fallen/legen blog
Dienstagsfilm – In this category we try to recommend one movie a week to you, a special movie that we think might inspire you during a cosy night in front of your DVD-player.
Imagine being a small boy. Maybe you are around 10 years old, maybe you are living in a sunny country, maybe your name would be Zozo. You would go to school in shorts and shirt, your bag swung loosely over your back. On the way there you would meet your friends, you would joke about girls and how you are fascinated by them, you would also talk about this ‘sex’. In school you wouldn’t really listen to what the teacher said, you would be a 10 year old boy after all. And on the way home, in this nice and sunny country, you would maybe pull off some kind of charade with your friends in order to steal some warm bread from a guy selling it in the street. It would be a wonderful life, right? If this sunny country wasn’t the civil war torn Lebanon.
[youtube width=”500″ height=”282″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv5XDgk-VeY[/youtube]
When Zozos family, after a long struggle, finally decides to leave their home, their home-town and home-country, it is already too late. Only Zozo is lucky enough to survive the mortar shells, the car bombs and the marauding soldiers. Sheer luck brings him to the airport and from there on to Sweden into the arms of his grandparents living there. Zozo is supposed to start a new live there and the small boy shows a strong will to do so, but the memories of what happend in Lebanon and the present of a gang of bullies picking on the stranger don’t make this easy for him.
Zozo tells a story about the universal cruelty of war as well as about the personal tragedy it brings. It also tells a story about the fate of being a stranger, an outsider, and about the human ability and will to struggle with and maybe even overcome that fate. Zozo is inspiring in the way that it reminds us of three things: about how lucky we are to be born at exactly the peaceful time and exactly the peacefull place that Europe is today, about how ignorant we are to the incredibility of this fact and how ignorant we are about the fate of others that were less lucky then us.
Zozo | Josef Fares | Imad Creidi, Antoinette Turk, Elias Gergi, Carmen Lebbos | 2005 | Memfis Films | imdb, Wikipedia | Bilder © Memfis Films
