2018 - Max Richter - My Brilliant Friend (OST)

Wonderful musical score to the brilliant HBO series--My Brilliant Friend. I'm now watching season 3 which corresponds to book 3 (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quadrilogy. Season 3 will end shortly; at least I can look forward to season 4. Quality television all the way--a pearl in a sea of mostly garbage. 

 

A quieter way of life

 This is how I've viewed life for many years now. 

The television series White Wall

White Wall is an eight-episode Finnish/Swedish tv series from 2020 that showed up on Norwegian tv (NRK1) recently (perhaps it's been there a while and I just didn't know about it) and we finished watching it last week. It is apparently available for viewing on Netflix as well. White Wall is a sci-fi series that I can recommend, although the ending will probably frustrate some people (not me). But I happen to like the sci-fi genre and will cut sci-fi writers/filmmakers some slack if their creations are mostly well-done. I think this series was well-done, even though it moved slowly. It took its time getting to the revelation of what the white wall actually was and what was behind it. Additionally it had an appropriate 'atmosphere' and subtle feeling of impending doom in each episode.  

The series has Norwegian actor (Aksel Hennie) in one of the main roles. I thought he did a very good job as the character Lars Ruud, project leader at a former Swedish mining site that is being prepared as a large repository for nuclear waste. There are the extremist environmental activists who are against the opening of the site as well as corporate leadership that doesn't want anything to stand in the way of the formal opening. The underground team working on the site discovers the existence of a white wall at the end of one of the many tunnels after an unexplained explosion. Several members of the team are killed and this prompts an investigation by security; Lars and his team keep the discovery of the white wall secret from corporate leadership while letting the security leader in on the secret. They come to realize that they cannot dig around the wall or excavate it; it has an oblong shape and is quite high. Without giving away the rest of the story, the white wall is eventually shown to be a huge capsule of some sort, composed of carbon and unidentifiable materials not before seen on earth. What this capsule is doing there, who put it there, and what it contains are the subjects of the last three episodes. Subplots include Lars' affair with his colleague Helen Wikberg (played by Vera Vitali), her autistic son Axel's behavioral changes after touching the capsule wall, the activist Astrid and her father Besse (retired but who once worked in the mine and knew about the existence of the white wall), and the relationship of Oskar the security guard with Astrid. The atmosphere is appropriately eerie and claustrophobic, as one might expect when working in deserted mine tunnels. The series was filmed in an actual mine located in Pyhäjärvi, Finland. Kudos to the actors who worked in these mine tunnels for months at a time. You couldn't have paid me enough money to descend so far underground; my claustrophobia would have gotten the better of me. 

It's unclear whether there will be a season 2 based on the ending of season 1. Without giving it away, I'll say that it's fairly catastrophic, so what there would be to continue in terms of storyline would be truly challenging to write. But time will tell. 

The Kashmir Files

There are some films that will haunt you for the rest of your life. The Kashmir Files is one of them. I saw it last night with a friend who happens to be from India. She did not know the story of the 1990 exodus of the Kashmir Pandits, which is what the film is about, but she had heard that the film was very good. She invited me to join her and her family and friends to go and see the movie. We have previously talked about going to see an Indian Bollywood film together with some of our other friends, a group of women who happen to be former colleagues, and we will do that at some point. But last night's film was not a happy Bollywood film. 

The Kashmir Files is a Hindi-language drama film (with English subtitles) based on real-life stories of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits during the Kashmir Insurgency. It was written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri and was released in March of this year. It has done very well at the Indian box office and it will be interesting to see how well it does globally. The film has been criticized for promoting anti-Muslim sentiment due to the brutality of the extremist Muslim insurgents against the Kashmiri Pandits. If you want to read about the film you can do so here: The Kashmir Files - Wikipedia. What I have understood is that the insurgents butchered not only the Kashmiri Pandits but also moderate Muslims and other religious groups. Their aim was to free Kashmir from India and to make it a Muslim state; their motto was 'convert, leave, or die'. In the film, the young male university student named Krishna Pandit (played by Darshan Kumaar) learns what happened to his parents and brother at the hands of the insurgents; he has not been told the truth by his grandfather who raised him. His speech at the end of the film to his fellow university students was electrifying. He tells the story of what he has learned about what happened in Kashmir after going there to spread his grandfather's ashes together with his grandfather's old friends, which leads to estrangement from his professor Radhika Menon (played by Pallavi Joshi) who has pushed him to front the new separatist movement. All the actors and actresses in this film delivered excellent performances.  

I leave the political discussions for the experts. I cannot comment on the history or the events of 1990 in Kashmir; I know very little about Indian history. But it struck me once again how much evil is committed in the name of religious sentiment. Religion has been the reason for many of the wars up through history and for the ensuing brutality. After seeing this film, I asked, why? Why can't we live in peace, coexist peacefully with each other? I firmly believe that most people want to do just that. Why can't we worship as we please without preaching and subduing others who believe differently? If you believe in several gods and I believe in one, so be it. We are different. I have no right to tell you that my beliefs are better than yours, nor do you have any right to tell me that yours are better than mine. I am not the sole possessor of truth in this life and neither are you. It is more important to me that we should live peacefully together. But I see that many political leaders do not want to do that. That is very clear to me when I look at what is happening in Ukraine. Man's inhumanity to man; I wonder if it will ever stop. 

One of the older characters in the film says that inhuman leaders rely on the hopelessness of the people they subjugate in order to retain their power. He says that one must always have hope, because if there is hope there is the possibility of change. I can imagine that for those who lived through this era in Indian history, that having hope was difficult, much like it must have been for the Jewish people during WWII. But it is hope that keeps you going. My friend said that one of her friends did not want to attend the film with them because she is from Kashmir and experienced what happened first-hand. I can understand that too. The film was tough to watch, and probably on my own, had I read about it first, I would not have chosen to see it. But I don't regret having seen it. Sometimes it is necessary for the bubble that we live in to be popped from time to time. Because we really have no idea what it is like to have to leave your country behind because an invader wants to kill you. We have no idea. 

Another way of looking at it

Another way of looking at life's detours.......