Okay, first things first, this movie was not at all what I expected. The class was told that we would fall in love with the little blind boy. And guess what, we did. And then his mother drowns him and kills herself. What a way to wake up in the morning. When the first scene opened with the young girl on the cliff I was thinking to myself, oh no don't jump! And then as the movie progressed and I saw how terribly she treated the young boy, I couldn't help but think that perhaps it was best if she just ended her miserable life. That's a really harsh thought, I know, but until the end of the film, we do not even know why she is so terrible to this child whom we think is her little brother. I think the diasporic situation that plagues this small "family" is that they were forced to leave their original home because 1) their parents were killed, 2) the girl was raped and mothered this young blind child and 3) because they probably felt that they had no other reason to stay. Or probably because it was far too unsafe for them to stay.
As an American, it was hard to understand at first why there were all these children sleeping in what looked like an abandoned tank of sorts, hard to imagine that they had no home. That is not to say that in America we do not have orphaned children but it is much harder to imagine children living in a war stricken village when we are not surrounded my it. My identity as a North American also impacts my original opinion of the young mother. In my eyes, I see a young girl who does not want the responsibility of caring for a child that she does not want, while there is an arm-less boy who does all he can to care from him. I see a young girl who cannot see past the tragedy that has happened to her and is losing her grasp on reality. By the end of the film however, we understand that this is a girl who was raped and now has a reminder of it every day. She is alone and the last thing she wants to care for is a crying, blind child that is a product of her torture. It is hard to understand that at first, because as an American, that is not something we are witness to everyday.
The diasporic children versus the children in Satellite's town are very different in both their lifestyles and how they view the world. Satellite's friend, despite having lost a limb, is such a sweet and kind little boy. They are playful and treat Satellite as their leader, whereas I feel that the little diasporic family in the film is reliant on help from others and view the world much more bleakly. I think the purpose of telling this story was to show the effects that war has on children, both physically and mentally, to show us what can become of you when you've run out of options or feel that you never had one to begin with.
First let me just say I never fell in love with the little boy, I was just wishing he shut up and stopped crying most of the movie. I do agree It's true that most North Americans never experience the horrible things that goes on to the people in this movie. It may be hard to imagine this, but our country has been doing things that may directly or indirectly cause the conditions that we see in the movie for other countries since its inception. This can be seen with our founding and the genocide of the Native Americans which Hitler studied during the Third Reich when creating his Jewish labor camps. Even if you look at Japanese internment camps that proceeded Pearl Harbor, it shows how these negative conditions have been displayed on our soil not too long ago just like the refugee camp in the movie. Countries create negative conditions for people in "inferior countries" every day.
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