more films

so today I started with a group of fabulous shorts - dark comedies - which are always favorites of mine- and then into a terrific documentary on Jane Jacobs (who faced off Robert Moses and helped lead to his downfall as the kingpin of "urban renewal" boondoggles in NYC - then it was on to more shorts (a less satisfactory group that I basically only like one of the five) and finally a short before another feature length film about a bizarre murder in a mountain town in Galicia... but here they are-

This next one was my favorite film so far - an excellent examination of the subject matter and the history of the "urban renewal" debacle we suffered from in the 60s....

In this next group I LOVED Shy Guys, Our of Frame and Stuck... liked the Made in Spain movie - was less than enthusiastic about For Free (which was missing subtitles and therefore maybe lost something in translation) and Tond was just downright creepy-

This next group was from the women's film fest (a fest within the fest) and lived down to the old joke "Sorry ma'am this is a feminist bookstore - there is no humor section..." bummers pretty much across the board - in A Beautiful Day a dad kills his daughter's abusive husband. In Wig a woman discovers her husband's adultery and bastard child. In the Disappointment Tour (one of the better of the group) three generations of women don't get along.  In Flora a transvestite is mistreated by all her family and luckily runs into a guy in the men's room who is human enough to give her encouragement to stand in her own truth. I am not sure how The Bus Trip found its way to this group as it was a political statement about the settlements in the West Bank and historical anti-semitism (must have taken a wrong turn on the way to the Jewish Film Festival of two weeks ago LOL)

The final film for me - tonight - was the strange Santoalla- a murder mystery about a remote mountain town in Galicia where two families battle it out for absolutely nothing- the place is a ruin in the middle of nowhere and one wonders what possessed the Dutch couple who settled there to stay in the face of such antipathy.... you could easily mistake this for a story about Sicily....

tomorrow an easy day with only two films - both documentaries...

Tonight we had a late dinner at Blue Marlin - our Bradenton Beach favorite - it was a stop on the farewell tour of our time here for winter--- Phil heads to Chicago in ten days ---

so as always stay tuned for more fun and games - up next back to Uzbekistan for the spring festival...Navruz...