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 .