Documentary The Last Days Quotes

LIVE FROM THE PASTA FARMS, THIS HAS BEEN AL DENTE: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a documentary on its new show Panorama about Spaghetti growers in Switzerland-- on April 1, 1957. The joke broadcast showed Swiss spaghetti farmers picking fresh spaghetti from 'spaghetti trees' and preparing the spaghetti for market. It also mentioned that the pasta farmers had a bumper crop partly because of the 'virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.' Soon after the broadcast, the BBC received phone calls from viewers eager to know if spaghetti really grew on trees and how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. To the last question, the BBC reportedly replied that they should 'place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves. Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall,

Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

Steve knew the sharks intimately by now. “The big tiger sharks will show up at eleven o’clock,” he said. And sure enough, they did, right on the dot. We had the shark cage and the dinghy, with myself (and Igor), Steve, and Sui. I sat in the dingy and watched the enormous tigers as they circled around. They had to be more than fourteen feet long, and some of them were larger than the boat itself. I quickly figured out that because of my great belly I was very unbalanced. I had to be careful so as not to tip the boat. Sui was an old hand at all of this. She planted herself in the center of the boat and lay down, sticking to the safest spot possible. Steve enjoyed going into the cage. The sharks came up to him one by one, trying to open this strange container and get to the nice yummy food inside. “They have a childlike curiosity,” he told me, breaking to the surface before lowering himself down again. “They’re really trying to figure out how to get me!” I got to experience them on the surface, in the dinghy. Tiger sharks don’t just feed under the water. They readily take food off the surface, too, and even lift themselves partially out of the water. Huge tiger sharks, wider across than I was (which at that point was saying a lot) came up to taste the boat, taste the motor, and put their heads all the way over the back of the dinghy. I was fascinated and had to stop myself from reaching out and stroking them. Of course I didn’t dare move, because I needed to counterbalance the boat, so the sharks wouldn’t rock it over. After a day of filming, my opinion of sharks was even better. Steve was right. Bringing people into close proximity to wildlife was all you had to do. I fell in love with tiger sharks that day. As it turned out, that was the last documentary of my pregnancy. For the next few weeks I’d be restricted to working at the zoo.

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down memory lane with his old rival John McEnroe, who, alongside everything else—music, art, tennis commentary, and punditry—maintained a busy life reminiscing about his earlier life. Sometimes it seemed as if the lucrative business of reminiscing was not just a full-time job but a full-time life as McEnroe rehearsed the key moments and told and retold the old stories, in his autobiography, Serious, in numerous documentaries, in the course of his match commentary and punditry for TV (hopping profitably between the BBC and an American channel in the course of the same day),

As a wildlife warrior, Steve fought against age-old practices that were destroying entire species. He felt it was time to focus on the nonconsumptive use of wildlife. Poachers were still hunting tigers for their bones, and bears for their gallbladders, all for traditional medicines that have been far surpassed by modern pharmaceuticals. It should be simple. We should be able to take an aspirin instead of powdered rhino horn, make whaling something that we read about in history books, and end our appetite for shark-fin soup, which is causing one of the world’s most ancient and important species to vanish from the oceans. Until the day comes when the senseless killing ends, we will all have to fight like wildlife warriors to protect our precious planet. Steve came back from his Antarctica trip with renewed determination. In his last documentary, Steve showed how penguins actually play. He tried to demystify the fierce reputation of the leopard seal. He talked about how humpback whales have a family structure similar to ours, that they are mammals, they love their children, and they communicate.

Steve was right. Bringing people into close proximity to wildlife was all you had to do. I fell in love with tiger sharks that day. As it turned out, that was the last documentary of my pregnancy. For the next few weeks I’d be restricted to working at the zoo. Steve, on the other hand, had time to squeeze in one more doco. He and John headed to Indonesia to film Komodo dragons. Steve found one dragon with a fishhook in its mouth. The line was trailing alongside the eight-foot lizard, and Steve decided to help. He got in front of the huge predator and pulled until the hook popped free. It was at that moment that the dragon clicked. He homed in on Steve, raised his head, and gave chase. The Komodo was serious. Steve managed to scramble up a small tree, with the dragon at his feet. Luckily, it was just too big to climb well and only grabbed Steve on the boot. Steve turned to the camera. “Danger, danger, danger!” was all he could get out. The Komodo dragon carries about sixteen types of bacteria in the long strings of drool that hang from its mouth. All it needs to do is break the skin, and its prey will die of infection. Although the dragon’s tooth had sliced all the way through Steve’s boot, it didn’t penetrate his sock or his foot. “I’d rather take a hit from an eight-foot saltie than an eight-foot dragon,” Steve said later. When Steve made it home safe and sound, I encouraged my tummy, “Hurry up and be born, Igor, so we can hit the road again.

Last year, the single evening generated almost $12 million, was a trending topic on Twitter and attracted over 25 million page views on vogue.com the following day. This year, it will be part of a documentary by the filmmaker

Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim of Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to catch all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the universe.