Watched two great films - La Grand Voyage and Last King of Scotland. Highly recommended.
The first movie is about a religious Morrocan father and his secular French son who made the Hajj by car from France all the way to Mecca. It is a french film so you can expect the show to explore its subject can delicately. I think that it is a very moving movie that portrays Islam in a more positive light (besides its main theme about generational gap) and highlights the truer essence of Islam that is often being missed in the fundamentalist debates these days. The movie also contains beautiful shots of Istanbul, Mecca and some other countries that I cannot recognise - they passed quite a few countries from France to Mecca. There is also this interesting juxtaposition of mainstream Muslim thinking and the Sufi’s way of looking at things towards the end of the show and a quote from the Quran about why the father chose to make the journey by car. It was produced just last year and it is quite unique because it is the first fictional piece that was permitted to be shot in Mecca, according to a website that I read.
The second one was about Idi Amin, the Uganda dictator and his Scot physician. I like it because it demonstrates once again what politics can do to a country. It also made me realise that politicians can promise you the heavens and send you to hell.
