Film: Livet i 8 bitar ('8-bit living')
Jun. 4th, 2007 10:02 pmReasons for watching it: I wanted to watch a Jewish film with my bar mitzvah class, and this was the only vaguely appropriate one available. One of the class had recommended it, and I think she was right to do so.
Circumstances of watching it: There were various logistical problems with organizing this film showing. In the end, I managed to join the synagogue library, which turned out to have a much poorer selection than I'd remembered. In fact, almost everything falls into the two categories I was trying to avoid, either Holocaust stuff or faky Yiddish nostalgia crap. The Producers and The Believer I suspect are too old for 12-year-olds, especially as they don't have that good a grasp of modern Jewish history. Very few of your recommendations were available, sadly. I considered Annie Hall but decided that Woody Allen annoys me too much, and the theme sounded like it would not be very interesting to pre-teens.
In the end I picked up The summer of Aviya, which is Holocaust-related but set in the 50s and dealing with a Survivor getting on with her life. I have a vague memory of seeing it at about the age my pupils are now, and it's based on a YA book so it seemed likely to be well pitched.
Then there was trouble about where we were going to watch the film. We'd hoped to watch in one of the pupils' homes, but didn't manage to organize that. Luckily, the Jewish Centre has a youth room, with comfy sofas, a computer, a Playstation, a small handful of books and board games and a huge wide-screen TV, and we were allowed to borrow this room for the evening. But when we settled down to watch The summer of Aviya, it started jamming and skipping about ten minutes in. One of the youth workers who was floating around lent us Livet i 8 bitar instead.
Verdict: Livet i 8 bitar is rather high-grade fluff.
( detailed review )
The copy we had had no subtitles available, so I'm quite proud of my ability to follow the dialogue in variously accented Swedish! It wasn't quite the positive rounding off of the term that I had hoped for; the film came to and end and everyone just drifted off. But never mind. One of the pupils gave me a bunch of flowers, which made me feel like a real teacher. And on the way home I visited the Stockholm food fair which is going on at the moment, and ate a nice snack meal at the booth belonging to the Ethiopian restaurant. Mm, injera.
Circumstances of watching it: There were various logistical problems with organizing this film showing. In the end, I managed to join the synagogue library, which turned out to have a much poorer selection than I'd remembered. In fact, almost everything falls into the two categories I was trying to avoid, either Holocaust stuff or faky Yiddish nostalgia crap. The Producers and The Believer I suspect are too old for 12-year-olds, especially as they don't have that good a grasp of modern Jewish history. Very few of your recommendations were available, sadly. I considered Annie Hall but decided that Woody Allen annoys me too much, and the theme sounded like it would not be very interesting to pre-teens.
In the end I picked up The summer of Aviya, which is Holocaust-related but set in the 50s and dealing with a Survivor getting on with her life. I have a vague memory of seeing it at about the age my pupils are now, and it's based on a YA book so it seemed likely to be well pitched.
Then there was trouble about where we were going to watch the film. We'd hoped to watch in one of the pupils' homes, but didn't manage to organize that. Luckily, the Jewish Centre has a youth room, with comfy sofas, a computer, a Playstation, a small handful of books and board games and a huge wide-screen TV, and we were allowed to borrow this room for the evening. But when we settled down to watch The summer of Aviya, it started jamming and skipping about ten minutes in. One of the youth workers who was floating around lent us Livet i 8 bitar instead.
Verdict: Livet i 8 bitar is rather high-grade fluff.
( detailed review )
The copy we had had no subtitles available, so I'm quite proud of my ability to follow the dialogue in variously accented Swedish! It wasn't quite the positive rounding off of the term that I had hoped for; the film came to and end and everyone just drifted off. But never mind. One of the pupils gave me a bunch of flowers, which made me feel like a real teacher. And on the way home I visited the Stockholm food fair which is going on at the moment, and ate a nice snack meal at the booth belonging to the Ethiopian restaurant. Mm, injera.
