You’ll get the schtick pretty quickly. The BBC’s Matthew Stadlen spends five quick minutes with celebrities, thinkers and newsmakers. And, above, he gets down to business with Richard Dawkins, with the conversation touching on religion, the afterlife, spirituality, morality, happiness, and the whole point of life. Other thinkers featured in the series include Martin Amis, AC Grayling, Alain de Botton, Brian Cox, Sir Terry Pratchett and others.
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Out My Window — it’s a new interactive documentary, a film unlike any you have seen before. Katerina Cizek, the director, put it together over the course of years, and the award-winning film uses its novel approach to explore life, as it goes on, within highrises — the most commonly built structures during the past century. Created with 360º video and high end web technology, Out My Window brings you to 13 different locations across the globe, moving from Chicago to São Paulo, to Bangalore and Johannesburg. And the story doesn’t unfold linearly. You choose where and when you want the stories (49 in total) to begin and end. The film is better experienced than described. So my recommendation: Watch the trailer, or just jump into the interactive documentary and see for yourself.
Howard Zinn, the People’s historian, taught at Boston University for 24 years, until he died earlier this year. In late October, Bill Moyers delivered the first Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture during which, appropriately enough, he focuses on the challenges facing our democracy, and particularly America’s long drift toward plutocracy, where the rich get richer at the expense of the average citizen. The talk (followed by a Q&A session) runs a good two hours, and Moyers himself starts speaking at the 6:40 minute mark. You can watch the video here, or read the transcript here.
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During the past decade, Howard Hall has directed four IMAX films that take you deep under the sea, right into the homes of amazing marine life. Now, Hall has brought his act to Vimeo where he has posted a montage of his favorite underwater shots from the past year. Filmed with a RED One camera, this footage was taken in the waters of the Maldives, Alaska, California, Costa Rica, and Mexico. And it’s all fairly stunning. I would highly recommend watching the video on Vimeo itself and sizing it to full screen. H/T to @eugenephoto.
Every November 2nd, Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead. Closely associated with other Catholic holidays (All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day), the Day of the Dead gives participants a chance to pray for and remember dearly departed family members and friends. And it’s often carried out in a festive spirit, not one marked by melancholy. As Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico’s most celebrated writers, once said about death: “We Mexicans don’t advance towards death, we return to it, because death is not the end but the beginning, the start of everything: we descend from death.”
Today, on the Day of the Dead, we give you a claymation film that captures the mood of the holiday — Hasta los huesos or Down to the Bone. René Castillo, a self-taught animator from Guadalajara, wrote and directed the film back in 2001. And it went on to win many international awards for excellence in film. Down to the Bone runs nine minutes, and it’s a wild ride throughout. H/T M.S.
The Last Farm, a short Icelandic film directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson and starring Jón Sigurbjörnsson, is now being featured in the YouTube Screening Room. Nominated for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 2006, the 20-minute production gets into some sobering yet inescapably universal issues – love, aging, family and death. And I’ll leave it at that. You can now find this film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online along with 200+ high quality cinematic works. Or you can purchase it on a DVD that brings together several Academy Award-nominated short films from 2005.
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Dark Side of the Lens presents the art and inner voice of Irish surf photographer Mickey Smith. The six minute film lets you experience Smith’s aesthetics translated into beautiful practice. (“I wanna see waveriding documented the way I see it in my head, and the way I feel it in the sea.”) But then it rather poetically cracks open the personal philosophy of the artist:
I never set out to become anything in particular, only to live creatively and push the scope of my experience for adventure and for passion… The raw brutal cold coastlands for the right waveriders to challenge – this is where my heart beats hardest…
Most folk don’t even know who we are, and what we do or how we do it, let alone what they pay us for it. I never want to take this for granted so I try to keep motivation simple, real, and positive… If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living where I’m scraping.… If there’s no future in it, this is a present worth remembering.
The aesthetic choices. The personal decisions. It’s all what’s happening behind the camera, the place no audience sees, the “dark side of the lens.” You can find the full transcript of Smith’s commentary after the jump…
A final note: Dark Side of the Lens was born out of a project called “Short Stories.” Established by Relentless Energy Drink, the UK-based project challenged filmmakers to create their own mini opus, to explore and celebrate “no half measures” in film. Find other shorts here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
A quick bit of inspiration from the man who has changed the way we buy books, and now the way we’re reading them – Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon). Speaking at Princeton’s graduation last May, Bezos discussed the life choices that we all face: Will you follow dogma? Or be original? Will you play it safe? Or take good risks? Will you be a cynic? Or a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others? Or will you be kind?
In short, your life story comes down to your choices. What story will you write? And how will it read when you’re 80?
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