One of the nice discoveries in my role as manager and chief film-picker for the Cape Breton Island Film Series has been the movies of Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American director of dramas like Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo. Bahrani portrays the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a naturalistic style that is almost documentary in character. We were the only film series in Canada to show Chop Shop; by the time Goodbye Solo came out a year later, Bahrani's movies were de rigueur on the indie circuit. Bahrani grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Roger Ebert calls him...

The Harper Government's ambivalent attitude toward immigration deserves more thoughtful consideration than I have time for this morning, but in light of yesterday's release of a new guide for prospective Canadian Immigrants, a manual high in testosterone and shy on environmental values, I flag it here for future discussion. An immigrant himself, Contrarian left yesterday's Film Series benefit for L'Arche Cape Breton* thinking about the Senegalese immigrant cab driver at the centre of the featured movie — an ebullient character named Solo, brilliantly played by Souleymane Sy Savane, himself an immigrant to the US from the Ivory Coast.  Solo is one...