From a Czech comedy to a Tibetan documentary

Shameless is a Czech comedy about a loser called Oskar. He wakes up one day and decides his wife’s nose is too big. He’s fired from his job as a weatherman for lying about the weather. He did this to keep his wife away from home longer because he is having an affair with the au pair. He is found out and his wife kicks him out. He drifts from the relationship with the au pair, to one where he’s a toy boy for a famous singer. He starts working as a “safe driver” after loosing his weatherman job. A safe driver drives drunken people home in their own car – cool business idea huh? The only thing was he goes to these jobs on a really crappy looking fold up electric scooter. Meanwhile Oskar’s estranged wife Zuzana keeps their house, their kid, and her job as a radio DJ.  She also gets on better with Oskar’s parents than he does. They think he’s an idiot, actually everyone thinks he’s an idiot. They’re great and his Ma must be the coolest mother-in-law in history. By the end of the movie Zuzana has hooked up with a pretty sound single dad. Oskar winds up with nothing, but he is a loser after all.

There are places in the world and you just can’t imagine how people live there. John Murray’s documentary “A Prayer for the Wind Horse” featured one of these places high up on the Nepal-Tibet border. In fact you can’t live there in winter so the people from that village must undertake a long trek to “Winter” with their families and yaks in a more forgiving terrain. The documentary follows one man in particular called Kharma and his family as they undertake this treacherous journey. Before they set out from home, Karma points out the mountains around his village and says, I love these mountains just like my ancestors loved these mountains. You don’t wonder why, the views are breathtaking. Watching this you really get a feeling of the continuity of life in this community, generations of people have made this journey every year. You see old people follow a path they have done since their mothers first carried them on that path. Tots skip along after them, and you wonder how many times they too will make this journey.

Kala

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