0124. a heavy musk of incense smog hung over the heartlands yesterday as the chinese common folk ignited tonnes of netherworld currency on the last day of the hungry ghost festival. personally, i dont wear a grudge towards this fervent act of pyromania, but dressing the entire residential area in an unbearable cloak of smoke and carpeting it with tattered little pieces of charred paper isnt very environmentally friendly. maybe they should look into banning such activities in a bid to save the earth.
go green, ya paper burners. burn your stuff online or something. hell yea, we should invent a site to allow people to burn incense on their very own browsers! why the heck not?
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i'll sum the jap film fest screenings i attended in one word - artsy footsy. that's two words but you get my drift i suppose. this year's film was women centric; stuff about being a woman, the roles of a mother, the emotions of a woman etc.
the final film i caught was mourning forest by kawase naomi. it was a sellout screening, filling the 200 seater theatre to the brim. it talked about a wayward pair of lonely persons - a mother who had lost her son in a disaster and an elderly man who has lost his wife 33 years ago - and how the two journeyed into a vast forest, lost and clueless.
it was a powerful feature length film which contained numerous single shot scenes. the mis-en-scenes touched me the most because without cutting the shots, the emotions on the characters can truly drill into the viewer's mind. and without cutting, the effort of the director showed. it's extremely difficult to attempt a lengthy scene without a cut, much less actually shoot one with so much feelings involved.
i enjoyed myself a lot during that film. cant say the same for the rest where the topic spoke about motherhood (throw in a film where the director shot herself giving birth), but they were all worth the time and the cash.
if the japanese film fest comes again next year, count me in!
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meeting a friend out of the blue just to smoke 2 cigarettes with him at a quiet playground made my day. im glad he is happier now. at least it puts me at ease knowing that he is not troubled anymore... for now.
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