• Pitch Perfect 2 promo

    Pitch Perfect 2 – Feminist Storytelling

    Warning, this one has some plot spoilers. Pitch Perfect 2, is a great dose of quirky, catchy and exuberant musical fun. And just for fun here are the Barden Bellas with their re-mix of Just the Way You Are from the first Pitch Perfect movie.   But this fun movie has a serious message, not far from the surface. The explicit and implicit feminist sub-texts of Pitch Perfect 2 are gracefully woven into the latest adventures and music of the Barden Bellas, an all female a capella group, for whom the label ‘misfits’ is spelled with a capital “M”. The characters of the Barden Bellas are a collective challenge to…

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    The Hundred Foot Journey

    The Hundred Foot Journey, plays out against a physically short distance, yet the distance that keeps the people involved apart, is vast. The movie tells the story of a meeting between two cooking cultures:  Indian and French. Both are proud of their cooking traditions. An Indian family, displaced some time before to England by political violence in their home country, seeks out a new life across the channel in Europe.  A chance car breakdown takes them to an idyllic French town; where they find the food ingredients with the flavours they are seeking. Their arrival sparks a competition between cooking cultures and rival restaurants.  Four characters are at the heart…

  • Burakumin leather workers from 1873 photo by SHINICHI SUZUKI

    Hometown Foreigners

    We traditionally define a “foreigner” as someone who comes from a country other than our own. But that definition is too easy. It does not fully encompass the range of people who find themselves “foreigners” in their own hometowns (that is facing exclusion and discrimination): sometimes because of the occupation they hold. The Japanese film “Okuribito,” known among English-speaking audiences as “Departures,” explores the subtle but serious stigma that society can attach to certain lines of work. The movie, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, focuses on the life of Daigo, the protagonist, who loses his job as a cellist in Tokyo and moves back…