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11/01/2005: "God's gift to femalekind"

If you can guess what my cousin was talking about when he made this comment, I owe you a Cohiba cigar. But in the mean time, let's talk about how God painted Iapetus, the Saturn moon that has a strange ridge 13km high all around its circumference (BBC article). The Cassini spacecraft's flyby is uncovering these bizarre twin features of our solar system, which we hope to be solving in the near future. The pictures are stunning.

God's gift to femalekind could also be the movie Turtles Can Fly from Kurdish Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, which I saw at the ICA a few days ago. In the film, maimed children defuse land mines to stay alive, peddling them to a middleman who, in turn, profits by selling them to the U.N. It is shot on location in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Turkish border and depicts the struggle for survival just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Dedicated according to the Kurdish Ghobadi "to all the innocent children in the world - the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists", Turtles Can Fly vividly immerses the viewer in the nightmarish realities of daily existence in this makeshift community that's located within a forbidding natural landscape. There's no running water or electricity, the fear of gas attacks is palpable, and kids use their bare-hands to defuse land mines in the surrounding fields, which they then trade for machine guns at a market. (BBC Review)

The girl who was raped by soldiers and can't stand to have to carry the son that she was forced to bear drowns him in a pool and then jumps off a cliff. Her armless brother walks away in agony after being unable to stop his sister. Their friend has jumped on a mine, trying to rescue the baby boy that the girl was trying to abandon. The US army arrives and patrols the area. The end, credits.

After leaving the theatre, I walked to the Burger King on West End and enjoyed the abundant bland food paid for from the bundle of cash I like to carry around. I ate with both hands, no fingers missing. How cool.

Enough lies. Now when can I go there to actually help out and do something... instead of doing like for South Asia? Buy holidays, you rich western tourist! In so doing you'll help the locals rebuild their destroyed homes. Be sure to buy plenty of souvenirs.