A Film Commentary on SIDDHARTH
By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison

Siddharth, the boy, only appears in the first few fleeting frames of a sweeping saga that takes his father, Mehendra, on a journey that could hardly be described as a spiritual quest. He merely wants to find his son who has disappeared, and feared abducted; after violating India’s child labor laws and sending the boy off to work in a trolley factory to supplement his own inability to earn enough money to care for his family. 

This film was shown by Mountain Shadow in September, 2014.

Click on the image above to read the full commentary.

A COMMENTARY ON THE FILM, “LOCKE”
By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison

Played by the very capable actor, Tom Hardy, Ivan Locke is a construction foreman and indispensable part of an impending project, when he suddenly leaves work one night, jumps in his car and leaves everything behind; including his job, home, wife and children. While he’s in the driver’s seat on what clearly turns out to be anything but a joy ride, he himself will be driven by something far more important to him than everything else he’s willing to risk losing or giving up.

Click on the image above to read the full commentary.  

A COMMENTARY ON THE FILM, “THE ROCKET”
By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison

A Film by Kim Mordaunt - Non-rated - 96 min. – Drama -- Summary: A boy who is believed to bring bad luck to everyone around him leads his family and two new friends through Laos to find a new home. Note: Mountain Shadow screened this film in June, 2014.

For a decade beginning in 1964, the U.S. military dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during countless bombing missions, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita to date in human history. The bombings were part of what came to be known as the U.S. “Secret War in Laos,” in efforts to support one side in a civil war; while disrupting the supply chain along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail during the more public American war in Southeast Asia (commonly referred to as the Vietnam War).

While the bombings in Laos destroyed numerous villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of Laotians, up to one third of the bombs dropped never detonated; leaving the countryside contaminated with vast quantities of unexploded ordnance, otherwise known as “UXO.” Subsequently, over 20,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO in Laos since the bombing campaign ended over 40 years ago. 

It is against this sobering backdrop that Australian filmmaker/writer/director Kim Mordaunt wrote and directed his 2013 film, The Rocket. You can read the full commentary here. 

Click on the image above to read the full commentary.

Note: This 2014 Oscar Best Short-Action film from Denmark was screened at Mountain Shadow's March event, along with the delighful film from Saudi Arabid, Wadjda.  Mountain Shadow director, John Bennison offered the following commentary.  Your comments are encouraged at the end to continue the conversation!

 The old moon laughed and sang a song,
   As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
   And the wind that sped them all night long
   Ruffled the waves of dew.
   The little stars were the herring fish
   That lived in that beautiful sea —
   "Now cast your nets wherever you wish —
   Never a’feared are we";
   So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
   Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
                                           Eugene Field, 1889

Before the time we learned how to expand the known world by enlightened scientific methodologies -- including the wonders of modern medical wizardry --  certain truths were not bound by the requirements of factual verification. The Ancients instead relied on the kind of storytelling that found far less distinction between the known world and the inexplicable mysteries left only to the imagination.  

Nowadays such tales are often relegated to the realm of children’s stories; the subtleties of which are regrettably more often than not wasted on the young.  Now, for everyone, there’s Helium.

A Commentary on the film, “Fill the Void”

     Origial title: “Lemale et ha’halal”  A Film by Rama Burshtein

 Commentary by John Bennison

As alien as the marriage customs of Hasidic Judaism may be to our own contemporary way of living and looking at the world -- it is the same question that is at the heart of the storyline and setting in Israeli director Rama Burshtein’s film, Fill the Void. 

What’s love got to do with it?

Sometimes described as a Jane Austen-like melodrama set in the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish community of Tel Aviv, Fill the Void tells the story of a young woman who is pressured and/or persuaded by family entanglements into an arranged levirate marriage to an older widower with a young child.

In a day and age when popular sentiment suggests anyone ought be allowed to betroth oneself to whomever one chooses and call it marriage, the notion that social custom, religious dictums, cultural traditions and familial obligations should interfere with one’s individual rights may seem a bit rigid and arcane, at best.  

Our reviewer discusses the film and sets it in the context of modern day demellas.  

A Film by French writer/director Christian Carion
Mountain Shadow screening: Dec. 22, 2013

By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison 

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Excerpt, The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) 

One hundred years ago, nation states had taught their young to hate the Hun, the French and Englishman.  And by 1919, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats had borne witness to what four years of human slaughter had wrought upon the world he knew.  

His poem, “The Second Coming” not only ushered in the literary era often referred to as modernist poetry, but challenged subsequent generations to name that “rough beast,” as he called it, that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”