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Jesus is on Hulu. And he looks a lot like Willem Dafoe.

Story at Filmwell.

Now would be a great time to subscribe to Film Movement, because next month you’ll receive my favorite 2009 film so far.

What, you’re not sure how to pronounce it? Think about it. You learned to pronounce Ratatouille, and it was worth it, right?

NEXT MONTH’S FILM – MUNYURANGABO

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
Drama – Rwanda, USA – in Kinyarwanda with English subtitles – 97 min

After stealing a machete from a market in Kigali, Munyurangabo and his friend, Sangwa, leave the city on a journey tied to their pasts. Munyurangabo wants justice for his parents who were killed in the genocide, and Sangwa wants to visit the home he deserted years ago. Though they plan to visit Sangwa’s home for just a few hours, the boys stay for several days. From two separate tribes, their friendship is tested when Sangwa’s wary parents disapprove of Munyurangabo, warning that “Hutus and Tutsis are supposed to be enemies.”

ACCLAIM
WINNER – Grand Jury Prize – AFI Film Festival
WINNER – Best Narrative Feature – Sarasota Film Festval
WINNER – Best First Film – Mexico City Int’l Contemporary Film Festival
WINNER – Peace and Cultural Understanding Award – Wine Country Film Festival
WINNER – SIGNAS Award – Amiens Int’l Film Fesival
NOMINATED – Breakthrough Director – Gotham Awards
NOMINATED – Someone to Watch – Independent Spirit Awards
OFFICIAL SELECTION – Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), Berlin Int’l Film Festival, Toronto Int’l Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival, London Int’l Film Festival

REVIEWS
“An astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut… This is, flat out, the discovery of this year’s Un Certain Regard batch”
– Robert Koehler, Variety

“Remarkable! An authentically beautiful film…a ‘small’ masterpiece”
– Robin Woods, Film Comment

I’m back from The Netherlands, and I hope to cook up a good long journal entry for you about all of the exciting things that happened there.

Meanwhile…

Have I expressed how excited I am about Filmwell, and all that is is slowly becoming? We decided *not* to prescribe what the site would be. We made a list of places we wouldn’t go, things we wanted to avoid, and then decided to let a mystery emerge. What would happen in the chemistry of relationships, the variations in perspective among a handful of adventurous moviegoers?

Is this a film blog? Or is it a diary? Or is it a spiritual exploration? Is it self-indulgent or service? Time will tell.

Whatever the case, I’m finding I can’t revise my Netflix queue fast enough as I read about the films these folks are introducing. And I’m learning more about my friends all the time. I hope you’re enjoying our little experiment too.

Today… Mike Hertenstein on Treeless Mountain:

When you’re a kid, there’s always so much going on that you don’t understand. You don’t know the names of things. You don’t have categories for all the strange stuff that’s always going on around you. Connections, too, can be mystifying: cause and effect often seem arbitrary, if not magical. Obviously, there’s pluses and minuses to living in this undivided Eden we call childhood. As long as you have an adult around to help you understand and guide you through all this, it can be a wondrous experience. But if the adults have abdicated their role as protectors, and a child is forced as a matter of survival to try to make sense of it all, the strain can either wake them from that innocent idyll or wound them in deep, pre-logical places, with nameless fears and a sense of the malevolence of the universe. In any case, kids seem to have an intuition about certain things. They sense when something isn’t quite right in the grown-up world. They intuit that some adults are nice, others mean – and that some know what they’re doing and others do not. In Treeless Mountain, two sisters feel their way forward through that limbo between innocence and premature knowledge, between a child’s dreams and nightmares.

Jeffrey Overstreet’s consideration of Times and Winds is posted at Image.

I borrow that title from an Innocence Mission song as a way of saying that I’ll be airborne tomorrow (and drinking a lot of Airborne) on my way to Houston, then Amsterdam, and then a town called Ede.

So, needless to say, I probably won’t be blogging much.

While I’m gone, keep your eye on Filmwell.org. Lots of great stuff happening there this week. Jason Morehead wrote about a Jean-Claude Van Damme film (one you should make time to see). And Alissa Wilkinson wrote about In a Dream.

My thoughts on a breathtakingly beautiful movie called Times and Winds will be up at ImageJournal.org soon, so keep checking for that too.

In the mood for some music? In case you didn’t know: I’ve signed up on Blip.com, where I find I can play many of my favorite songs for you, and check out many of your favorites too. Here’s my Blip page.

When next I post here, I’ll be jet-lagged but excited, as this is my first flight across an ocean in 18 years. Quite a “vacation” before the heavy work of revising and finishing Raven’s Ladder in May. (Cal-raven, the ale boy, Krawg, Warney, Cyndere, Jordam, Emeriene… so many characters, so many stories to tell you!)

Have a good week, everybody. See you soon.

Thank you for alerting me to your breaking-news scoop on a celebrity and his troubles.

No, I don’t think I need to blog about it.

I’ve been through enough hardships of my own to know that having people blog about them would only intensify the suffering for all involved and indicate that the public has a right to shove their noses into my personal business. There are far better ways to respond to celebrity gossip than to throw fuel on destructive flames.

Please write again when there’s something more rewarding to discuss.

Thanks to John Ottinger for the interview about Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight that appears at Strange Horizons today. I take a lot of encouragement from this as I prepare to revise Raven’s Ladder, the third book in The Auralia Thread.

I have a recording of my friend Nathan Partain singing a hymn called “Jesus is Mine.” I’m grateful to have his permission to share it with you.

If you’re interested in the history of the hymn, you can read about the history of the hymn here, in this excerpt from The Complete Book of Hymns.

I had never heard it, though, until Nathan wrote a new arrangement and performed it in church. It moved me to tears, and remains, for me, the song in my music collection that moves me most deeply. I have no desire to entertain morbid thoughts, but this is the song I want sung at my funeral. If the Lord is willing, I’d be honored if Nathan sang it. I suspect I’ll be singing it when I rise to meet my Lord, and I’ll be singing it tomorrow morning when I rise to join the Body of Christ in celebrating a joyous Easter.

I hope it blesses you too.

Okay, Nathan… sing it.

“Jesus is Mine” (mp3)

As I pack my bags for the Netherlands, I’m curious: What’s your favorite Made-in-the-Netherlands movie?

What’s your favorite scene set in Amsterdam?

Perhaps I should revisit those scenes. You know… so I learn how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. :)

And speaking of the Netherlands, if I keep getting photographs like this one from Matthijs de Jong in the mail, I’m going to wonder if this is all some elaborate hoax!

Read about two opening minutes that impressed me last year, and tell us about your own favorite opening minute… over at Filmwell.