The third movie I saw on Full Frame this year was To See If I'm Smiling. The movie is about six Isreali women who look back at their compulsary military service, and their experiences. So somehow I saw 3 movies in a row about female warriors. Of the 3, I liked Lioness the best with My Daughter the Terrorist a close second, but To See If I'm Smiling is a strong film as well.

The title refers to a picture that one of the main subjects talks about. The subject of the film is not just female soldiers, but also on the behavior of young men and women serving in the border zone of Israel. One of the women talks honestly about crossing the line -- how at one point she made Arab civilians stand in the sun for many hours for example, to punish them for the death of one of her friends she just learned about. She knows that the civilians have nothing to do with that death, and so do her soldiers, but she's honest about how stress and war-like circumstances make good people do bad things. Another woman says that serving in the military has learned her that she has an utterly evil side.

The film isn't always very strong in its technical execution -- the interviews feel a bit artificial at times. However, the story it tells is powerful and this quite makes up for the technical deficiencies.

It's interesting to see three different approaches to female warriors. The United States military has not quite figured out how to deal with female soldiers (it's only in the last 15 years or so that female soldiers have been deployed in large scale into war areas), whereas in Israel men and women both are expected to serve in the military service for two years. The Tamil Tigers have no trouble with using women in their rebel rmy and they take this to an extreme by training them for suicide terrorist attacks.

To See If I'm Smiling won an award last year at IDFA, a documentary festival in Amsterdam.

The movie opens with a beautiful nature shot of a river in Sri Lanka, and the camera moves to two heavily armed girls of around 18 years old. They are soldiers in the Tamil Tigers rebel army.

The personal story of the girls shows why they choose to join the rebels at the age of 11 after attacks by the military on their village. The father of one the girls is killed in an air raid as is told in moving interviews with the girl's mother. The mother hasn't seen her daughter in year since the girls now live and train in a rebel controlled area. In conversations with the two girls it becomes clear that the girls are trained to become suicide bombers, who at one point will strap a mine to their body to attack 'high value targets'.

The film is directed by Beate Arnestad and produced by Morten Daae. It is amazing how much access the filmmakers had to these two girls, and they did a great job providing context to their story and the civil war that's going on in Sri Lanka. The audience gets a bit of an understanding of why and how people can become ready to kill themselves for a Leader; the movie also shows some of the tragic results these suicide attacks have on the civilian population. When I searched for more information on the civil war there I found a newspaper article that just today, Sunday April 6th, a suicide bomber killed 12 people at the start of a marathon in Sri Lanka.

An eye opening film; one of the best I've seen on the festival this year. I'm now sitting in the Armory, waiting for the results of the juries decisions and hoping to be able to buy tickets for the winning movies.

The first documentary I saw on Full Frame this year was Lioness, a film about female soldiers in the U.S. army deployed in Iraq. It is directed and produced by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers.

The policy of the U.S. military is that female personnel cannot participate in direct combat. This documentary shows how difficult it is to maintain such a policy and what it means for those involved. The films shows the experiences of women in various roles in the Iraq War, from a base commander to soldiers in desk positions who are then assigned to Team Lioness, and are asked to join in ground operations to help calm down female civilians down and perform security checks on women if necessary.

An important problem with the official policy is that the women have received far less training than the men and this brings them into problems. A striking example of this is shown when one of them is asked to join a combat mission with the Marines and finds herself isolated from her combat group in a battle because of this lack of training.

The film shows the cost of going to war for soldiers, not only for those who die but also for those who come back and find it difficult to adjust. An impressive film.

Early in the morning the weather forecast for 8.00 am in Raleigh still mentioned thunderstorm, but when I arrived the weather was quite acceptable; overcast but no storm. I was really happy that the race would start on time, my first half marathon ever.

It was great fun! I finished in about 2 hours and 20 minutes (the official time will be posted on their website in a while), about 10.7 minutes a mile. That's better than my long training runs and it's a good first result that I can improve on a next time.

It's strange that the race that I've been training for so long is now over. I'll have to find myself a new running goal; I hope to find another half marathon for in a few months. And I promised myself I can buy new shoes now; mine are about a year old and have seen many miles.

Downtown Raleigh is beautiful, and I liked the track. There's a long out-and-back in the second half, where it's 4 miles up and then 4 miles down Hillsborough Road. The first part was a bit depressing because you see all the runners who are so much faster, but the second part was nice because you see the runners that are slower. There were music bands every few miles, a nice touch. It's wonderful to be able to run in the middle of the road! The surface is nice and smooth, and in the middle the road is flat so you don't walk crooked like you do when on the side of the road.

The race was very well organized. Parking was easy and very close to the start, and there was plenty of water during the race. The only thing that was a bit weird were the first two or three water stops, where there was essentially a cooler full with water and cups to scoop it out with. Not exactly a healthy idea, but with the bad weather it must have been hard to find enough volunteers. Anyway, a minor point on a great race.

I'm glad that I ran the track plus an extra miles two weeks ago. First, it's really nice to know that you can run the distance and finish it, so you don't have to worry if you'll make it. Second, I like to know the track as to estimate how much more is still to come. There were pretty clear mile markers but I liked knowing the track ahead of time.

Now, a very easy day... We're going to see two documentaries this afternoon.

After a short night (we watched a documentary until 11.30 pm) I'm now getting ready for running in the rain... or not running at all!

I won't know until I arrive in Raleigh, but the weather looks really bad and if it storms and there is thunder the race will be canceled.

From the website:

"As you are, we are keeping a close eye on the forecast for this weekend. Because of the way weather systems work, these forecasts can change quickly by speeding up or slowing down, so we will not make any decisions until Saturday morning."

Let's hope for the best! I really want to run this race and I certainly don't mind running in the rain (thunder is something else of course).

Today was the first day of the Full Frame documentary festival in Durham and I saw my first movie in the late afternoon. I'll write about it in a separate article but it was a great start.

I've done something quite unusual: I took a day off. I had such a good time last year at the festival that I'll spend a good chunk of tomorrow watching documentaries. In the afternoon I have to go to Raleigh to pick up my packet for Saturday's. So far it looks like it going to rain on Saturday morning. Rain is fine, as long as the race doesn't get cancelled.

I must say that I'm disappointed with the selection for opening movie of Full Frame this year, and we decided not to go see it. The movie is called Trumbo; various people are reading from the correspondence of Mr. Trumbo, a writer who in the 1940's got blacklisted as a suspected Communist. I'm sure it is a good documentary but it seems overly self-focussed for a documentary festival to start with a movie about a screenwriter. I suppose I'm just disappointed that it's not as brilliant as a choice as Castells was last year

Saturday night we went out to a bar in Southpoint Mall. We had dinner and drinks in Champs, a sports bar, and there was a big basketball game going on between UNC (University of North Carolina) and the team of Louisville, Kentucky. It had been a long time since I had seen a basketball game, but it was a lot of fun. The bar was packed with UNC fans in blue T-shirts and caps.

Traditionally Duke and UNC are fierce competitors in basketball so Duke no making it through is sour for the Blue Devils.

Angelo and Chris had placed an outside bet on Louisville winning this game, in the hope of gaining lots of points in a work-pool, so there was a lot of excitement at the table when Louisville came really close to UNC. In the end UNC won quite convincingly and continues to the semi-finals this weekend, the Final Four. There are games on Saturday and Monday.

I've planted some herbs today. I like to use fresh herbs for cooking, but if I buy a bunch in the supermarket it's usually too much, and the remainders will go to waste.

I've planted six different types: Genovese basil, thyme, a pepper 'hot mix', sweet basil, tomato's and parsley. I'm growing them indoors, in a sort of mini hothouse, and it will take a week or two before the first leaves start appearing. A nice thing to look forward to, somehow.

Today I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte: Presenting Data and Information. Mr. Tufte is a professor at Yale and is an expert in the field of data visualization. I read about him in last year's Christmas edition of The Economist and I've used his website in the past.

Mr. Tufte is in the Triangle today and tomorrow, and the course was in a small conference center near the airport. We received a package with four of his books and the course was build around sections of the books. The course touched on a large variety of topics and we saw many example graphs and videos. I especially liked his idea of sparklines, embedded high-resolution graphs embedded in regular text. For example, the US deficit from 1980 to 2003 looked like (not very good, in other words).

Mr. Tufte brought an original first edition of a book by Galileo, more than 400 years old, and a while later he did a review of the iPhone. An important point of view that I learned today is: adding detail to add clarity. "Simplifying" information by leaving things out or abbreviating them, does no justice to the smartness of human audiences. If a diagram or a picture is cluttered, you're first action should not be to start leaving out data, but to reevaluate your design of the diagram or picture.

It was a very inspirational day and I'm looking forward to read the books.

A plant in our living room is sick.

There are little things on the leaves and the leaves look wet. I'm not sure what to do about it but it doesn't look very healthy.

The plant is pretty far from the other plants and they seem to be fine but I'm worried that it might be contagious.

Is there a cure for something like this? Any recommendations?