Today at Filmwell: Mike Hertenstein Climbs "Treeless Mountain"

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.