So I learned a new traffic sign today.

I was recommended a restaurant a few miles from the hotel. I took a good look at Google maps and remembered how to drive. It wasn't hard: a few miles down the road, make a right on Kennedy, and it's right there.

It was a busy 4 lane road, and I saw an interesting sign: "All turns from right lane". Once I approached Kennedy street, I realized that I should move to the right lane, which looked like a highway exit. I took the exit and came on Kennedy. So far, so good, but somehow I missed the entrance to the shopping mall where the restaurant was and I decided to make a loop, go back over the 4 lane road and just try it again.

However, left turns weren't allowed. I figured I'd just take make a U-turn a little later on the 4-lane road and then go back. But every time there was a place to go left, there was a sign "No U-turns", "No U-turns". It got really annoying and it was almost 10 minutes later before I had a chance to make a U-turn. It was only when I stopped at a traffic light that I realized I could have used any of those "All turns" exits to make my U-turn...

I reached the restaurant, a New York style Italian place and had a great lasagna for dinner.

I'm staying in New Jersey for a few days this week for work.

I flew in this morning and while I was rather worried, I made it well on time to check in. Curb-side checkin is great -- there's never a line. Not that the lines in RDU are long at all, compared to the D.C. airports.

The rental company gave me a huge Suzuki, with a broken tire pressure monitoring system so my warning light is flashing all the time. I discovered that on the NJ Turnpike and stopped at a gas station, but the technical service I called said that it was a malfunction of the sensor, not of the actual tires so I shouldn't worry about it.

Today I went for a walk through our neighborhood.

Last week when I went to the supermarket after work, I locked myself out of the car at the parking lot. I had forgotten that I had put my keys in shopping a bag, so I closed the trunk with a satisfying "bang" sound and realized right away that I wouldn't be able to get into the car.

It was a beautiful afternoon so I decided to walk home. And so I did, and I realized how rare it had become for me to walk from the supermarket to home. When we lived in Arlington we didn't have a car, so we would do all our grocery shopping on foot. Not always convenient but at least we would walk and see the neighborhood.

So today I went for a walk again, to explore the area. A few months ago I had seen an interesting stone formation not to far from our house, and I thought that perhaps it's a monument or something historical, so I decided to walk to there.

Almost immediately after I left our apartment complex, the sidewalk stopped. There was no other way than to walk on the grass.

LaSalle, the street I was walking on, crosses a highway.

After a while there was a sidewalk again, now at the other side of the road.

Coca Cola distributor on Hillsborough Road. There are so few people walking, that I noticed I got suspicious about the people who were: "what that guy doing there? Why is he walking and not by car?".

An old saloon in Texas style. Though closed (and for sale), the cactus plants are still growing.

A Mexican store, Don Jose, on Hillsborough Road.

My end point was this set of these stones. Not a monument or something historical, as I had thought...

...but the start of a small park around a water filtering plant.

The week before the festival I bought a ticket for the Sunday afternoon re-screening of the Award winners, obviously without knowing what the winners would be. When I arrived Sunday around noon I was curious to see who had won, and I read on the posters that For The Bible Tells Me So had won the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, and I saw it in the same session as the award winning short.

Wow... what a movie!

This documentary by Daniel Karslake describes the various attitudes of different Christian churches in the United States towards homosexuality. Some churches condemn it as the worst sin possible, while others see no difference between homosexual and heterosexual relationships and allow gay people to become priests.

The intolerance shown by some in the movie was amazing and shocking and the movie was incredibly moving. Not just due to the struggle of the homosexual main characters but also because of the struggle their families went through, in various ways.

This was the best documentary I've seen at the 2007 Full Frame Festival. A very deserved award winner.

Cross Your Eyes, Keep Them Wide is a short documentary on a group of artist in New York with developmental disabilities.

It was the award winner of Full Frame 2007, it won the jury award for best short. Personally I didn't think it was the best short of the festival. I liked A Son's Sacrifice better.

More about this movie by Ben Wu: http://www.benwufilms.com/page3/page3.html

Greensboro: Closer to the Truth is a documentary by Adam Zucker about the Truth and Reconciliation committee that was set up in Greensboro in 2003. The committee's goal was to analyze the killings of communist activists in 1979 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. I saw it on the fourth day of the Full Frame Festival, now 2 weeks ago.

It was the first time this movie was screened in North Carolina. The large Fletcher hall was full and the Q&A session afterwards was very interesting. Many people in the audience had personal memories of the original trials and publicity around the events.

The Ku Klux Klan is something I've only read about, when I was younger, in the "far, far United States". It was really strange to see them in a documentary. I liked that the movie focussed on the work of the committee, and didn't try to assign blame to one of the two parties specifically. I didn't know anything of the Greensboro incident and the movie had a good introduction for people like me -- it isn't just for 'insiders'.

After seeing the movie the report of the Truth and Reconciliation committee is fascinating read .

Are you Americanized if you have to look up how much 150 milliliter is in cups?

A while ago we bought an electric grill. I use it on the balcony and it's great as it gives a real grilling flavor, and it's much nicer to grill food outside.

Tonight we had kebabs from Whole Foods: chicken with bell peppers and onions. Delicious, but 1 kebab is too much for 1 person. I made some Indonesian peanut sauce on the side.

By the way, 150 milliliter is slightly over 0.6 cups.

The Saturday evening screening of the Full Frame Festival last week was The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a 1987 movie by Japanese director Kazuo Hara. Sasha and I saw it in the Fletcher Hall in the Carolina theater.

This was truly an amazing documentary, about the search for answers in a war-crime case by Kenzo Okuzaki. As the New York Times put it in a great review (written in 1988):

"From everything the audience sees, Kenzo Okuzaki is a certifiable psychotic, though The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On never addresses this suspicion. He's the sort of fellow who writes long, crazily incoherent letters to editors, confronts people on street corners and harangues them with a loudspeaker from his van. It could be that Mr. Hara thinks the psychotic state is the only sane response to the contradictions in contemporary Japanese society."

Kenzo Okuzaki frequently uses violence and threats of violence to get the truth out the people he interviews, and at times it's easy to forget that this is an actual real-life documentary.

The movie was screened at the Full Festival in the "The Power Of Ten" series, a recommendation by film maker Michael Moore. The Q&A session with director Kazuo Hara after the movie was very interesting.

Michael Moore said he saw the movie when he was making his first major documentary, Roger and Me. While filming that he was somewhat concerned he was too harsh in his methods, but he joked that after seeing The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On he felt he was well within limits.

Mr. Hara said that after Kenzo Okuzaki came out of jail there was some talk about a follow up documentary but that Mr. Hara decided against it, because he feared that it would push Mr. Okuzaki over the border of sanity, an honorable choice.

The least interesting movie of the festival was Helvetica, a documentary about the font Helvetica.

The topic "Helvetica" was an nice choice and the movie maker found a lot of different angles to talk about the font. But that was exactly the problem: the movie consisted of nothing but talking heads and this got really boring after the first 30 minutes.

A number of the interviewees were Dutch. In the 1950s Dutch artists used Helvetica in their work and the documentary had interviews with them and footage of Amsterdam.

Gary Hustwit, the film's maker was at the screening, and I feel a bit bad for not liking the documentary. He seemed like a nice guy, and he said he "spent every free minute and very available dollar on the documentary".

The Full Frame Festival had a number of documentaries on the American South. The first of the two I saw was Banished, a film by Marco Williams on ethnic cleansing in the late 1800's and early 1900's in the United States.

Some of the cities where these "banishments" occurred a 100 years ago are still all-white, and Mr. Williams visits those cities with decedents of the black people that were expelled from their homes. It is dumbfounding to see the Confederate flag flying on public buildings in 2007.

The interviews with the Klan members are gripping enough ("no, I wouldn't want a black person to live next doors. I believe we have a valuable legacy to protect") but as a historian in the film points out, the real scary part is the attitude of the general population in some towns: "No Sir, the Klan is here because they feel welcome here".

See also http://www.banishedthefilm.com.