A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
October 5, 2015
Original Title:
Fireflies in the Abyss
Alternate Titles:
Luci nell'abisso
Genres:
Documentary
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 92
In the Jaintia Hills of Northeast India, boys and men descend into the abyss of the 'rat-holes' to scratch coal out of hard rock, with nothing more than a pickaxe and a head-torch. One of them is Suraj, an 11-year old boy. Born in the mines to Nepali immigrants, Suraj cherishes the hope of getting out of the coal-pit someday. With his mother no more, an unsupportive father and no place he can call home, the odds are stacked against him. And yet, he battles to eventually put himself in school. The film follows Suraj through his tumultuous journey, while revealing startling stories and lives under unusual - perhaps extraordinary - circumstances.
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While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
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Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
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Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.