Friday, February 22, 2019

Samba: unconfirmed pigeons in Paris.

Title: Samba
Year:  2014
Director:  Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano
Running time: 115 min.
Country: France




This film depicts the tough life of an illegal immigrant (Samba) in Paris, how he is forced to accept all kinds of jobs to survive in the city and how he falls in love with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Although we empathize with Samba, the reality is that we are only focused on pigeon appearances in the film, so we will skip describing his adventures. There are two scenes related to pigeons. The first one occurs when the police scramble onto some scaffolding to catch the immigrants, Samba and his friends escape running on the roofs of buildings. When Samba is leaving a roof hatch we can hear pigeons cooing and see a feather next to the window (red arrow in the screen shot). Of course, this does not count, it is a near miss.

A small feather (pointed at by the red arrow) next to Samba, the film's protagonist.

The second scene is more explicit: Samba is talking with his uncle, who is in depressed because he has lost his job.

In this picture we can see Samba's uncle's sadness.
Samba is trying to encourage him to start a new project and is getting dressed for a date with his girlfriend. In the background we can observe a tv playing a documentary and some birds (unconfirmed pigeons) flying way. We would have to find out the documentary's name to clearly discern where they are pigeons or other birds.

Samba is getting dressed. We can observe the tv on the right side of the screenshot. 


Here we can see the tv with more detail. Some unconfirmed pigeons appear. 




Details of the pigeon starring 

  • Source: Samba. Starring moment: 1:21:10 and 1:40:26
  • Pigeon activity: A flock of unconfirmed pigeons fly away, probably scared by the camera. 
  • Symbolism: None, they represent wild animals.
  • Relevance: Low, they are part of a tv documentary that Samba's sad uncle is watching. It is not clear whether this documentary helps him to feel better. 
  • Training level: None. They are wild animals. 

Friday, February 1, 2019

Fifth edition of Pigeon Quest

Welcome to the Fifth Edition of Pigeon Quest. Here, instead of finding the pigeon in the film, you have to find the film with the pigeon.

Just write in the comments the film name with a recognized user name. An anonymous comment will produce an anonymous winner. The first one in succeeding will win and receive an honorary certificate. 

The winner of this quest can be seen here.
The film review can be found here

You can see other editions of this Quest here.

In this sequence we can observe two people entering an abandoned building.....



When they are observing the ruins, two doves and a pigeon start flying, surprised by the intruders....