Recent Discoveries

In my 10th grade classes last week, we read some poetry by Sekou Sundiata. The written poetry is pretty good, but seeing his performance of that poetry on the video series The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, taken from the 1994 Dodge Poetry Festival. He is absolutely amazing. Beyond iTunes, there's not a lot of his work available on the web, but it's good stuff. If by some chance you happen to hear that he's giving a reading near you, I recommend it. I'm planning to buy some of his spoken word recordings from iTunes and I'll give a review when I do and when I have a chance to digest it. Good stuff, though--his poetry makes the spoken word into music, but behind the appealing surface is a real depth and seriousness.
On Friday, as a school, we watched the film Most (translation: The Bridge). One of the producers was a graduate of our school and he was there to talk about it. The film itself is a short, powerful story about a draw-bridge operator "forced to choose between love and duty," between love for one and duty to many, caught in a no-win situation. It's a powerful story and I'd recommend it if you get the chance. It's an independent film, made largely at the filmmakers' expense. They filmed in Prague, largely with Czech actors, to save money, but the performances they got were top-notch. The film is in Czech with English subtitles, but for the most part the story is so well acted that you would get most of what's going on even if you didn't have the subtitles. It's also cool to see what independent filmmakers can manage in terms of quality without the big budgets of Hollywood. As I understand it, these filmmakers all have day jobs--filmmaking is the passion they have, not the profession (though I bet they'd love to make it their profession if they could).

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