. But in an intimate retreat within your heart that pain will last forever. You always will be a survivor.

So true!

A picture is worth a thousand words! =)

The morning of Friday, March 11th, 2011, found many people still awaken from the night before. The news about the massive 8.9 earthquake followed by a tsunami that hit Japan traveled fast, people were trying to contact family and friends who were in the affected region. Images usually only seen on movie screens were all over the news: it wasn’t fiction. Tragedy hit Japan twice in one single day. Read the rest of this entry »

Better late than never:

Happy New Year!

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” —Edith Lovejoy Pierce

May this year be the year in which we follow our hearts.

May this year be the year when all our dreams come true… So dream BIG.

Cheers!

Yiipi! I finally finished importing and fixing some format issues upon importing (e.g.: all dialogue was imported as action), now I will expand the script just a bit, improving it, making it better. I wrote it for my class and I couldn’t go pass a certain number of pages; however, to make it the exact way I was thinking since the beginning I needed to go over the limit imposed by the professor. So, I ended up cutting off a lot of stuff and I was able to keep it under the limit she asked. Read the rest of this entry »