Word: agrarian
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...down there because it was beautiful,” he reminisces. “It was agrarian,” he adds, chuckling...
Elements of the Kyrgyz nomadic heritage still shape much of this largely pastoral and agrarian society. The brand of Sufi Islam practiced by the majority of the population has blended easily with sky- and nature-worshipping traditions of an earlier era. Though now illegal, the distasteful custom of wife-kidnapping - where a woman is unsuspectingly and often forcibly seized and taken to her husband-to-be's home - perseveres in parts of the country. (See a TIME piece on whether Moscow subverted the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan...
Souza, who sought the agrarian reform that would give small plots to the area's poor, was shot three or four times as he bicycled with his wife and her friend on Tuesday evening, said Loyana Nogueira da Silva, the police officer who was on duty when the case was called in. The three were on the edge of a temporary settlement of poor farmers, when an unidentified assailant or assailants approached him on a motorcycle and opened fire. Souza's wife and her friend had biked ahead and turned when they heard the shots. Although they have no firm...
...comes the turn of Thailand's Uruphong Raksasad. Applying the principles of reality TV to his homemade production, Uruphong engaged two scuffling farming families to work a plot of land he rented for them in his native Chiang Rai province, and filmed them. The end result - the ironically entitled Agrarian Utopia - is a poignant essay on lives of mounting debt and bug-catching subsistence, evoking eternal cycles of suffering that will seem stunningly fresh to urban audiences in Thailand and the region. See what we learned from a decade at the movies...
...anything to criticize in the 33-year-old director's sophomore effort (a follow-on from 2006's equally pastoral Stories from the North), it's that his high-definition images - all darkening clouds and lustrous green paddies - are too beautiful. Despite its share of grumbling about corrupt politicians, Agrarian Utopia quickly moves beyond some heavy-handed message movie toward Buddhist meditation. Uruphong's oppressed peasants are as much victims of their own restlessness as they are of meager rice prices. With a poet's eye, the sights and sounds of their close-to-nature existence are transformed into sources...