Movie Madness

This week there has been a film festival right here in good ol' Thessaloniki. I got a free pass to all the screenings thanks to my school! The film festival people give a certain number of free passes to students and I signed up for one. Normally they cost 60 Euro! (Like $75 US) I've been taking advantage of this pass as much as possible. I'm going straight downtown after class today for another film!

I've seen some good ones and some bad ones. My favorite so far has been, "Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai" which was about the movement in Kenya that brought down a dictatorship. It was a really interesting story that I never knew, and the film was shot beautifully! I guess there was something about their style of filmmaking that I really enjoyed. I can't quite explain it unless you've seen the film.

I've seen some disturbing films. Why else would you go to a documentary film festival, if not to be disturbed by human nature? One such of these was called, "Zeru Zeru, the Ghosts." This film is about people in Tanzania that cut off the limbs of Albinos for good luck and fortune. Sometimes they don't even kill the person, they just run into their house with machetes and start hacking off arms and legs. To CHILDREN no less. Pretty disgusting. The film wasn't that great; they just didn't do enough with the subject to make a good film. I do not recommend it.

Another film that was slightly disturbing (not as much as the albino one, in my opinion) was called, "The Children of the Pyre" about kids in India that live and work at a ceremonial cremation site. They burn corpses all day and night and steal shrouds to make a living. It was a little sad to think about what these kids do just to make some money. They all talked about how scary it was at first, but that after a while, you get used to seeing all the corpses. I actually liked this film a lot; I really liked the shots the directors were doing in it. Nobody else liked it except me though so what do I know.

I've also seen a film about Chinese parents that are pusing their children into being Olympic gold medalists in gymnastics, one about the monarchy and it's fall in Iran, an Israeli's film about Anti-Semitism across the world, and maybe a few more that I can't remember. I have 2 I want to see tonight and a few more this weekend! I really want to use my free pass until I'm sick of films! I'm a documentary junkie, so this is like crack to me.

Aside from the films, I haven't been doing much else. I'm slowing down on the travel for now since spring break is coming up as is my trip to Athens. The study abroad students all have a trip to Athens the first weekend in April. I'm excited for that! I'm also going to be officially buying my plane tickets for spring break today. I'm starting in Amsterdam which I didn't think I was going to get to but I'm going with 2 other people for the first weekend. Then I'm going to fly into London and meet the girl I'm traveling with the rest of the time.

My life here is more or less the same as back home. Meaning that I do a lot of sitting around waiting for something exciting. The only difference here is that I get to travel a lot and I actually get to have a night life, something I've never had before! And man, do the Greeks love their night life. I can't do it how they do it-usually out til at least 3 a.m. if not later. But, they don't start til midnight usually. The city here is really energenic at night as well. Always people doing something and there mysteriously always seems to be traffic. The only time it stops is from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. when everyone is sleeping!

I love this place.