The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content.
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With Esy Casey and Sarah Friedland’s powerful (and beautifully shot) documentary Thing With No Name debuting on iTunes for rental and purchase, I’m re-posting part of a piece I published during LAFF 2008 on the film.
Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene.
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When I first had the idea to assemble a dream cast for a movie about Somali pirates, I envisioned a typical actioner with a dash of tense international politics. The pirates would be played by unknown actors of African descent, with the exception of “the good one,” who would be played by either Djimon Hounsou or Chiwetel Ejiofor. He would realize his folly, then become an integral part of the hero’s harrowing siege of a captured vessel. The hero, of course, would be a white, male, American naval officer, rough around the edges, not afraid to cut the crap and do the right thing. As it turns out, the truth of what’s going on in the Gulf of Aden is much more fascinating.
Enter Michele Ballarin: Virginia socialite, investment banker, weapons dealer. When she’s not breeding horses or fending off allegations of fraud in Austria, she’s running Select Armor, Inc. The company is not your typical private security firm competing for lucrative anti-terror contracts. It’s a small, nimble company, run by a woman, with small town roots, and plenty of murky dealings in places like Somalia.
What does Ballarin have to due with the pirates? More importantly, who should play her in a movie? More after the jump.
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The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content.
…Read more
