Sometimes you need a person who will turn your world upside down. Maybe what you believed in didn't really ring true and had no correspondence to your life? Maybe you craved a little bit of magic because you forgot about your childhood naivety and, instead, you got engrossed in your career and responsibilities? Possibly you desired a different perspective and the answer to your prayers was a small add in a newspaper. Is travel in time possible? Or is the only travel that we can undertake the travel in our own mind? Remember, there might be no return. Indeed, safety not guaranteed.
Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann/The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
adventure 04:57:00
When you're thirty you think that your life is already over. The same story goes for the forty-year-olds. Apparently, the youth is gone and there are no prospects for marriage, children, and love. When you're fifty you wonder how is it so you're still alive and appreciate your family and friends. When you're sixty you realize that it's high time to fulfill your dreams and cross out the targets on your bucket list. When you're 80 you look for your place in the cemetery and annoy your loved ones with the stories of your soon-to-be death. But what if you were one hundred years old and your life blessed you with adventures extraordinary in their nature? What if the end of your life was to be just one more beginning? An adaptation of an entertaining and inspiring novel with a title which length could just as well symbolize the length of a life. Enjoy.
There are moments when you've had enough and decided you wanted to live your life for yourself. There are people who accept you the way you are and there are those who would rather make you pretend that you're someone else. There are situations which make you happy and surroundings you'd rather forget you had ever been plunged into. There are extraordinary stories about love and sex which redefine your idea of trust, passion, friendship, and relationship. Sometimes a friend you know is not entirely the one he appears to be. Une nouvelle amie.
I believe that soon the concept of gender will disappear completely and people won't pay attention to what kind of relationships you are in. Some taboos should, however, be broken, some eyes opened to the diversity and some countries taught the necessary tolerance, even though sometimes it takes years. Poland is one of such countries. And this is one beautiful story about love, which can just as well go with the repertoire of Brokeback Mountain lovers. And many more. Sometimes you find love in a person, whom you'd never expect to love you back. And then the opinion of your friends, family, and society doesn't really matter.
Education is the key to success, they say. Even though the majority of subjects are either too boring or too difficult, or completely unnecessary in life. But if you had no access to education, if it was too expensive or due to your sex, religion or background - forbidden, you would appreciate its every stage. The beauty is in the process. Sometimes it's about students that become your lifelong friends and supporters, sometimes it's about subjects which prove to be the passion of your life and the reason you wake up every morning. And very often it's about teachers, who appreciate you when no one seems to do this, who inspire you for the rest of your life and who show you possibilities which will make you happy, even though the world seems to be against you. Appreciate your teachers. The best ones, not the ones who make your schooldays insufferable.
If losing a job makes you depressed, if not buying the flat of your dreams seems to be a disaster, there are bigger tragedies which make you appreciate your every day. You can be rich and famous, popular and loved by your family and friends, but there are moments when the above fragile qualities of your character lose the battle with a disease. Cancer is a trail for everybody. It questions everything you knew so far. You see whether the person you married can stay with you for better and worse. You witness your parents' unexpected reactions and letting down reactions of your friends. Then you can make choices whether you want to live and for whom you want to prolong your stay on earth. While there is so much injustice impersonated by ridiculously expensive cancer drugs, by the dying ones who were left alone at the most critical moment, one man told a beautiful story of love and struggle. Chemia.
Once there was a time when tribal instincts guaranteed the survival of the fittest. Once there were no hospitals but people used the blessings of nature to recover from diseases. Once giving birth to a child was as natural as killing an animal for food. And once humans were driven by such inexplicable drives that they could cause the annihilation of the whole civilization. As far as we did look different, we did wear strange clothes and ornamented ourselves in tattoos and jewelry, and we did hold extraordinary beliefs in supernatural forces, have we really changed that much over the centuries? Or do we still store the pristine urges which just wait for the right time to be released? Apocalypto.
When it comes to time travel I am a little bit inexperienced. As they say: never been there, never done that. But when you take a pair of medieval guys with their coat of arms, honor, duties, and beliefs, and you put them in the contemporary civilization, the result has to be interesting. From cars, through houses, clothes, toilet refreshers, cutlery to modern technology - everything from a medieval perspective seems new and extraordinary. Gosh, we did develop! A French classic which will make you laugh out loud and think about the paradoxes of us as humans. Don't you have a feeling that all the rules that we invented over the years are a little bit ridiculous? On the same note: when you take into account the medieval, feudal relations between the knight and the servant, some things seem to stay the same. Enjoy.
It seems that Jane Austen needed some brushing up after years of money-related arranged marriages which always seemed to end in true love affairs. We got bored. Of the handsome Mr. Darcy, independent Elizabeth, awkward mother, typecast sisters and greedy lovers with mischievous intentions. We needed a kick of adrenaline. Badly. Although I was thoroughly skeptical about the whole concept, I must say I really enjoyed watching for the nth time a classic which was complemented with blood, guts, cutting off limbs and brains. Who would have thought?
When your political situation doesn't allow you to speak your mind to the fullest when you're being interrogated, threatened, monitored. When the only possibility of freedom is being a little... smaller? In times when there is nothing on the shop shelves, when there is no freedom of speech, when you dream of another world, people need consolation. For some, this consolation might be an utter parody of political system when the drawer is your only place to live and the society's rules do not meet any standards at all.
If you think that space odysseys are limited to Star Wars, you might be wrong. There are love stories beyond our galaxies, there are adventures beyond our access, enemies beyond our comprehension and trade wars over substances we cannot define. If you crave an entrance to the fantasy or an evening adventure with one good classic, this is a film for you. Dune.
Science allowed us to treat diseases which we were incapable of curing years before. It enabled us to contact each other over a long distance, to travel thousands of kilometers within days and to cut the publishing process and distribution of digital press to seconds. Possibly it could enable us to travel through time and galaxies. What if in Egypt there was an entrance to a completely different world, obeying utterly different rules? What if your seemingly peaceful, scientific life was to be turned upside down by the adventure of a lifetime? What if you discovered Stargate?
Life is apparently divided into stages. You have your primary school friends with whom you play after finishing your homework. Then you hang out with your teenage peers, trying out the forbidden pleasures of life, choosing your professional path or making the standard mistakes. Then you have your college/university pals who help you mature and get into the adult world. Then it's your business life and people found along the way, who are either to stay in your life for longer or to go as rough-and-ready friends. Often you just don't fit in. You like to hang out with younger colleagues, you get on well with those twice your age. You outgrow your group of friends and, sometimes, outgrow the period of life you are supposed to be in, whether it concerns marriage, children or relationships. A fun story of growing up and letting go. Laggies.
It seems that temporary solutions prove to be the most permanent. Possibly, be it by accident or by the giggle of fate, you just started living in one place and you stayed there for years, not noticing the passing of time. It might be that along the way you met people who stayed with you for years, to bid you not any farewell but the last one. Maybe you bought a chair, which was at first so hideous, but, out of a sentiment, it was impossible to throw it away. Maybe you adopted a pet and it turned your life upside down. Maybe you met a person who made such an impact on your life that the only way to handle the emotion was to write a book about her. And then turn this book into a movie. What's the story behind the Lady in the Van?