Yesterday we were without power till midafternoon, which was too late to write a blog. So today you get two.
One: Last weekend we went to Savor Cinema to watch the five action shorts nominated for Academy Awards. Last year they were uniformly depressing, beginning with the first, which featured a phone call to a mother in Spain from her son in France who had been abandoned on a beach by his father and was now being pursued by a strange man. The first of this year’s batch featured a phone call to 911 from a young woman who was being driven against her will down a dark road by a volatile man. Oh no, I thought, here we go again.
But the shorts that followed got progressively better. Two were set in Tunisia – how often do you get slices of life from the Maghreb? – the second of which, NEFTA Football Club, had a wonderfully droll ending. The one that should win, however, was Saria, an American production based on a true story about the tragic deaths of girls in a Guatemalan prison. I will be watching the category closely on Sunday, the only one of which I will have seen every nominee.
Two: Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, Reyna Grande complained that publishers are not interested in immigrant stories. There are many things publishers are not interested in. In travel, it’s most countries not named Italy or France.
