Monday
After a weekend of standup comedy, a super fun festival-concert-picnic, and a ████████ turn of events, I kicked off the week with one of my colleagues hosting a movie night in the office after the day ended. He is also from California, and besides being fluent in Chinese, he is now studying Mongolian, where he has had extended stays in the past. Freakin' epic, man.
Anyways, the movie tonight was a Mongolian film and the first Mongolian movie I have ever seen at that. It's called If Only I Could Hibernate (2023) and is essentially about the struggle of living below-the-poverty line. It's even more gut-wrenching when the main character is a young teen, struggling between not dropping out of school and doing his best to keep his younger siblings from starving. I won't spoil too much, but man, there is an emotional breakdown scene that hit all of us watching pretty hard.
It's beautifully shot, but a hard movie to recommend with its subject matter—I typically make group movie nights either a comedy or so-bad-that-it's-good kind of night. BUT it actually was quite nice to watch a different kind of group movie night and talk about it after. The kids in the film were great actors, and the two adult characters who were their heroes at times gave me hope in the world when watching. As I'm typing this, I actually do want to recommend it haha. And definitely want to see more Mongolian cinema.
It was 6 of us watching and I thought it was cool how no one pulled out their phone during the movie, at least as far as I could tell. Besides that we had Hainan chicken rice ordered an Uber Eats and my colleague hosting brought tea from Mongolia which was bomb AF.