Library Picks: 'The Boy Mir', 'Elephant in the Living Room'

This week, I’m back with more new documentary suggestions from the Orion Township Public Library.  With fall television premieres still a month away, why don’t you stimulate your brain with one of these compelling selections from our Non-Fiction DVD collection? 

The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan

In 2002, filmmaker Phil Grabsky wanted to make a movie about people living in Afghanistan.  When Grabsky met eight-year-old Mir living in a cave with no possessions, the smiling boy caught his attention.  He ended up filming Mir and his family over a decade, chronicling the changes in their lives as well as the changes in Afghanistan during the ten years after the fall of the Taliban.  Will Mir have different choices as an adult than he would have under the Taliban’s regime?  The film offers a rare and intimate glance into a country that we know so little about despite our nation’s continued involvement.

Elephant in the Living Room

This film explores the controversial practice of raising wild – and often dangerous – animals as pets in the United States.  Director Michael Webber profiles two men on opposing sides of the issue: Tim Harrison, whose friend was killed by an exotic pet, is the founder of Outreach for Animals, a non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of owning exotic animals, and Terry Brumfield is the owner of African lions that he loves as a part of his family, but has a hard time controlling.  This multiple-award winning film exposes just how widespread and potentially disastrous this growing trend is.

Life in a Day

This National Geographic film is a selection of footage compiled from over 80,000 videos submitted to YouTube by people in almost 200 countries.  All of the submitted videos – over 4,500 hours worth of material – were filmed on July 24, 2010.  From that massive amount of film, 90 minutes of the most gripping content was chosen to represent what it is like to live on our planet on any given day.  The trailer gave me chills.  Watch it here. 

Pelada

Not able to make it professionally after playing college soccer, Luke Boughen and Gwendolyn Oxenham decided to travel around the world to see how the game of soccer affects people across the globe.  They travel to places like Kenya, Israel, and Iran (25 countries in all) to play casual “pick-up” games – or “pelada” as it’s known in Brazil – and discover that the human interaction involved in the sport transcends cultural and linguistic barriers.