I am watching...

If you are looking for an interesting DVD to rent, this is the one: prepare yourself a nice home made TV dinner (how does chicken with capers and parsley with watercress salad, pinenuts, olive oil and balsamic vinegar sound?), sit back and relax, while being willing and ready to learn, a lot too. The beauty of this movie for me lied essentially in the discovery of gay activism in the USA in the 1970s, a world I did not know anything about, aside from the main facts everyone knows regarding Frisco and discrimination against the gay community in general. This movie takes you deeper into the social and political issues the gay community was faced with during those years thanks to the fight led by Harvey Milk, beautifully embodied by Sean Penn. This is how you learn about the rampant discrimination in every day life, political mechanisms and strategies on which lives depended - a detail often ignored - religious zeal and injustice in all forms. In the background, you will also hear mentioned here and there how things were evolving - or not - in Europe, which helps you gain a little perspective - not that the situation was any better on this side of the pond though.

Something scary happened once we finished watching the movie: DVD player disconnected, the TV switched on automatically and tuned us in on the French speaking channel, TV5, right in the middle of the news night edition. Guess what? They were showing images of Russian gay activists marching during the Eurovision contest held at the same moment in Moscow! And here too, as if nothing had changed, the police was rounding everyone up: demonstrators were not allowed to voice their messages and were being carrried away in armored vans, to the nearest police station. The voice off commented that in Russia gays are not accepted and that opponents were defending ideas of morality grounded on religious values - and that's when the camera showed a priest holding an orthodox icon in his hands while stating that the only safe place for gays was a goulag. 

This could have been "MILK - Part 2 - 2009".

Scary, don't you think, how universal and time-resistent discrimination is?

Wishing you all a lovely Sunday afternoon, watching a good movie, maybe...

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