Just watched Cloud 9, but the real title is 7e Ciel.  This is a slow but very touching German film about love, and lust in older age. The acting is superb.  And the story line is unique.  The lead actor is a seamstress who, at the outset, seems satisfied with her life in a small apartment with her husband;  she sings  in a choir, and joyfully cares for her granddaughters.    But something happens and her life changes –in many ways for the better. Her confrontations with her husband of 30 years, and with her adult daughter are well done.  What we don’t see in Hollywood films is the genuine fear grownups have of hurting one another when a relationship goes south.  Instead on screen we see  the shouting, the accusations and the roaring of a marriage breaking apart.  In Cloud 9  we see something so human– so welcome and so thoughtful that — while we are prepared for a fight scene — what we get is something far more intolerable. I got this dvd at the library.

I must have read a reference to this new young novelist’s book My Sister the Serial Killer.  Written by Nigerian  Oyinkan Braithwaite, the book takes place in today’s Lagos.  There is some dark humour — but when that is swept aside, the reader is led through a story of the upper middle class lives of a careless (or carefree) daughter and a dutiful one.  The latter is pressed into helping  the former.  But the careless daughter  has a bad habit of killing her boyfriends.  It’s a short book, I read it as an e-book from the library. But there are sparks of familiarity with the relationship between the sisters — and their caustic relations with the father.  “Libby,” the free e-reader program at the library, tells me the book took me 3 hours and 57 minutes to complete.  The book is entertaining, but not too deep.