The Window ("La Ventana")

Director: Carlos Sorin

Starring: Antonio Laretta, Roberto Rovira
Year: 2008

80-year-old, bedridden Antonio awaits the visit of his estranged son. Looking out his window at the Patagonian landscape, he decides to secretly leave the house, unseen by his faithful caretakers, to take what might be a last walk in his fields. What could otherwise seem like insignificant memories or moments in one’s life, take a special, beautiful meaning and weight in this poetic, humanistic film.

Director Sorin casts the great Uruguayan writer and scriptwriter Antonio Larreta in the lead role, establishing a link between fiction and reality that makes the protagonist’s fears, hopes and wishes even more palpable.

Comments: Zhanna really liked this film.

Recommended.

Man From Aran

Director: Robert Flaherty

Starring: Colman "Tiger" King, Maggie Durraine, Michael Durraine
Year: 1931

A fictional "documentary" depicting life on the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland. It portrays characters who live in premodern conditions and their hardships, documenting their daily routines such as fishing off high cliffs, farming potatoes where there is little soil, and hunting for huge basking sharks to win their liver oil for lamps.

After living two-and-a-half years on the Arans, Flaherty (the director) was able to convince local residents to act in his film through equal parts cajolery, a priest's assurance that the boy wouldn't be made into a Protestant, the promise of payment, and a hard-hitting local brew known as potheen.

Third in the corpus of Flaherty's four major films, Man of Aran is preceded by Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), and is followed by Louisiana Story (1948).

Comments: A beautiful film like a visual poem.

Recommended.

Adrift on the Nile ("Thartharah fawq al-Nil")

Director: Hussein Kamal
Starring: Ahmed Ramzy, Imad Hamdi, Magda El-Khatib
Year: 1971

A simple Egyptian worker, Anis (Hamdi)y, who cannot tolerate the hypocrisy of the Egyptian government (for whom he works at the Ministry of Health) and the illiteracy of the Egyptian public and decides to hide from all the problems in the country by taking up smoking hashish in a shisha, a popular smoking habit in Egypt, to escape from reality.

Comments: A decidedly moralistic, anti-drug movie set in the days before the six-day war in Egypt.

Recommended.