Sundance Channel

I have a confession. I head home with the best of intentions.

I save a lot of information that strikes me as worthwhile directly to a blog entry. It sits there and waits until I take the time to write something as to why it struck me as worth while.

Those are my intentions. However, those intentions disappear the longer it takes me to drive home. I leave little bit behind at each mile post. A little over the river, a little at the rest area. A little at the entrance to my development. By the time that I have opened the garage door and walked inside, intentions are no longer a part of my to do list.

There is a great commercial for Weight Watchers. Hunger is pictured as this cute orange stuffed animal. Sometimes you shut the door on Hunger.

Well orange is the color of my Intentions.

One of the best things about cable TV is that it has these great movies channels, Sundance, Independent, Foreign. -I love anything with subtitles. Even Bollywood movies.

A while ago I watched this great movie, Blame it on Fidel (original French title: La Faute à Fidel) a 2006 French drama film directed by Julie Gavras.

The movie is about a 9-year-old girl, Anna de la Mesa, who weathers big changes in her household as her parents become radical political activists in 1970-71 Paris. Her Spanish-born lawyer father Fernando is inspired by his family's opposition to Franco and by Salvador Allende's victory in Chile; he quits his job and becomes a liaison for Chilean activists in France. Her mother a Marie Claire journalist-turned-writer documenting the stories of women's abortion ordeals, supports her husband and climbs aboard the ideological bandwagon. As a result, Anna's French bourgeois life is over. She must adjust to refugee nannies, international cuisine and a cramped apartment full of noisy revolutionaries.

The film covers an array of philosophy and ideology - everything from Communism to Catholicism to Greek and Asian mythology - which Anna must reconstruct from confusion into her own set of beliefs. As she negotiates her way through this ideological maze and ultimately internalizes her parents' well-meant (albeit ad-hoc) objectives, she must deal with stereotyping, misinformation, the potential hypocrisy of ideology and the potentially false hope of idealism.

The gist of the film shows how diversity and different influences alter the precocious Anna's life, as she struggles to understand why her parents would want to give up their comfortable life and wonders about what gives over their newfound ideals. Through the little girl's view we see both the parents' shortcomings (mom's feminism clashes with dad's male supremacy, and both parents begin to have a strained relationship with Anna) and strong points (they are both caring parents), but as the rigid and selfish girl begins to thaw she never becomes lovable enough to really embrace with love.

The schematic political film offers a full-blast lecture on the benefits of diversity and even the right to live differently.

I highly recommend this movie.

"Many Thanks to Wikipedia"