Comrades in Dreams
A charming, funny, moving documentary about the very reason I’m spending my holiday commuting all hours of the day to Edinburgh – cinema. Specifically, it looks at the lives of 4 sets of cinema owner/operators in small towns in the USA, rural India, Burkina Faso and, most surreally, in North Korea.
In fact, the cinemas are really the nominal subject of the film – it’s the lives of the people involved, each in a different stage in their life, that forms the focus. The young Indian on the verge of an arranged marriage (sweetly shy and serious), the three friends in Burkina Faso whose wives complain that they spend too much time at the cinema and not enough at home (cheerfully hustling tickets for the next show “You’ve got no money? You’d better go home then.”) The middle-aged Korean woman, heroine of the revolution, whose husband is far away, elected by the commune to help restore the late leader’s birthplace (fiercely patriotic, in a cinema where films are chosen to increase the community’s productivity). And finally the late middle-aged divorcee in small town USA (Big Piney, Wyoming, to be precise), working 3 jobs to keep busy “So you don’t have time to feel lonely”.
There’s an extended riff on the film ‘Titanic’: The Indian explaining that his audiences want something thay can relate to, and retell to others – “A big ship splits in two and sinks – what’s that?” – it has no relevance to land-locked rural India. While in Burkina Faso and the States, they’re obviously hopeless romantics – “I’ve only seen it on video” “It’s not possible!” / “And then Jack just froze! It was so sad…”
In North Korea, for obvious reasons, ‘Titanic’ doesn’t feature – but the final shot has the Korean woman standing in the prow of a ferryboat…
I saw:
- 21/08/07, 8pm: Comrades in Dreams (Cameo 1)
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