About Elly (2009): Secrets and Lies

About Elly  is a new film from the great Iranian director Asghar Farhadi [A Separation (2011), The Past (2013)]… or at least new for us. Completed and released elsewhere in 2009, and even shown at New York's Tribeca Film Festival that year  (winning the "Best Narrative Feature" award), it got caught in some legal tangles and is just now being distributed in the United States.  No matter, it was worth the wait. About Elly is an intriguing, perceptive, captivating movie, a worthy antecedent to writer/director Farhadi’s two subsequent pictures.

In my review of The Past, I noted how that film and A Separation “examine how miscommunication, emotional reticence, and unexamined expectations can lead to misunderstanding, loss of trust, acrimony, and other corroding emotional responses in relationships." In a different context, the same can be said of About Elly.   This film focuses particularly on how the deception of little white lies and hidden truths can corrode relationships and lead to unintended consequences.

A group of Iranian millennials, friends since their university days, arrive at a seaside vacation spot for their annual weekend holiday.  They have just driven up from Tehran, three couples, their young children, and recently divorced Ahmed, visiting from Germany where he now lives and works. The ringleader of the group, Sepideh, has also invited a newcomer, her daughter’s kindergarten teacher Elly, to come along in the hope that she will hit it off with Ahmed.  Elly was a reluctant recruit, and insists that she can only stay for one night.

There is a bit of a snafu in that the reservation is only for one night, although they were planning to stay for three. Sepideh actually knew this when she made the booking, but figured they could work something out when they got there – and she proceeds to plead with the proprietress to make a special accommodation, asserting that Ahmed and Ellie are newlyweds, that this is their honeymoon weekend, and that it would be most unfortunate if they were forced to leave after just one night. The fib works, and the party is offered a somewhat ramshackle beach house large enough to accommodate everyone.

 

A somewhat embarrassed Ahmed and Ellie are teased as the "newlyweds", amidst the ensuing party

atmosphere as the place is cleaned, dinner made and consumed, the children frolic on the beach, there is singing, a game of charades, and so forth. During the course of this opening sequence we start to get to know and differentiate these attractive folks. They are good people having a good time.

The following day, however, everything changes. A child nearly drowns, and in a thrillingly shot ocean sequence, is rescued and brought to shore. Before anyone can catch his or her breath, it is discovered that Elly is missing.  She had been on the beach and must have swum out herself to save the child. A frantic search ensues on land and at sea, but she is gone, presumed drowned. Or is she? 

Yes, there are shades of Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) in this setup. But whereas Antonioni uses this premise of the disappeared woman to explore the alienation and hollowness he saw in western society at the time, Farhadi takes us in a different direction.  He’s interested in who these people are, what their responses to this  tragedy reveals about them – and by extension, about us.  He explores their feelings of guilt, their fears, and the conflicting impulses to blame themselves for what has happened and to find someone else to blame. The characters’ intertwining narratives and explanations quickly shift as new information is revealed. Layers of lies have been told, lies of commission and of omission, perhaps well-intended at first, but ultimately, as they unravel, consequential and revealing.  As the dissembling is exposed, trust is undermined, relationships fray, emotions are unleashed, there are recriminations, more lies are told.  Sepideh’s husband, Amir, becomes so upset at her machinations that he physically attacks her. At one point the group actually takes a vote on whether or not to be honest with a newcomer.  No one is innocent.

On one level, About Elly is a search for the truth about really happened. It’s a psychological thriller and a mystery. Did Elly drown, or did she just sneak away to go back home as she had said she must? Why wouldn’t she tell anyone? Did we upset her, are we to blame? Or is she ungrateful and inconsiderate, taking off like that? Perhaps she’s just a bad person, in which case we’re not culpable, and whatever happened is her own fault. What do we really know about her? People grasp at hypothetical straws, making up self-serving stories to assuage their own feelings of responsibility and grief.

On another level, the movie seems to be exploring the friction between religion-based traditional values, such as family honor, respect for elders, strict gender roles, modest dress and behavior; and the secular modernism of these characters, their moral relativity, ideas of gender equality, consumerism, western styles of music and dress. Several of the women are heavily made up under their stylish hijabs; they wear modest tunic tops over designer jeans. The men wear shorts or jeans and European-style shirts, which they hasten to strip off for a game of volleyball. These are, of course, the young, the educated, the rising professional class. They don’t exactly want to offend tradition, but they certainly do not feel bound by it. Not unlike their Western counterparts, they just want to have a good time, and if rules need to be bent a little, well ….  

Bending the rules and hiding the truth may have become somewhat of a necessity in ayatollah-ruled Tehran.

Farhadi is an actor’s director and the performance of each member in the ensemble is terrific and wholly believable.  They are so comfortable with one another, especially in the scenes before the trouble starts, joking, bantering, playing games. The standout has to be Golshifteh Farahani as Sepedeh, who convinced Elly to come in the first place, schemed to get her to stay longer than planned, and subsequently experienced the greatest sense of responsibility, guilt and grief after Elly’s disappearance.  She is beside herself, and – perhaps for the first time in her life – doesn’t know what she can do to make things right.  Farahani is simply exquisite.

There are scenes of sweeping beauty, most particularly one of Elly, helping a child get her kite aloft on the beach, then herself coming alive like a child as she succeeds, running back and forth holding the string, looking skyward, laughing, squealing with the simple delight of it. Then there are moments of desolation, as where Sepedeh runs behind the house to get away, be alone, so she can just sob.

The story sweeps you along with its layers of complications, one thing leading to another. I long to tell you how it turns out in the end, but why spoil it? Go see for yourself.  I can say that the final scenes are sad, haunting and beautifully wrought. 

We are left with an apt image: one of the group’s cars is stuck on the beach, and the sea’s relentless waves are encroaching. Members of the party are pushing.  The car spins its wheels, trying desperately to extricate itself to no avail, all the while digging itself ever deeper into the mire. 

ABOUT ELLY, opened on May 22, 2015 in the Bay Area, and in limited release nationwide. For release dates in other areas, click here.

This review originally appeared in Eat Drink Films.

Notes From Tribeca: The Adderall Diaries (2015)

Another of the films I liked at Tribeca FF, was a contemporary drama:   The Adderall Diaries, based on a  best-selling  memoir of the same name by Stephen Elliott, starring James Franco as the author, a young man battling his demons. 

Stephen is a bright, talented, narcissistic guy who takes too many drugs, engages in risky, masochistic sex, and blames his father Neil (Scott Glenn) and  everyone else but himself for his cascading personal and professional troubles. He is on a steep downward spiral. Elliott had made a name for himself by writing a confessional about his wild, strung out, screwed up life – all of which stemmed from the death of his mother and subsequent abandonment and emotional abuse by his cruel father, now deceased. Except it turns out that Dad isn’t deceased, and when he turns up, he’s got a different story to tell.   

Elliott has a new problem now: he’s got writer’s block. So, like Mailer and Capote before him, he turns to a splashy murder trial in the hope that writing about it may open the creative floodgates. It’s the notorious trial of Hans Reiser for the murder of his missing wife. Reiser (convincingly portrayed by a shorn Christian Slater), like Elliott, is a great finger pointer: at first he loudly proclaims his innocence, proclaiming that his wife simply abandoned the family, but once convicted he reverses course and acknowledges killing her but because he had to “protect the children” from their horrible mom. (The Reiser case arose in Oakland, CA, but it and the milieu of the entire story are transferred to New York City.)

The screenwriters – Elliott and first-time director Pamela Romanowsky – also add a fictional love interest for the movie, a pretty reporter (Amber Heard ) who happens to be covering the Reiser trial for the NY Times. Her relationship with Elliott is not totally believable, but does help us care for his mostly insufferable character – nothing like getting a little romance to get the empathy flowing. We also care because the Stephen Elliot character, however flawed, is charismatic, and because Franco is a terrific dramatic actor. So is Scott Glenn, who brings a wild intensity to his role as the maybe or maybe-not abusive parent.

Through the character of Stephen Elliott, this film raises interesting questions about subjective experience versus objective reality, about how we edit and conjure memories to fit the narrative we want or need to believe and express, how those self-justifying memories can in turn alter our perspectives and our understanding of  “truth”, and so how blaming and victim-hood can so easily become a barrier to understanding and responsibility.

I found The Adderall Diaries to be a very well made movie, and expect it will be successful. No idea when it will be released but keep an eye out.

Notes From Tribeca: The Cut (2014)

The Cut, an internationally financed feature released in Europe late last year, was on my list based on my admiration for it’s star Tahar Rahim (A Prophet [2009] and The Past [2013]) and the reputation of writer director Fatih Akin.

The Cut is a drama, bordering on melodrama, depicting the Armenian genocide of 1915, a horrific crime against humanity that resulted in the deaths of more than 1.5 million Armenian Christians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during the Great War, through the story of a blacksmith named Nazaret Manoogian (Rahim), who gets caught up in it.  This a modest, hard working young family man going about his life; until there's a knock on the door in the night, and in a moment, he loses everything. Nazaret is torn from his family, is forced into slave labor, and endures incredible physical and psychic  hardships. He miraculously survives the throat-slashing massacre of his work group (the Turks wanting to save bullets), but loses the ability to speak as a result of his injury. Through all this, he is sustained by the hope of reuniting with his beloved wife and daughters until, when he eventually learns his town has been destroyed, his wife dead and presumably his daughters as well, hope and faith die too. Still, he hangs on, what choice is there?

When Nazaret later gets news that his daughters may be alive, saved by a Bedouin family, he forms a steely determination to find them, no matter what.  The second part of The Cut is about Nazaret's quest, one that takes him to Lebanon, then to  Cuba, and eventually to the far reaches of the U.S.  Despite his handicaps – homeless, mute, no money – Nazaret perseveres. Through his journey he (and we) see another side of humanity, as strangers offer kindness, support and material assistance to help him. Eventually, there is a bittersweet resolution.

My admiration for Tahir Rahim was not misplaced. His character spends much of the movie unable to speak, yet his gestures and his eyes communicate effectively and touchingly. As in his other movies, you can't take your eyes off him.

This film is beautifully photographed by German cinematographer, Rainer Klausmann (Downfall [2004]). The Monoogian home is warmly, glowingly domestic; a vast refugee camp is a picture of hellish hopelessness; The terrain, ranging from the desolate Syrian desert to the stark, empty plains of North Dakota, are foreboding but gorgeous.

This movie has been criticized by some for inadequately conveying the enormity of the Armenian holocaust, but to me, those critics are missing the point. This is not a documentary, it is a narrative film, the story of this particular man, through which the  breadth and barbarity of the extermination campaign becomes obvious; we do not need some voice-over, much less a documentary style overview to understand what happened.   Another criticism that I've heard is a bit more valid: the second half of the movie, i.e. the international travel section, is a bit less believable, less well written.  All true, and the movie loses a few points as a result, in my estimation.

Still, The Cut is an important movie about an oft overlooked topic, Tahar Rahim is consistently watchable throughout, and the bittersweet ending is just right.

Recommended

Notes from Tribeca: The Wannabe (2015)

I saw this upcoming feature film at Tribeca FF on Friday April 17. I'm not sure when it will be released, but it's worth looking for. Keep an eye out.

The Wannabe takes place in 1992 at the time of the federal trial of John “Dapper Don” Gotti - the previously teflon-coated godfather of the Gambini crime family. Gotti, notwithstanding his vicious history and profession, was something of a folk hero in his Queens neighborhood, and the movie starts with a block party in his honor taking place during the early days of the trial. Thomas (Vincent Piazza) isn’t from the neighborhood, and is certainly no mobster, but he is a huge Gotti fan and a nut for gangster movies like the Cagney classics from the thirties and the Coppola Godfather series  – so much so that he has  modeled his whole persona on those characters: he walks, talks, and acts as though he’s one of those guys. He’s a nobody, but wants to be a somebody. His fondest wish is to ingratiate himself with Gotti; and he has a plan .

So he shows up at the block party in a white suit, silk tie, pocket hankie, hair slicked back, tough guy leer on his face, in the hope of making an impression. While there, he catches the eye of Rose (Patricia Arquette), a neighborhood girl at least ten years his senior. Rose is on the make too, for some excitement and for some one to take her out of her humdrum life. They hook up. Though not as crazy as Thomas, Rose is intoxicated by his bravado and soon is sucked into his wacky fantasies.

Arquette channels Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker, gangster moll and a cross between mommy and Lady MacBeth to her man. Piazza’s Thomas is sort of cinephile in the mold of Belmondo's character Michel in Breathless, crossed with De Niro's obsessive celebrity wannabe Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, a guy who has so immersed himself in Hollywood's tough guy mobster archetype, that he forgets these guys are fictional. Michael Corleone and John Gotti are equally real to him, and somehow noble in his mind.
                                                                                                                                                                    The Wannabe  is loosely based on a true story. Writer/director Nick Sandow, best known for playing Officer Capputo on Orange Is The New Black,  clearly has a strong affection for this material and the milieu.   Piazza is dazzling as Thomas, the rest of the cast is strong, the story – by turns funny and tragic – works, and the result is a pretty terrific movie.

Notes From Tribeca: The Survivalist (2015)

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of mini-posts from my five days at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.

Although my first movie, Bleeding Heart, starring Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet, was pretty much a dud, my second, The Survivalist, was something else entirely: a revelation.  I have no idea when or how widely it will be released, but write this down and put it on your list of movies to look out for.

The Survivalist is a small independent movie from Northern Ireland about a not too distant dystopian future, where society has collapsed and much of the world's population has died off.  As the title implies, this story concerns a guy trying to hold on and survive after the apocalypse, but unlike most pictures of this genre, the environment is rural and rustic, rather than tumbled-down urban. It has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than it does with Mad Max, Blade Runner, or Hunger Games.

The setting is a small wooden cabin hidden in a deep wood, with a postage stamp garden, and a mood of overwhelming paranoia. That’s not quite the right word, though, because the unnamed survivalist (Martin McCann) is not delusional, just appropriately hyper-alert and fearful, much like a rabbit or a sparrow,  wary of possible predators. In this case, the potential predators are other survivors. He always carries his weapon with him; he bars the door and shutters his windows at night. He has lived alone for seven years now. Then two women, a mother and daughter (Olwen Fouere and Mia Goth) approach, asking for food and shelter, although there’s not really enough to feed three.

The Survivalist is bleak yet lush, visually and emotionally. The conversation, such as it is, between the three main characters is spare, and their interaction is mostly non-verbal, but very intense and very real – distrust, desire, cautious connections, shifting loyalties. There is male and female nudity, and it is stark, deeply human and not at all lascivious.  The film develops slowly and is at times painful to watch, but it is unflaggingly spellbinding, with a feeling of stunning immediacy throughout. The story, the pace, the mood, and especially the acting all are just superb. Kudos to writer/director Stephan Fingleton, and to the amazing cinematography of Damien Alliot.

Despite the grim scenario, I left (at 11:30 p.m.) thrilled.

104 riveting minutes. Not yet released.

2017 update: The Survivalist is widely available on most streaming services including iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, etc. Although not currently streaming on Netflix it is available on disc from dvd.netflix.com.

Born Yesterday (1950): And Still Funny

Sometimes, all I want is a movie that will make me laugh. Consistently. On such occasions, I don’t particularly want and certainly don’t need the picture to fire up my adrenalin with chase scenes or explosions, to tug at my heartstrings with a cloying romance, or to teach me anything profound about the human spirit or society’s failings.  And, frankly, few of the current crop of so-called comedies fit the bill either, because so many of those movies overly cater to adolescent sensibilities, emphasizing pee-pee-caca-upchuck jokes, crude embarrassments, and a profusion of f-bombs to get laughs.  Don’t get me wrong: I don’t begrudge the kids their entertainment, but what about me? I need something a bit more clever, a bit less crass.

So it was the other day, when I happened upon the old classic comedy, Born Yesterday. With a witty script (adapted from the play by Garson Kanin) and captivating, convincing, hilarious performances from its leads, the amazing Judy Holliday and (of all people) Broderick Crawford, this picture delivered the comic goods.  So what if the film old (1950)? It works!

Broderick Crawford was known mostly for playing tough guys and thugs until his breakthrough academy-award winning performance in 1949’s All The King’s Men, as Willie Stark, a rough and tumble politician, modeled after Louisiana’s Gov. Huey Long. In Born Yesterday, he is Harry Brock, a gruff, uncouth, up-from-the-streets junk-yard magnate, come to Washington D.C. on business – that business being buying-up a few politicians, with the assistance of his corrupt but sophisticated and well-connected lawyer, Jim Devery (Howard St. John). Brock has brought along his benighted blond doxy, Billie Dawn (Holliday), a character somewhere between Jean Harlow’s Kitty Packer (Dinner At Eight [1933]) and Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire (1941). 

Billie Dawn, as brought to life by Holliday, is an great and unforgettable character. Her entire persona is funny – her clothes, body language, attitude, and especially her hilarious patois – some sort of 1930’s Bronx/Brooklyn concoction, a squeaky and tarty American version of Eliza Doolittle, if Eliza was a showgirl. Holliday originated the role of Billie on the New York stage, but her work in the film version of Born Yesterday won her an Oscar for Best Actress in 1951 (over the likes of Gloria Swanson, nominated for Sunset Boulevard, and Bette Davis, nominated for All About Eve) – one of the very rare occasions this award was bestowed for a comic performance. 

Harry Brock’s problem is that Billie is too vulgar and unsophisticated for DC society, yet he wants to show her off. (He does not seem to realize just how boorish and coarse he is himself, or perhaps – being rich and powerful - he just doesn’t care.) So he buys (i.e. “hires”) a suave, Ivy-educated journalist, Paul Verrall (William Holden) to upgrade the girl, smooth her rough edges, teach her how to fit in better.  Paul takes on the job in the linguist-spirit of Henry Higgins, but with the additional task of expanding Billie’s intellectual horizons. Being a true-believer in American democracy and with all of the iconography of the nation’s capital in his toolkit, Paul goes to town, literally, with this assignment, and with predictable results – providing a little dramatic tension , i.e. Billie’s discovery of her brain, as well as a bit of (not very convincing) romance to move the story along.  Holden is okay, but his character is essentially a plot device and unconvincing. 

Born Yesterday is pretty much Holliday’s show. She is awesome in every scene.  Early on, in a sequence in which Harry and Jim are trying to discuss “business” schemes, she cracked me up just by turning on the radio, then tunelessly and humorously humming along with some on-air ditty, mindlessly disrupting the conversation.  Her scenes opposite Crawford, where Billie and Harry go at it, are a complete and absolute hoot. They shout to and at one another across Harry’s cavernous penthouse suite; in the midst of a vociferous, passionate argument, each abruptly pauses mid-sentence to allow the maid to traverse the room, only to pick up without missing a beat when she’s gone; and then there’s the memorable (and famous) gin rummy game, a seemingly regular and intimate pastime between Billie and Harry - absolutely hilarious, while also revealing quite a lot about their relationship and about the real Billie.

Born Yesterday does have a few faults – a bit too much patriotic piety near the end, the contrived romance that does not really work  - but these are easily overlooked. It’s a true classic in the best sense of the word.  If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t checked it out in years, I recommend putting it on your list. It’s a light-hearted, funny romp.

Born Yesterday is available for streaming at Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, and at the iTunes store; the DVD is available from Netflix.

(Do not confuse this with the 1993 remake with Melanie Griffith – very inferior).

This Is Not A Film (2011): Art Will Out

Jafar Panahi is an acclaimed Persian filmmaker and a leading light of the Iranian New Wave film movement. Prior to the, um, artifact under consideration here, he had made five feature films, starting with The White Balloon (1995). While not overtly political, several of his films were banned in his home country, even as they received kudos and numerous awards at film festivals throughout the world.  (Most are not available to rent or for streaming in the US, as far as I can tell.)

Panahi was arrested in early 2010 for allegedly trying to make a critical documentary about the unrest fthat followed the re-election of President Ahmadinejad the previous year –  a charge which he denied. That December, he was convicted of "assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic. ”  He was sentenced to six years in prison and, just as significant, he was banned from making or directing movies, writing screenplays or even giving interviews for twenty years. (On appeal, the prison term was reduced to one year, but the professional ban remained.)

Understanding this backstory heightens the experience of watching This Is Not A Film – a project Panahi undertook (in collaboration with documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) while living under house arrest and while his conviction was on appeal.   It is a seventy-five minute quasi-documentary about Panahi, shot mostly in his apartment, partly by Mirtahmasb using a professional digital camera, and partially by Panahi himself with an iPhone.  The completed movie was saved on a flash drive and sneaked out of Iran hidden in a cake! It premiered at the Cannes film festival a couple weeks later.

There is no plot, really, just the backstory and Panahi’s attempts to deal with it.  The picture is structured as a day in the life of the artist. We see him cooking a meal, speaking with his lawyer, and calling Mirtahmasb to suggest that he come by later for a conversation on a topic can’t discussed on the phone. Panahi may have been prohibited from practicing his art, but his mind and his artistic temperament is unchanged and undaunted.  When his friend arrives he explains his plan: He is not allowed to make or direct a movie or even write a screenplay but, technically, he is not prohibited from describing the movie he was going to make or reading the existing screenplay on camera. And Mirtahmasb would be the filmmaker, not Panahi, right?  Easier said than done: before Panahi starts reading his screenplay, as he is sitting in the kitchen talking about what he is proposing they do, he says, somewhat imperiously, “Cut!”, whereupon  Mirtahmasb reminds him that he is not the director and he can’t say that: “It’s an offense.”

In his living room, Panahi begins to explain his unmade film – it’s about a teenage girl locked in a house - and starts to read his screenplay in front of the documentary camera. It’s an insightful bit to watch, as he paces off the dimensions of the girl’s room, describes the planned camera setup and the different shots, acts the part of the girl, and allows us a glimpse into the mind of the writer/director. But it doesn’t go so well.  Panahi breaks it off within about ten minutes. “If we can tell a film, why make a film?” he laments in frustration, then gets up and walks sadly away.

It does not end there. Panahi screens and analyzes a few scenes from his earlier films, illustrating his point that a film is not something that the director really controls; it is not just an idea or a story, it’s the location, the lighting, the emotion, the spontaneity of the actors, the unexpected ephemeral moments,  the totality of which can’t possibly be described in words, much less the reading of a screenplay.

Panahi is a mild-mannered, seemingly amiable, yet passionate man, who is also engaging and interesting to watch. Confined to his lavishly furnished upper middle-class Tehran home, he is like a caged animal.  Worse  than that is the proscription on plying his profession. This guy clearly lives and breathes filmmaking. Looking out his window at the city below, he absently, involuntarily frames what he sees with thumb and forefingers.  Describing scenes from his films, both finished and unfinished, excites and stimulates him.   Being banishing from his work is not merely frustrating: it is intolerable, impossible to accept.  How does an artist live if banned from practicing his art?

Panahi seemingly can’t. He is determined to persevere and courageously has carried on, despite the obvious risk to himself and his family.  After the covert export of This Is Not A Film  to Cannes in 2011,  he wrote and directed another movie, Closed Curtain, which was shot on a shoe-string at his vacation home,  smuggled out of Iran and released in 2013; and a third new movie, Taxi, just had its initial screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2015.

This Is Not A Film ends provocatively. Late in the evening, Mirtahmasb departs, and as he does, a young man named Hassan appears, collecting the trash. Panahi engages with Hassan, a part-time college student, and then, filming with his iPhone, follows him on his rounds through the building, asking questions, inquiring about his life, his goals.  Even this random young man’s life is interesting, he seems to be saying. When they get out into the courtyard, there’s a bonfire just outside the gate and firecrackers popping off in the distance. It’s “Fireworks Wednesday”, a.k.a. Festival of Fire, an ancient holiday celebrating the end of winter, dating back nearly three millennia (although disapproved by the ayatollahs of modern Iran). People are out and about, celebrating. Spring is coming.  Hassan says, “Mr. Panahi, please don’t come outside. They’ll see you with the camera.”

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are light moments involving the family’s pet iguana (“Iggy”) roaming about the place, and a neighbor girl’s efforts to get Panahi to babysit her yappy little dog. And he himself is able to see the dark humor in his own predicament.

I found This is Not A Film fascinating to watch for its insight into the artistic spirit, and its glimpse at the courage and pluck of this artist in particular, for it’s slice of life picture of contemporary Iran, for Panahi’s cunning ability to make something seemingly out of nothing,  for its concurrent portrayal of despair and of hope under oppression, and for its humanistic heart.   

Available on dvd and streaming on Netflix, and for purchase at Amazon and elsewhere.