Some great movies!

There are two really lovely Korean films about childhood separation and attachment, both made by women: So Yong Kim's "Treeless Mountain" and Lee Jeong-Hyang's "The Way Home". I saw the latter on SABC a couple of week's ago. These make quite good alternatives to the famous Robertson documentaries which were made at the Tavistock Institute and were quite expensive to acquire when I last tried about 10 years ago. "The Way Home" also tackles how shocking the differences between urban and rural life could be for a child, spoilt by the consumerism of the city.


A film that manages to eschew the usual good/bad polarities in its main protagonist and at the same time gives a sobering picture of the plight of illegal immigrants in France is "Welcome" by Philippe Lioret.

Finally, a really fascinating documentary made by Chris Rock called "Good Hair" about the billion dollar hair industry servicing Afro-Americans in the USA.

This was an eye opener for a whitey like myself. I just listened to Yanga Zembe and some others on SAFm tonight talking about Transactional Sex. Her Ph.D. research has uncovered the incidence of this form of transaction among young women. For the first time I heard a South African mentioning 'weaves'. Maybe it happened before but I didn't know what it was. Thanks to Chris Rock, now I do. To obtain a weave, some young black women will have sex with a man who can buy one for her. Whatever happened to Steve Biko and "Black is Beautiful"? I hope young women somewhere are still talking about internalised oppression - I recognise its hard with Noeleen and Oprah as models, but there is Lira - she may be being used to sell deodorant, but at least she shows her own hair - or does she? You tell me. (I have to admit lest I sound judgemental, that I dye mine. I do this to avoid gogo oppression!)