Stream Something Short
Ever heard of An Alpine Divorce? Robert Barr (1849-1912) was a prolific novelist whose family emigrated to Canada from Scotland when he was a child. As a young man he became a teacher then school principal in Windsor, Ont. From there he wrote short fiction and articles at the Detroit Free Press. The newspaper started a weekly paper in London UK, and Barr was hired as its editor. Barr wrote more than 500 novels, humour pieces and short stories. This one you can listen to in 12 minutes here, or read it. Written at the turn of the 20th century it’s still evocative and painful.
“You woke?” Two very clever and humorous minutes from the BBC here.
Toast a brilliant dramatic short film from the UK. In 13 minutes this comedy fills you with despair and hope and then despair. Clever and not cloying. Watch it here.
To see something utterly captivating watch 1600 Years of British Women’s Fashion Evolution 400 to 2026. All in 10 minutes. Brilliant and a lot of fun. Right here.
“Over the next five months, I took an image every 300 seconds (5 minutes)… 24 hours a day. Every few days I would adjust the camera to provide a different angle as the avocado tree grew.”
Scott, Waltz of the Avocado Tree
Meet Scott, a YouTuber, educator, and Avocado Enthusiast in Melbourne, Australia. He loves to grow his own avocado trees; he decided to film one while it grew. He notes,
“… I conducted a project where I took a time lapse of an avocado seed growing into a small tree. I bought a cheap lamp, a cheap tripod and set an old iPhone up with Skyflow (a fantastic time lapse app), and let it run. Over the next five months I took an image every 300 seconds (5 minutes). The lamp kept the tree will lit so that the camera could see it 24 hours a day. Every few days I would adjust the camera to provide a different angle as the avocado tree grew.”
What he shows in his five-minute video here is amazing. His avocado pit grew two shoots and the shoots’ daily interactions are amazing to watch. Watch his short video, Waltz of the Avocado Tree – Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers here .
Salam (2018) by Claire Fowler is a 13-minute drama you can watch on Kanopy. Late one night, a young woman Lyft driver in New York City picks up a woman passenger. The driver is Muslim; she wears a headscarf. Her passenger, a white woman the same age, has just been clubbing and is wearing party clothes. When the woman “drive, I don’t care where” the plot thickens. Here’s the trailer.
Never Forget Palestine
You can watch The Present (2020). On his his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his six-year-old daughter set out from his West Bank village to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping? This film is 20 minutes here’s the trailer you can watch it here for $1.99
The United Nation’s Relief and UNRWA’s “Gaza Through Their Eyes” photo exhibit is a powerful testimony to Palestinians’ lives lived under the constant threats of displacement. You can watch a short tour of the art show in Dublin here. Dublin was one of a dozen European cities that hosted the displays.
Every Saturday at 12 noon (Eastern) you can watch an interesting film, even a play presented free by The Palestine Museum, in the US. Have a look at the great site the Museum has. Lately the museum has been asking for donations for a giant tapestry dedicated to the Palestinians. Various artists and artisans have made the squares t are being sold to raise money. The tapestry will hang at the Venice Biennale in May, until the fall. To join the email list a what films are coming up, sign up here.
What to Watch…
An Honest Life is a 2hour long Swedish film “… an interesting if undemanding thriller that weaves together themes of classism, anarchy, and ultimately a young character coming to terms with who he is, and how far off the path of an ordinary life he’s prepared to go.” Sounds not bad, eh. It holds one’s interest and the acting’s good. It’s on Netflix. And the trailer is here.
Breaking Idol on GEM is a 44 minute documentary well worth watching. The film examines the rapes carried out by former lead singer Jacob Hoggard in the Canadian band Hedley. In 2018, he was assault of two women. This doc is excellent. Watch it here.
Dynasty: The Murdochs is a fawning series on Netflix about Rupert Murdoch and family how he worked his way from a deadbeat job in Australia to well—being a right wing, pro-war creep who lives in London, New York and LA with his trophy wife. It’s cringe, as they say.
Armand is a Norwegian film about a single middle-class mother who is called to account for her six year old son’s behaviour in school. What happened and who did what are handled in a black and white way. However, the mother’s refusal to accept the incident happened as the principal said starts the viewers wondering about what actually took place. Well acted, if inconclusive in terms of the ending. You can read this review for more You can watch it on Prime Video or AppleTV. And the trailer is here.
Shrill is a good comedy series on Netflix. It is funny. The star Aidy Bryant (Saturday Night Live) is Annie, a fat young woman who wants to improve her life — but not her body. Annie is trying to step up in her career and impress her boss – it backfires. Her boyfriend is a bro who does little and cares less for her. Her mother is nasty, jealous of Annie’s acceptance of her size. Delightful. Trailer is here.
Parlement is a great satirical series on Kanopy. Made around the time of Brexit (2020) this French comedy is about European members of Parliament (MEPs) in Brussels, and their key staffers. A young man, Sammy, gets a job working for the MEP from a rural riding in France. The MEP plays word games, sleeps and drinks in his office all day. Undeterred, Sammy takes on writing his speeches and clashing with some other assistants on public issues. It is funny, fast and well worth seeing. Subtitles. Trailer is here.
Big Mistakes on Netflix is a brand new series that features Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega, as a grown-up brother and sister in middle America who (of course) unwittingly get involved with The Mob. It’s clever, funny and quick witted. The dialogue is punchy not preachy. Oh that reminds me – Levy plays Nicky the brother of the family. He’s a pastor. Ortega plays Morgan, his wild sister who couldn’t manage an arts career in New York and is now an elementary school teacher. Delightful and you’ll have at least an hour of smiling time after each episode. I promise. Here’s the trailer.
Clairtone (2025) is a lively documentary I saw recently and found it fascinating. It is all about engineer and industrialist Peter Munk, his and his partner’s designing the top high-end record players and sound systems. They were manufactured for seven years in Canada– in fact in a huge plant in Stellarton, Pictou County, Nova Scotia. What a story this is. Fascinating. Of course Munk himself wasn’t such a good guy. When the Clairtone business failed, he went into real estate, development and then the dirty world of mining. The name of his company is still Barrick Gold. Narrated by his daughter, Nina Munk, the doc is on Crave. The trailer is here.
“It’s not for the rich but for the filthy rich.”
one cop’s opinion of a snazzy apartment building in New York City
Crime Scene– There are only 3 episodes but the first episode The Times Square Killer: Murder on 42nd St. features a grisly murder – certainly grabs your attention. Watch on Netflix. Here’s the trailer.
Homicide NY– is a police series. If you see the US as a swamp you can’t go much deeper than the crime scene in New York City, according to these cops. It’s all about NYC detectives reliving their cases. One dick points out a building in the promo, “It’s not for the rich but for the filthy rich.” And so it goes on – guarantees you’ll have a new view of cops and prosecutors. Not sure that would be good. It’s on Netflix and here’s the trailer.
Treasure of the Month
What if every woman simply took the day off? is the subtitle. The 70 minute film is called The Day Iceland Stood Still (2024-2025). On Oct 24 1975, 90% of Iceland’s women refused to go to work, go to the office, teach, nurse, drive kids, make dinner or do housework. The one day strike makes a great film, and paved the way for Iceland’s recognition as the most gender equal society in the world. You can stream it on Apple, or MUBI. Watch the trailer here.
What I’ve Read…
Pick a Colour (2025) by Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Canadian Souvankham Thammavongsa is her latest book. Her book blurb says is a “revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class.” I really liked her earlier book of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife but I did not like Pick a Colour. If you are interested in a woman, a former boxer who now runs a nail salon – this book is for you. I hated the gossip, the forced chat, and the boredom of the salon. Also salon owner Ning didn’t grab me.
We Were the Salt of the Sea by Roxanne Bouchard is a good novel, in the sense it seems authentic and features the ups and mostly downs of life in Québec’s Gaspésie. An woman dies on her boat off the coast of Capelin. Her estranged daughter comes to town to breathe a bit of her late mother’s spirit. The characters are well-drawn, the murder plot loose and convincing. Bouchard is Canadian. I’ve never been to the Gaspé but this book has made me want to visit.
A Newfoundland lawyer and academic, Ray Critch, wrote The Beltane Massacre (2025), and it’s not a bad novel. Canadian grad student Rowan McRae loses his wife and three-month-old baby son in a bombing at the Beltane Festival in Edinburgh. A few years go by; McRae becomes a lecturer at a London university. He meets up with an old friend who now works in intel for MI5. They start to track down what happened to McRae’s family – who was behind the bombing and why.
Karen Grose, an author from Toronto, has published her first novel The Dime Box. It caught my attention because it was selected by Amnesty International for its 2021 Book Club. It starts out slowly and a bit predictably, but later it becomes more thorny. Greta Giffen, from a northern Ontario town, is searching for an opportunity, a job or even a friend in Toronto. The police charge her with murdering her father. It’s not really her father, as she was adopted, but the man had terrorized and beaten her mother and her for Greta’s whole 19 years. The veteran homicide detective in Toronto is a middle-aged woman who needs Greta to confess. The cat and mouse game during the interviews at the cop shop are what keeps this book vibrant, and definitely worth the read.
Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre is a must read. Giuffre was a sex toy and a girl recuriter for Epstein and Maxwell for several years. This book is well written and very well presented to the reader. The grooming, the training and the money is dizzying.
Podcasts I’m listening to…
Amanda Knox, the American who 20 years ago was twice convicted of murdering her roommate in Italy and finally exonerated, hosts Doubt a very good podcast series on the conviction of English nurse Lucy Letby. Letby, age 35, was charged nearly a decade ago, then convicted, of murdering seven infants, and almost killing six others in the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit. One question is how, and another is why? This young woman had done nothing wrong in her whole life; she came from a good home, was a dutiful daughter and student, earned a university degree in nursing and specialist certificate as a neonatal nurse. In fact, she said at her trial that she entered nursing because she wanted to help children. Start listening here. Fascinating.
I listened to the Wrongful Conviction #565 program in which host Maggie Freleng interviewed Jane Dorotik in central California. In 2000, Jane’s husband, 52-year-old Bob, went for his usual jog. By nightfall he hadn’t returned so Jane, a nurse, contacted the police. She was convicted on “junk science” and faulty forensic evidence. After a quarter century in prison for a crime she did not commit, Jane managed to get out due to her age (nearly 80) and new leads to the murderers. It’s well done, confounding and Jane was born in Canada! Listen here.
The best podcast series I’ve heard lately is David Ridgen’s Someone Knows Something (season 10). In this series, he investigates the 2021 disappearance in Costa Rica of a Canadian amateur athlete Jaclyn Ferland-Smith. She and her Canadian husband, Sebastien, both retired from the Canadian military, built a big house at Playa del Coco, a town where many other ex-pats live. Ridgen I like because he dives deeper into the affected people’s memories and psyches. His interviews are quiet but fascinating. He’s persistent!! Listen on the CBC podcast app here.
The Poet Laureate who provokes
A five-minute poem about social justice called “February”, is read by its author Peterborough’s (Ontario) Poet Laureate, Ziysah von Bieberstein. Brilliant and thought provoking. She read this at a Peterborough city council meeting, Feb. 26, 2024.
Another ruined dinner party... 