What do you see in the human experience?

The Human Experience is a documentary about two young brothers, Jeff and Cliff, who emerge from troubled pasts, setting out to explore questions of life, meaning, and purpose. They are fueled both by a desire to see the world through someone else’s eyes and the opportunity to discover who they really are.

The film follows their adventures into three different human experiences – living homeless in NYC, serving disabled orphans in Peru, and befriending lepers in Ghana. In the midst of these stories, you hear the voices and thoughts of several people (humanitarian workers, a priest, professors, etc.) each with his/her own unique expertise on life.

What Jeff and Cliff find is that while our particular experiences may be very different, we are all asking the same questions: What’s my purpose? Does my life matter? Where am I going and why? We discover that life everywhere is lived out as a drama of love and suffering; a story in which we have agency to choose to embrace or reject the gift of life that we’re given.

This is a film that inspires asking big questions and entering into a world of mystery and wonder. It’s a film that puts reality and experience to what, for most of us, are only vague notions or ideas of truth.

How will you, in your particular life circumstances, get out of your box and open your eyes to what’s going on around you? And with all that you see will you choose to live with hopeful joy or merely attempt to survive the despair of suffering?

Where is the beauty?

Contrast is often a gateway to experiences in wonder. When beauty is placed alongside grit. When compassion is juxtaposed to injustice. When love is tethered to pain. Biutiful is this story.

With the title hovering over every shot, director Alejandro González Iñárritu creates an experience of the both/and through a visual emersion of Barcelona’s underground. It’s harsh. It’s intimate. It’s (seemingly) un-beautiful. But it’s midst the dark and broken, we see that such labels are often misspoken. Beauty is not bound to an environment, a locale. Rather, Iñárritu prefers to attach it to an emotion, an experience.

An experience embodied by the narrative’s lead, Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem.

For those who saw No Country for Old Men, it might take a half-hour to accept Bardem on the other side of all-that-is-evil, but his persistent pursuit of putting things to right eventually leaves you longing to experience the very vindication he pursues.

In fact, this a film just as much about the viewer’s (visceral) experience as it is its subjects. There’s plenty to feel. Plenty to wonder.

In the end, the combination of Iñárritu’s poetic realism and Bardem’s embodiment of human complexity place Biutiful as one of the most compelling films of 2010 and one we are happy to recommend.

Enjoy. See.

How does story change our perception and treatment of people?

Stories are vehicles for vision. They are dust rags and power-washers for the silt that settles in our souls. When we listen to a story, we travel along the line of vision that the author, or poet, or director creates for us, and come to see things anew. Our vision is renewed: we see things more clearly as they are.

Our best storytellers assume a prophetic role in the way that they burn off cobwebs of self-deceit and take ice picks to narrow apertures of vision; with their words, metaphors, characterization - tools kept handy - they widen our perspective that we might better comprehend all that life encompasses. Story, good story, combats our reductive tendencies.

The Help is a film about the truth-telling power of story, the kind of imaginative corrective that can be enacted when another's story is told well. Eugenia, "Skeeter," is the prophetic voice in the movie as she speaks against the habitual and not-so-subtle racism of Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s through a collection of memoirs. She is the mouthpiece for a community of black maids, writing their unique stories of service, humiliation, humor, and love, all the while giving readers in general, and Mississipians in particular, a fuller sense of the humanity of these women.

The maids were members of an ongoing tradition of service to white owners that extends back to the days of slavery, and attitudes had changed surprisingly little since the Emancipation Proclamation a century before. Blacks were falling victim to the habitual reduction of people to property.

Wendell Berry writes that, "We treat people, places, and things according to the way that we perceive them, and literature influences our perceptions." Skeeter's human, humble act of storytelling subverts the prominent, reductive vision of the southern culture, and though the film does not conclude in a tidy way, the rest of the Civil Rights story looms large.

Empathy for blacks in America was ultimately cultivated through attention to their humanness, an empathy that can begin only with well-told stories of people.

How does what’s been broken get restored?

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a captivating story about a family whose lives, roles, and interactions are drenched in more dysfunction than you could likely dream up. Betty, a single mother, is so overweight that she is confined to her home and her children worry about keeping the floor from collapsing underneath her. Arnie, the family’s rallying figure, is mentally disabled and in constant need of attention and protection by Gilbert, the eldest son who is himself searching for identity and meaning. Amy is an angry and selfish teenager desperate to escape her family’s reputation in their small town.

The Grape family is fighting the great battle to survive. They live disconnected, discontented lives, barely held together by some faint sense of responsibility to each other, or more likely, an inability to see or choose differently.

Yet as their story unfolds and a brilliant young woman named Becky enters in, this family, in the midst of dysfunction and against all odds, learns to care for and love one another.

Becky brings hope first to Gilbert and then to the whole Grape family. Near the movie’s end, Gilbert’s first and only timid touch of his mother gives a glimpse and a hope of coming restoration; a restoration culminated in the movie’s rather unexpected conclusion.

Not only does Gilbert Grape have a stacked cast of actors, it portrays the possibility of finding redemption in the broken parts of life and relationships. It’s a hope that comes only when someone (or something) else enters in, giving you new eyes to see and a new heart to love.