we saw two movies yesterday. osama is the first film shot in post-taliban afghanistan and was quite sad. it takes place during the rule of the taliban and is about a little girl in a family where all the men have been killed by various wars. because of the taliban restrictions on women working, the family is starving and in desperation dresses their little girl as a boy so she can provide for the family. i don't want to spoil it, but it is not exactly a happy uplifting tale. its a good, perhaps too realistic, film. but skip it if you like happy endings
the second film we saw (which was actually the first one we watched) was casa de los babys. i am a huge fan of john sayles even though in many of his more recent films not all that much actually happens. it's not about the plot as much as the characters. his movies always have a political undercurrent lurking in the background. but politics is rarely the focus. the situation is what it is, effecting the characters in different ways without ever really resolving the underlying political issue. just like in real life, those things never really get resolved. i actually like the fact that most (if not all) of the subplots are left dangling. it's strangely refreshing and gives a much stronger sense of reality than you get from films with neat story arcs.
casa is a 24 hour snapshot of a bunch of american women in a hotel somewhere in latin america waiting to pick up a baby that they have adopted. around them is the poverty and desperation that makes the babies available for them. but these privileged women themselves are desperate for the child they cannot have. the film meanders around exploring the reasons the locals are giving up their children, resentment of that fact by some locals, the people who profit off of the americans waiting in a hotel for a baby, and the conflicting personalities of the women themselves.
another reason i found the film so interesting is because my sister-in-law is currently trying to adopt a child from china. said sister-in-law is mrs. noz's twin. (perhaps evil twin, i'll let others decide that) for simplicity sake, let's call my wife's twin "mrs. zon."
mrs. zon visited about 6 weeks ago and i heard a lot about the trials and tribulations of doing a foreign adoption. one of the things they have to submit with their application is a photo of a baby's room with a crib in it. the problem is that the whole process takes so long that they have to submit a photo about a year before they will come home with a child. psychologically it can be hard to have an empty nursery and crib set up in your house for a whole year when you are waiting for a child. so the adoption agency suggested that mrs. zon and her husband just take a snapshot of a friend's nursery for the crib photo. it's a bit of a sham, theoretically the crib in the photo is supposed to be the baby's crib, but the agency noted that no one will ever know the difference. the zons, however, recently moved to a new city so they don't know many people in their area with a baby. but their neighbor had a small child and mrs. zon talked the neighbors into letting them take a snapshot of the neighbor's crib.
unfortunately the neighbors had a boy and virtually all chinese adoptees are girls. because the crib had pictures of helicopters on it, it was deemed to be too masculine. so the agency rejected the photo--quite infuriating for a women-studies minor like mrs. zon, but what could she do?
mrs. zon asked my wife to help them find an appropriately froofy feminine crib to photograph to appease the sexist adoption agency and chinese government. again, the agency knew this was all a sham--it wasn't gonna be a picture of the actual crib the adopted baby would be sleeping in. but even sham photos had to comply with appropriate gender rules.
my wife started asking around on her sister's behalf for a girly crib photos. meanwhile mrs. zon made a lucky discovery. she and her husband bought a house several months earlier. when they were looking around they took photos of the rooms of the houses they were interested in buying. when they looked at the house they eventually bought, they took a photo of the room which they now intend to use as the nursery. as it happens the prior owners had a crib in the room when they took the photo. the crib was not overtly feminine, but it wasn't too masculine either--no helicopters or any other military vehicles to offend the sensibilities of the people at the agency. plus, it had pandas. pandas!!! the chinese will love that.
they submitted the panda crib photos and just heard that their application was accepted by the agency. now its being translated into chinese so they can advance to the next round of bureaucracy.
and they lived happily ever after. well, not quite. they're still waiting for a baby, but at least their application is back on track.
