Nixon confers with his aides on the social scourge of the Children's Television Workshop. Written & Produced by Matthew C. Johnson, performed by Chris Caniglia, BJ Gallagher and Matthew C. Johnson

The Memories of Angels (2008, Canada) is a documentary mashup of archive film of Montreal on the 1950s and 60s – explained here by the director Luc Bourdon. Below is the trailer. Both from the miraculous National Film Board of Canada online archive.

dir Jafar Panahi; Iran, 2001.

Another extraordinary film from Iran.  Really, what a country for film-making.

The Circle gives the interlocking stories of a handful of women who are on the run from prison, or heading back to it; we don't know their crimes and it seems unlikely they are guilty of anything much more than trying to survive in this man's world.  The circle is the traffic circle in Tehran, the circle of life, the circular moral code they're obliged to live by and the narrow world they're unable to escape from.  Like many Persian films, the story is slight and itself circular, and what's more important is character, circumstance and meaning.

There's little beauty on the streets, cinematographically or otherwise, and no real physical brutality either.  Their oppressors are reasonably courteous and in theory, there is a structure into which these women should fit, but they don't, and their lives are a mixture of frantic manoeuvering, tedious frustration and patient forebearance.  The pacing of the film is perfect - lull and panic in  balance - and the women are sympathetic without a trace of sentimentality or heroism:  neither immoral nor amoral, they have been divested of their rights and freedoms so completely that prostitution,  abortion and abandoning a child are just necessary steps in their survival, after which perhaps more complicated reactions may be allowed a look in.  Only the most naive, a girl of 18, has any kind of dream left to her; the rest are just astonishingly resilient in what seems to be a thoroughly hopeless life.  Banned in Iran.  Five stars.

There's a scene from it here.

The eyebrows! The eyebrows! It's a wonder the species didn't die out during the war, what with the tea instructors and the smug women. And anyway that's not how you make tea in the Hebrides:

1. Use a tin pot and warm it.
2. Use tea leaves, and boiling water but actually that doesn't matter so much as -
3. Put it on a low heat and cook it.
4. Stir and serve in the kitchen with a sideplate of at least 3 homemade things, involving at least one scone and one portion of crowdie-and-cream.
5. Converse.

Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh.

Przypadek, dir. Kieślowski, Poland 1981; 122min.

Kieślowski was simply miraculous and this was one of his earlier films, made in 1981 though not released until 1987, as Poland started to emerge from wherever it had been. The international title is Blind Chance though I think (with my imperfect Polish) that the meaning is more than that: accident, incident?  And there is one, finally.  Witek the medical student is running for a train and catches it, misses it or misses it in a different way, and has three lives: apparatchik, dissident or happily married doctor. This concept of multiple possibilities is Kieślowski's thing, underlying also The Double Life of Veronica, and Three Colours - and apparently it inspired the much inferior Sliding Doors. The editing in Przypadek is a bit jumpy and each of the three segments is too short, but it's very Polish, and I like the fine detail: partly for the physical details of the Poland I knew 10 years later (the long windows, the tea glasses, the square buses, blackened courtyards and broken pavements) and partly for the humanity of such close attention to the personal. For all that it juxtaposes late-Stalinism with new Solidarność with religion with family and professional life, it's about one recognisably consistent ordinary guy living through his time.

It reminds me of Ashes and Diamonds, Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel (and Wajda's film) about the last days of the war as the various factions (then the communists, the AK partisans and the collaborators) come into sharp focus and people find themselves in the middle of it all.  Ashes and Przypadek sort of bookend that era in Poland - both very useful in explaining it.

Merci! dir. Christine Rabette, Belgium, 2003; 6m48.

I defy you not to laugh. Keep it in your medicine cabinet; Reggie Perrin could learn a thing or two (and his makers.) Thanks to @frankwkelly for pointing it out.

Too serious around here. Try this. It's almost art.

Dagur Kári, Iceland 2003.

A very cool blue film about not belonging.  Nói is not really an albino; it's a metaphor.  The town (tiny?  not by our standards) is a composite of three in the West Fjords and Nói, though odd and hard to warm to, doesn't strike me as suffering from more than a touch of existentialism.  In fact he seems to have reasonably warm relations with lots of people, just not his teachers.

Some striking scenes, like the blood scene above .  Light touch -   a lot of them, and in Making Of comments the director says

This little English film is described by the BFI as being "for those who like their humour daft and thoroughly unsophisticated" which obviously I do. The actress is also the director: Florence Turner, the Vitagraph Girl, was born in New York and had a career in the new flicks before moving to England in 1913 to tour the music halls. So, sad to say, this gurning is not authentically British. Ben Fogle is cast as the husband* - he's older than I thought.

Dir. Florence Turner, England 1914; 8min55

*Actually it's Tom Powers, also American, who was in England in 1914 to make 20 films for Hepworth, including this one. He was later murdered by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.

Dharavi in Mumbai is Prince Charles's favourite slum and is the heart of Slumdog Millionaire (my copy of which has not arrived yet).  Here's a piece on it from IIED:
Increasingly, [Mumbai] city planners are learning to listen to the interests of slumdwellers. Together they make up half the population of this great city and provide so many of the essential services needed to keep it moving - whether it's highly effective waste collection, the wealth of food stalls, or the basket makers and vendors of every kind of thing.

Dharavi's recyclers are in a class of their own: over 200,000 people work in the industry, primarily recycling plastic. Add in revenues from its thriving pottery and textile concerns, and Dharavi brings in an estimated US$650 million a year.

The skills on tap here extend far beyond those tied to consumption and waste. This is fortunate. A massive urban planning scheme called Vision Mumbai is due to replace the warren of lanes with high-rise housing for the slumdwellers, and luxury shopping malls. People from Dharavi have been recruited to carry out the surveys needed to plan for redevelopment, and their skills in building and upgrading are in demand.

Not all are convinced that Vision Mumbai is fully inclusive, however. There are worries, too, that when the recycling workshops are bulldozed, that service will disappear and a mountain of urban waste will engulf the city.
It's also got a sanitation problem.  The slum that constitutes the "horror and wonder that is Bombay" is the setting for Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters and A Fine Balance - the latter a superbly balanced book and quite devastating in the way that only Indian books can be, by the way.  Here's a tour.

There's another interesting article in the NYT on what Dharavi really is to its own.

Daniel O' Hara, Ireland, 2003; 9min21.

Kind of cute.

Este es el spot de Historias minias de Carlos Sorin. Será exhibido en la muestr Cine, sur y después.