Afternoon Shower

Between films at the Fountainpark cinema. Another Film Festival day, even if we are doing it in a pretty easy way compared to many people's festival when they might see twenty or thirty films. Actually started this morning at the Filmhouse with Socrates Cafe. It was my turn to facilitate and today's question was "Would we all benefit from a bit more quiet in our lives?" (or at least that's as best as I can remember the precise wording). Interesting chat about different sorts of quiet - free from not just the noise you can hear, but also things like the visual noise of the city streets. And the way that one person's external noise can actually provide the quiet in another's head that silence outside only amplifies - the quiet that 'white noise' can provide. The way that chatter in another language is less disturbing than words you can understand. We talked about the companionable quiet with long-time friends. And the way that perhaps the reduction in shared quiet is a reflection on greater individualism and less collective action. Quiet needs everyone to do it.
After the meeting L and I went to see I.D., set in India - another film, another country. To be honest it seemed a little thin conceptually for a full length film - more the material for a short film perhaps? Afterwards I killed a little time watching the rain sweep past outside, while L caught up with a bit more of her current proof-reading job, before we went to see Battle of the Sexes about women's tennis in the late sixties and early seventies, and in particular the matches between ageing former male champion Bobby Riggs and Margaret Court and more famously Billie Jean King. She was in Edinburgh for the premiere a couple of days ago, as captured by another blipper. I Thought it was a good documentary, and interesting to think it was only forty years ago. We have come a long way, and yet in other sense, still not far enough. As they said at the end of the film, tennis remains the only sport with equal prize money for men and women. And of course it's about one of the different 'axes of oppression', including gender, race, sexuality and so on, that are used to divide and rule the majority in the interests of the economically powerful minority - the so-called 1%.