"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." So said Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
That's the moral behind this brief and mostly wordless film. A man, apparently homeless, collects some change from passers by and instead of spending it on himself gives it away to others, some less in material need than himself.
It sounds a little corny in our Hobbesian age, and that's probably why so few people seem to accept such advice. The greatest figures in history, including those we worship, have endorsed the sentiment but the discrepancy between them and us doesn't seem to bother us much.
The budget for this short film must have been only a bit more than the change collected by the homeless hero, and yet it spells out how much can be accomplished with some talent, some effort, and some thumos, just like the story it shows us. It doesn't really take much.
The musical score, for piano, is wistful without quite sinking into melancholy. Some of the performances are better than others. The narrative is a little reminiscent of Dickens or O. Henry or Hans Christian Anderson, but none of that matters much.
The end result of this eleven-minute short is to prompt us to wonder why it sometime seems so much easier to hate strangers than to do something that will obviously benefit them. It's a question that's liable to leave many of us uncomfortable.
That's the moral behind this brief and mostly wordless film. A man, apparently homeless, collects some change from passers by and instead of spending it on himself gives it away to others, some less in material need than himself.
It sounds a little corny in our Hobbesian age, and that's probably why so few people seem to accept such advice. The greatest figures in history, including those we worship, have endorsed the sentiment but the discrepancy between them and us doesn't seem to bother us much.
The budget for this short film must have been only a bit more than the change collected by the homeless hero, and yet it spells out how much can be accomplished with some talent, some effort, and some thumos, just like the story it shows us. It doesn't really take much.
The musical score, for piano, is wistful without quite sinking into melancholy. Some of the performances are better than others. The narrative is a little reminiscent of Dickens or O. Henry or Hans Christian Anderson, but none of that matters much.
The end result of this eleven-minute short is to prompt us to wonder why it sometime seems so much easier to hate strangers than to do something that will obviously benefit them. It's a question that's liable to leave many of us uncomfortable.
