Cinema paradiso - the week tht was - movie special

These days movies are my fav pastime , and basically watching movies is all i do in life these days. After a point decided to spice things up a little .... now now dont get any wrong ideas .... naughty naughty ... just tht decided to make last week a 'Foreign Movies' week - of course all English movies are foreign movies - but in reality English is not a foreign language at all to me thts the language i use almost all the time in Mumbai ; Im deviating , back to my movie watching - aim was to see non-hollywood movies

There are lot of these movies which dont get usual hype in media , don't get released in theaters here , are not shown in movie channels on TV ... so its a bit tough to even know about these movies , let alone catch them ... over the course of time through arduous downloading or collecting movies through office network and personal networks established with great effort , i managed to a get a decent set of foreign movies

All these movies are not only good , but offer you a non-american view of the world ... so thought of sharing little bit bout these movies with all

Persepolis - This was a movie in French - It was a cartoon/graphic kinda movie , set in Iran of 1980-1995 . It was tale of a woman from Iran ... her life right from childhood to teenage to adulthood , examines many events in the country which changed the lives of people forever .. it doesn't show the events like - revolution against Shah of Iran or entry of fundamentalists or communists .. it just focuses of lives of ordinary families (slightly rich family actually in this case) how these major events changed the way they live. A very good movie.
This was actually a graphic novel which was converted to a movie

Diving Bell and the Butterfly - again French - Set in France this time , it was real-life story of Elle magazine editor , who became paralyzed after a stroke and had visibility in one eye alone but whose brain was working and hearing was proper. The movie is about how he manages to communicate to the outside world (by blinking his eye) and how he helped to write a book about how a person with his condition views the world. This is a true story , he actually communicated enough to make a book ! good watch , the best part of the movie is that it is totally non-manipulative and just presents the story without trying to reach to audience or make u like the character ,win ur sympathy etc ..needs to be saluted for tht alone ... tht really works and makes it feel genuine

Pan's labyrinth : its a spanish movie - set in arnd 1944 in Franco's Spain which was ruled by fascists and there was a civil war going on. The facists had taken control and a few rebels were resisting them in countryside .. tht is where the story is set. Its a tale which blends fantasy and reality .... the protagonist is a 12yr old girl whose mother had re-married a captain of fascist forces who is hunting down these rebels in countryside. Tale is set in an almost abandoned village near the edge of forest - a brilliant setting for such a movie

Without giving anything away , the girl reads a lot of fairy tales n fantasy stories and she imagines herself to be in one ... this is shown parallel to the story of how her cruel step father is fighting the good natured rebels ... both the tracks go on and somewhere along the way the line between them blurs ... fusion of real life and fantasy making this one really memorable movie for me - performances are top notch and direction is too good - MUST WATCH - a movie like no other !

Machuca - Spanish movie - this is set in Chile - yet another country which has been ravaged by civil war/ revolutions etc ... Story of a couple of kids , one a rich boy and another living in slums outside city , Communist party gets power in Chile and the long standing class divide seems suddenly threatened ... poor/underprivileged people suddenly seem to be raising their heads and are demanding equal rights in society. A set of poor kids are allowed to join the finest school for free ... this is a story of friendship between the rich kid and a poor boy ... how they weather the cultural/ political storm of class divide. In Chile ,Pinochet came into power backed by upper class and did a huge cleansing of the lower classes after this ... movie shows all this in background , with focus being how lives of people change with the changing times/ ideologies ... it looks at class divide without taking sides or sermonising

Nuovo Cinema paradiso - Italian - Set in some obscure town in Italy - This is the story of a director who returns to his hometown after 30 yrs ... it traces his story as a kid who was mad about cinema , his friendship with guy in charge of projector at local cinema. More than anything this movie is a celebration of cinema ... captures how cinema touches people .. a story of pursuing dreams.
Brilliant in all aspects ... Ennio Morricone's music is the icing on the cake ! yet another Brilliant movie

No Man's land - Bosnian/Serbian - set in no-mans land between both countries , its about 2 soldiers from opposite camps who get stuck in the no-mans land and need to depend on each other to get out alive , the attitude and beliefs and actions of the two mirror the countries from which they hail ... brilliant plot setting ... great movie which succeeds in bringing out the futility and insanity of war .. questions the role of UN ... looks at people in the war .. Fantastic movie

Trivia : This is the movie that beat Lagaan and Amelie to Oscar in best foreign language film category in 2002 !

Malena : Italian movie - set during WW II in a small town in Italy , spans the period when Italy was at its peak fighting war with ally Germany against rest of the world , Italy had great pride in itself
Then everything comes crashing down after a humiliating defeat in the war , the post war years are very terrible for Italians. This movie focuses on a few adolescent boys in a remote town and the effect of a super haaawwwttt Malena (Monica Belluci ) on them and infact of whole town ... on imp thing i read before this movie was that Malena in the movie represents Italy .. what Malena goes through is infact a representation of how Italy was used and abused -> my perception of the movie changed after reading this - earlier felt it was semi-porn ! But actually its a very good movie

Rashomon - Japanese movie -
Why you must watch it : Akira Kurusowa - Need any more reasons to watch this one ???

Movie is about a murder and account of 5 different witness of the same. Their accounts of the same event is different in some ways and all of them claim they are telling truth
Kurosawa makes a lot of interesting points and analyses human tendency to delude themselves and questions whether somethign called truth is possible .. i stop here and let u judge what he says after you watch .. brilliant movie

thts it for now ... again the reason for lumping together these movies are tht they are foreign language movies and I happened to have them in my harddisk this month ... this is no best foreign movies / 5 movies to watch before u do anything else or any such shit !