Pre-travel wrap-up

Let's get organized, shall we?

I saw a few more movies last week.

Friday I saw a shorts program. Several of these short films were outstanding! Rebel was about far-right anti-immigrant groups in Quebec in the near future. It was a bit simple, but a cliff-hanger ending. Ani was a nice story about a girl and her father, made by a woman for her own father. And The Physics of Sorrow was amazing, for the story and mainly for the technique, animation using encaustic painting. A visual delight.

Saturday I had not planned to see anything, but a friend had an extra ticket to The Truth, and who can resist Catherine Deneuve at 9 am on a Saturday morning? She was amazing, and the movie, mostly in French, with Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke, was really entertaining, quiet, not Hollywood-ish. It didn't come to some big crescendo ending, but told a story of a family, and an aging actress who had made certain choices in her life.

That evening we had a party at our house; we made too much food; it was really fun; now we have so many leftovers to eat before Friday.

At the party I also talked to a friend who had seen the film State Funeral, and he told me it was two hours of watching people stand in line. Well, that was our last film of the festival, and off we went on Sunday afternoon to see it.

People standing in line for a movie

It was two hours of people standing in line, but wow, what lines! It is a documentary made from archival footage from all over the Soviet Union in the two weeks following Stalin's death in 1953. People from east to west gather in town squares to listen to the radio. Huge statues are surrounded by giant floral wreaths and photos, and more just keep coming. In Moscow people go through a palatial building to see the open coffin, piled high with flowers. Elsewhere, across the whole, wide country, citizens parade past monuments, in March, so some of them are still in winter and some are beginning to feel like spring. Hats, scarves, coats all were interesting! Sometimes you'd see a line of people in woollen scarves, and then someone go by in a shiny, rich, fur hat. Some coats were plain, some had big fur collars. Some people were weeping openly, some were stony-faced. They knew things that we don't know, but we now know things that they didn't. One wonders what they were thinking, what happened next to this person or that. 

It ended with the coffin being taken to the mausoleum in Red Square, with speeches from Molotov and Beria, more people lining up. What happened in the months and years afterwards would make a fascinating movie as well, of course.

The filmmaker after State Funeral

Crazy, but I really enjoyed this!

Now we just have to fit in the last few coffee dates and university chores and occasions for eating all those leftovers. Oh, and packing. How much will I really knit in the next few months? How many layers will I need to keep warm, or cool?

Yeah, I am knitting a sweater. Long cuffs, thumb holes to keep my hands warm on early morning walks by the river. Except, um, I did the second sleeve just like the first, and that was not the right thing to do. This has been corrected now and I just have the body to knit. It'll be done any day now....