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264: Favourite Books and Documentaries 2022 - Seven Health: Eating Disorder Recovery and Anti Diet Nutritionist

Episode 264: This week on Real Health Radio, I do a round up of my favourite books and documentaries of 2022.


Jan 13.2023


Jan 13.2023

Books I’ve read this year: 

  • One Long River Of Song by Brian Doyle
  • Islands Of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
  • Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
  • Reclaiming Body Trust by Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant
  • Unapologetic Eating by Alissa Rumsey
  • Resilience By Design by Ian Snape and Mike Weeks
  • Windswept and Interesting by Billy Connolly
  • The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  • Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • Emotion-Focused Family Therapy by Adele Lafrance, Katherine A. Henderson & Shari Mayman
  • Asperger’s in Pink by Julie Clark
  • Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig
  • We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
  • Atlas Of The Heart by Brene Brown
  • Solve For Happy by Mo Gawdat
  • The Adonis Complex by Harrison G. Pope, Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia
  • Brainwashed by Elisa Oras
  • Raising Emotionally Intelligent Children by John M. Gottman
  • Mating In Captivity by Ester Perel
  • The Inner Game Of Tennis by W. Timothy Galloway
  • The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins
  • Sensory Perceptual Issues In Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome by Olga Bogdashina
  • Bittersweet by Susan Cain
  • How To Play Your Best Golf by Nick O’Hern
  • The Longest Match by Betsy Brenner
  • John Peel by Mick Wall
  • Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating by Katja Rowell and Jenny McGlothlin
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder by Johanna Kandel
  • Free To Learn by Peter Gray
  • Exit Music: The Story Of Radiohead by Mac Randall
  • The Snakes by Sadie Jones
  • Lost Connections by Johann Hari
  • The Courage To Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

Documentaries I’ve watched this year:

  • The Rescue
  • In & Of Itself
  • Art And Craft
  • Roadrunner
  • Val
  • Nordfor Sola
  • Stutz
  • Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
  • The Biggest Little Farm
  • The Alpinist
  • Until The Wheels Fall Off
  • Return To Space
  • 14 Peaks
  • Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Triology
  • Riding The Dragon
  • Hold Your Breath
  • Explorer: The Last Tepui
  • Bear Island
  • Desert Coffee
  • Train wreck:  Woodstock 99
  • Stay On Board: The Leo Baker Story
  • The Volcano

Here’s what we talk about in this podcast episode:


00:00:00

Intro + we’ve moved to Scotland

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 264 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/264.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients who are stuck in quasi-recovery restore their health and end eating disorder behaviours so they can regain their period, sleep through the night, improve body image, and have a peaceful relationship with food and exercise.

Happy New Year! I hope that the start of 2023 is treating you well. This is my first podcast episode since the 9th of December, and through the resistance of December and early January, I only put out rebroadcast episodes. The reason for this is that we have moved house. Well, more than just moved house, we moved country. We have moved up to Scotland.

We’d been thinking about moving on and off for a number of years now. If you’ve listened to any past life update episodes, we’ve explored different areas and just never found somewhere that felt right. We would have times of trying to make the most of where we were and then get that feeling again that we wanted to move. Ali, my wife, is originally from Scotland. She’s moved down south to London about 20 years ago, around the same time I left Sydney and moved to London. While Ali and I have been together for 13 years, I think it is now, it’s only really been in the last couple years that we’ve done some family trips up to Scotland – I think probably one of the upsides of Covid and the limitations on travel.

Ali’s mom and sister live in the Cairngorms National Park, and I remember the first time I visited it a couple of years ago, I was just floored with how stunningly beautiful it was. Even on that first trip, we started looking up properties to see what was available. When we first bought our house, Ali was working in London, so while we were living in the countryside in Surrey, it was a place that was commutable into London in under an hour. But Ali’s no longer working in London, and I was only going in there a handful of times a year, so we were paying a premium for this proximity to London but were actually no longer using it, and it was no longer important to us.

We both had this realisation that we’d prefer to have less financial pressure and a smaller mortgage rather than continue living where we were. The more we thought about it, Scotland just seemed like a place to move to. So we did a number of trips to check out different places, and then in early autumn we put our house on the market, and within a handful of weeks we had agreed a sale. But because of the archaic nature of the UK housing market, we didn’t actually complete until mid-December.

Over the last six months, we’ve done a ton of research on different places to live in Scotland as well as coming up and doing the trips. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in Google Maps, just scrolling through different areas and looking at places on Rightmove and other property sites.

Because this is such a big move, we are renting to start with instead of buying. It doesn’t matter how much online searching you do, or even coming up and doing weeklong trips; it doesn’t really compare to living somewhere for a year or 18 months and truly getting a feel of what a place is like. So we are now living in a village called Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. It’s in the hills and it is surrounded by the most picturesque scenery. There’s been a ton of snow since we’ve moved up here, so it often feels like we’ve moved to a ski village.

Even though it’s been less than a month that we’ve been here, we already feel really settled. Our new house is great, and we love the area. It does still feel like I’m on holiday, but I think this feeling will stay for a really long time and is probably just because of the beauty of the place. No matter what direction I drive, there are spectacular views, and the best description is awe. I’m constantly in awe of my new surroundings.

So that is my news and the reason the podcast has just been rebroadcast episodes lately. At some point in the next couple of months, I’ll do a life update episode and I’ll go into more detail on everything, but I’m very happy with our new abode and I’m excited for the new adventure of making a life up here.

Today on the show, I’m doing my annual roundup. This is looking at my favourite things from the last year – looking at things from 2022. I’ll be covering my favourite books and documentaries of these last 12 months. And as always, I love hearing what you’ve been up to and what have been your favourite things, so you can email info@seven-health.com and let me know, and I will read through those emails and respond, because I always love hearing what everyone else has been loving.

Let’s start with the books. This year, I read or listened to on Audible 35 books in total. You can see the full list of the books and the documentaries at the show notes (www.seven-health.com/264). Some of the books are still yet to be finished, not because they’re bad, just because I have a habit of reading multiple books at once. But the vast majority of them I have finished, and of the 35, I want to talk about six of them.

00:05:48

One Long River of Song

My favourite book of the year is One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. It was actually a book that a client recommended to me at the very start of 2022 after hearing my yearly roundup. So they listened to the last one of these podcasts and then recommended the book to me.

The book is a collection of short stories and essays and poems that was put together after Brian passed away, and it is simply beautiful. He has this real unique way of writing, with very long sentences – sometimes a whole page is one sentence. But his choice of words and his descriptions are just gorgeous. The content is beautiful as well: talking about the natural world or parenting or love or grief or nostalgia and so much more.

While reading it, I had many moments of being on the verge of tears, and then moments later having genuine laugh-out-loud moments. He really has a style all to his own, and I can’t think of another author to compare him to. I finished the book in a matter of days, and I just remember being so excited each night when I would get to sit down, sit in bed, and read it. You definitely don’t have to read it like this; it is one of those books that you can just pick up, open to a page, and just read whatever short story is starting around there.

Because of how much I love this book, I actually gifted this to a number of people over the last year, and it was lovely to have this book to be able to do that with. So if you are looking for something beautiful and moving to read, then please check out One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle.

00:07:36

Four Thousand Weeks

The next recommendation is called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. This was suggested to me by a friend. He’d heard him interviewed on Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast and then ordered the book. The title, Four Thousand Weeks, is the average number of weeks a human being lives for, and the subtitle of the book is ‘Time and How We Use It’.

Now, on the surface this could sound like another book about productivity and how to maximise our efficiency, but it’s actually something quite different. Burkeman had actually spent a decade as a ‘productivity geek’, as he describes himself, looking at the various hacks for better managing one’s inbox or how to get more done to free up more spare time. He’d written about this for The guardian for 10 years. But what he found was that the more he did this, the more he just ended up being busier and still feeling like he wasn’t on top of things.

This is something that I noticed very much myself over the years of running my own business. I can remember many years ago, before I had a child, I was doing 50- and 60-hour weeks, and many days I’d get up at 4:30 in the morning or 5:00 in the morning and try to get a head start on things and get on top of everything I wanted to do. But really, no matter how much I worked, there was always more to do, and I never felt any less busy doing this.

The book is really an exploration on our failed attempts to fit more into our lives and the various hacks we’ve been trying to use to get more done. It’s kind of like an amalgamation of a self-help book with a large chunk of philosophy, with the core message being about embracing our limits. Rather than pretending like we can fit more and more in, we need to realise that we’re only ever going to achieve a sliver of the available options that are on offer to us as humans, and to really embrace that we have this limited time on Earth and limited attention and spend this time wisely – which should include more leisure time and more procrastination and more time with other human beings and more time on things for the sake of it, rather than some benefit that is going to be bestowed on us at some point in the future.

I really can’t do this book justice here in trying to describe it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I used it to help create more space in my life, and it was actually the final push that I needed to adopt a four-day work week, which was something I’d been contemplating for a long time, and then after reading the book was the final thing that made me make that decision that I was no longer going to work on Fridays and that I was going to do a four-day week and then have a three-day weekend. The book is called Four Thousand Weeks and it is by Oliver Burkeman.

00:10:31

Islands of Abandonment

The next book is called Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn. This was actually a Christmas present given to me by Ali, so I only got it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve nearly finished it in this time. The subtitle for the book is ‘Life in the Post-Human Landscape’. It’s all about what happens in places that become abandoned – ghost towns or exclusion zones or fortress islands – and what happens when the humans leave and nature is allowed to reclaim that place.

The book is so well-written. Her writing feels poetic and is so specific in its descriptions. The best way I can describe her writing is beautiful in that it is full of beauty. And while her style is different to Brian Doyle, there is a similarity in their ability to use language. I read it and I enjoy it and I’m in awe of it, and it makes me want to be a better writer.

But it’s not just the words; it’s also the content. So much of what we read about and hear about now is the devastation of climate change and the deforestation and the irreversible damage that humans are doing to this planet. The book is in agreement with this theme, that we are living in a way that is undeniably harming the Earth – but the book also has a very hopeful tone about the way that forests are coming back, and about the way that places we think of as an eyesore are actually teeming with life and are rich in biodiversity and are havens for plants and creatures big and small.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t an urgency in our need to do things differently as humans, because there really is. I just love the way that she talks about these issues and the many ideas that I’d never heard about before. I’ve heard astronauts talking about the experience of going into space and seeing Earth from afar, and it creating this real perspective shift on things, and this book feels the same to me, without that sounding too much like hype or hyperbole.

Also, excitingly, the book was recommended to Ali at our new local bookstore, so I’m looking forward to going back in, telling the owner how much I loved the book, and seeing what their next suggestion is, because it’s this beautiful, independent bookstore and I’ve been very impressed with their first recommendation. The book is called Islands of Abandonment and it’s by Cal Flyn.

00:13:08

Reclaiming Body Trust

The next book is called Reclaiming Body Trust and it’s by Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant. Hilary and Dana run the Center for Body Trust, which used to be known as Be Nourished, and have been doing incredible work in supporting both the lay public and practitioners and have been doing this for many years. So when I saw that they had a book out, I was super excited, and it doesn’t disappoint.

The book is split into three sections: The Rupture, The Reckoning, and The Reclamation, which is the different stages that one goes through as part of their healing journey, as part of reclaiming body trust.

What I like about the book is its focus on inclusivity and the sharing of experiences of many different people. While Hilary and Dana are both white women, they’re including the lived experience of not just themselves, but of many others. The book is also very practical. It definitely has a lot of education, but equally, it has a lot of practical ideas, so it isn’t just about learning more but is how you can then follow through on this.

I also liked it because it opened my eyes to many concepts and ideas that I was unaware of. I’ve been working in this field for a long time. When I’m reading books of this nature, most of the time I’m reading them to see if they would be helpful to recommend to clients rather than being so much for my own benefit, because I’ve been living in this space and working in this space and reading so much in this space that majority of the time in books of this nature, it doesn’t feel like it’s a huge learning experience for me; more just, is this something that I think would be helpful for clients?

But because of Hilary and Dana’s focus on practitioners as well as the public, they have a real breadth and depth of knowledge, which meant that I was able to appreciate the book for me and truly learn from it rather than it just being something that is useful for clients. The good news is, I’ve actually recorded an episode of the podcast with Hilary and Dana, and it will be the next episode that is released after this one, so I highly recommend listening to that one as well as checking out the book. It’s called Reclaiming Body Trust by Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant.

00:15:35

Unapologetic Eating

The next book recommendation is Unapologetic Eating by Alissa Rumsey. In a similar vein to the last one, this was also a book that I put into the category of something that will be useful for clients, so I read it from this stance of vetting and seeing if this is something that I should be recommending to clients. And like Reclaiming Body Trust, I was pleasantly surprised by just how good it was.

There are so many intuitive eating style books out there, so I thought it would just be another one of those, but what I found was it was much more than just this. There was much more depth to it. There was exploration of topics that are not related to just food and listening to one’s body when eating.

The book is split into four categories: Fixing, Allowing, Feeling, and Growing. Part of it is connected to food and many of the principles and concepts connected to intuitive eating, but there’s also sections on awareness and mindfulness, on self-compassion, body respect, socialisation, grief, values, self-exploration, embodiment, and embracing your power. So it is really comprehensive, and that was the feeling I had as I read through it. I was like, there is a real depth to this. It’s not surface level. This is going into some really good detail without it feeling daunting.

Once again, it’s incredibly practical. There are many questionnaires and journaling prompts and reflection exercises, some of which I’ve started now using with clients myself. My expectations with this book were truly surpassed, and it’s one I have recommended many times to clients over the last year.

I also chatted with Alissa about the book, and it’s Episode 245 of the podcast, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, then I highly suggest that you do and that you also get the book. It’s called Unapologetic Eating by Alissa Rumsey.

00:17:40

Resilience By Design

The final book on my list is called Resilience By Design, and it’s by Ian Snape and Mike Weeks. I actually met Mike way back in 2007. We were both on the same NLP practitioners course, and while Mike had no idea who I was, I already knew who he was because he, with his then-girlfriend, who is now his wife, Bean, were on a TV show called Jack Osbourne: Adrenaline Junkie. Mike and Bean were jack’s trainers on the show, and I had watched the show.

Since the NLP course I did with Mike, I’ve continued to follow what he’s up to. He’s immersed himself in all forms of performance coaching and helping people to make transformations. Whether it’s vets with PTSD or going and helping in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Mike really has immersed himself in this stuff.

The subtitle for the book is ‘How to Survive and Thrive in a Complex and Turbulent World’, and the whole crux of the book is that resilience is a learnable skill, and it looks at all the ways that this can be done. What I love about this book is the thoroughness of the topic that it covers. While there are many pictures in there, it is by no means a quick read, and while going through it, there is a lot of pausing and reflecting and taking it all in.

I think in the world of books about resilience or podcasts about resilience, it often feels very one-dimensional – that you just have to push yourself. You get up at 4 a.m., you take your cold showers, you keep running even if it hurts and stop being such a cry-baby. This mentality, I think a lot of it is because the people have a background in the military or are ex-military, and that’s how they’re trained – this feels like the way that these things are talked about. But this is not what this book is about, even though it does reference and contain certain excerpts from frontline soldiers and firefighters and the like.

It’s a book that I’m going to keep coming back to, as it is just so rich in ideas. It’s also started to remind me of concepts and ideas that I’d learnt about many years ago, but just hadn’t thought about in a long time. It started me re-exploring books that I’ve had on my bookshelf and pulling them out and wanting to revisit them, and it’s got me thinking about the way I coach and bringing in new ideas. It’s just all very exciting in terms of what this book has led me to start thinking about and start to do.

The book is also really beautifully designed, and the way that it is laid out, there are lots of pictures that help certain concepts to sink in or just to be remembered more easily. There’s obviously been so much care when putting this book together, and this is true for the writing and the content as well as the design. The book is called Resilience By Design and it’s by Ian Snape and Mike Weeks.

That’s it for the books. I now want to talk about the documentaries. Over the last year, I’ve watched 22 documentaries, and I want to talk about seven of them. It’s hard to decide what my favourite one was for this year, and it’s probably a tie between these first two that I’m going to mention.

00:21:13

The Rescue

The first one is called The Rescue, and it’s all about the group of 12 Thai boys and their football coach who got stuck in a cave that flooded. This is something that made rather big news when it happened back in 2018, but I honestly knew so little about it. There are caves in Thailand that, during the summer months, are dry and you can explore, but they are then shut during the rainy season and the winter because they fill up with water. The boys had played football in the morning and then they’d headed out to hang out and play in the caves, and then the heavens opened up and in a very short amount of time, there was an enormous amount of rain and they got trapped in the cave.

The documentary is all about trying to rescue these boys. It is an absolutely insane story. I didn’t know much about cave diving before watching this, and after watching it I have absolutely no desire to get into it as a hobby or a sport, but it is great that there are people out there who are into this, because they were so needed here.

There’s just so much incredible footage in the documentary, and it’s so well put together. It’s by the same filmmakers who made Free Solo, which was about Alex Honnold’s climb in Yosemite Park. But what really holds it all together is the storytelling. It’s so captivating, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time while watching it. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s called The Rescue. It’s done by National Geographic, so wherever you watch that is where you’ll find it. In the UK it is on Disney Plus.

00:23:03

In & Of Itself

The second documentary isn’t really a documentary as much as a TV special, but because it is so incredible, I’m wanting to include it as part of this list. It’s a TV special called In & Of Itself and it’s by Derek DelGaudio. I’m on Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday email list, and it was one of the things that he included, so I watched the trailer and was instantly intrigued and started searching for how to watch the full thing.

DelGaudio is a musician – sorry, a magician, not a musician [laughs] – and a performance artist. In & Of Itself is this combination of one-man show, magic show, storytelling, and is just a really stunning thing of beauty. I actually don’t want to say too much about it because I think the less you know about it, the better. I don’t think watching the trailer ruins anything, so you can go and Google ‘In & Of Itself’ and see the trailer. But I think go in knowing as little as you can, and you’ll get the most of out of it.

I remember it being weeks after I watched it and it still kept coming back to my mind. It’s been probably 9 or 10 months since I watched it now and I still want everyone to go and see it, and if someone asks me about documentaries or it comes up in conversation, it is one of the first things that I mention. I have no idea how he does what he does, and he has such a craft for bringing the whole narrative together. And the fact that David Blaine and Bill Gates are in the audience in this fairly small theatre as part of the show is probably a fairly good indication of his talent.

It was also interesting when I was looking up more info about DelGaudio after watching it that I found he was consulted for the film The Prestige. The Prestige is one of my favourite films of all time and is probably my favourite Christopher Nolan film, so if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend seeing The Prestige. But it made sense that DelGaudio was somewhat connected to this film.

In & Of Itself was released on Hulu. In the UK, I signed up to Disney Plus to watch it. It’s incredible and you need to see it.

00:25:33

Stutz

The next recommendation is called Stutz. It only came out fairly recently on Netflix. Stutz is a film about the psychiatrist Phil Stutz, and it was created by the actor Jonah Hill. I’ve been a massive fan of Jonah’s since I first saw him in Forty-Year-Old Virgin, and I’ve really loved him and seeing him grow as an actor and taking on non-comedic roles as well. His first feature film that he wrote and directed, called Mid90s, was incredible. So I’ve always liked Jonah, or liked as much as one can someone that you don’t know in real life but you just see in movies.

The reason that Jonah made the film is because he’s one of Stutz’s patients and he has been so for many years, like many people in Hollywood, as Stutz is the go-to person in that world. Jonah credits him with so many positive changes in his life and wants more people to be able to benefit from what Stutz does. Part of the film, they go through many of the tools that he uses with clients and his model of therapy, but it also centres on Stutz’s life and upbringing and his Parkinson’s and some of the struggles that he’s personally had.

But what is equally helpful is that Jonah opens up a lot about his own struggles, and this really is actually the thing that holds the documentary together and is largely the vehicle with which the story is then told. Jonah talks about his struggles with his body and the constant dieting that was forced upon him when growing up and how this created this negative belief and all this shame, and how helpful it was to have Stutz be the first person to tell Jonah that he could take care of his body without punishing himself or focussing on losing weight, and that he could move his body in a joyful way without trying to lose weight, and that he could just take care of his health without weight loss.

I very much doubt that Stutz is Health at Every Size aligned, but it was great that Jonah got this message, and to hear how helpful it had been for him. I really enjoyed the film, and I’ve now been listening to other podcast episodes with Stutz on it and will be getting his books, because I’m very intrigued about him and the way that he works. The documentary is called Stutz and it is on Netflix.

00:28:03

Art and Craft

The next documentary is called Art and Craft, and it is probably the quirkiest one on the list this year. It is about Mark Landis, who is one of the most prolific art forgers in history. He would copy a piece of art and then he would contact a gallery and say that he wanted to donate it to them and make up a story that his mother or sister had passed away and he was left it in the will and wants to donate it to the gallery. Over 30 or 40 years, all these fake works end up in many galleries across the U.S. He would make the same piece of art multiple times and then just contact different galleries, so the same bit of art is showing up in multiple galleries, the same bit of forgery.

What is most interesting about the documentary for me is Landis himself. He’s not the kind of person that your mind conjures up as an art forger and having the bravado to walk into these galleries and into these offices and meeting these people and lying to them. He’s this very isolated and lonely guy, and he talks about how these 10 minutes or 30 minutes with someone at the gallery are the times where people treat him really nicely. You see, for all his skill as an artist, he just wants what we all want, which is to be loved and to be in connection with other human beings.

I remember watching another film about art forgery called Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery, and this guy was living the high life. He’d sold works of art for millions and millions. For the art that he was finally sentenced and went to prison for, these sold for nearly £30 million, and there are lots and lots more out there. There’s estimates that he made north of £50 million pounds, and he had the most insanely gorgeous houses and so much money, and money was really the big part of his motivation.

But in Landis’s case, he’s never made any money from this. Every bit of art he ever made, he just donated. So I just found him to be a very fascinating individual and a fascinating documentary, just looking at the human condition. It’s called Art and Craft. It’s on Amazon Prime, or at least it was on Prime when I watched it, but it’s definitely on Amazon.

00:30:35

Roadrunner

The next documentary is called Roadrunner and it’s all about the life and death of the chef Anthony Bourdain. I remember reading Kitchen Confidential, which was Bourdain’s first book, in 2003 or 2004. It was shortly after arriving in the UK, and I really loved it. It was this book that really catapulted Bourdain on a whole new trajectory. At the point of writing it, he was in his forties when it came out; he was a chef who was barely making ends meet and living paycheque to paycheque. Then the book led to him being on TV and constantly travelling the world, and this was his life for the next two decades.

Bourdain was a recovering heroin addict, and he had managed to quit heroin, but he simply had channelled his addiction into other behaviours and was constantly restless and moving from one thing on to the next thing. While he was travelling, he wished he was home, and when he was home, he wished he was travelling. It was like whatever he did, he could never scratch that itch. Sadly, he ended up taking his own life, and the documentary shows the demise that ultimately led to this place.

I just thought it was really well put together – interviewing those who knew and had worked with Bourdain. It was so crystal clear just how much he is missed. It’s called Roadrunner. I would definitely suggest checking it out, and I’m pretty sure it is on Netflix.

00:32:13

Nordfor Sola

The next documentary is a Norwegian documentary, and it’s called Nordfor Sola, which means ‘North of the Sun’. It’s about two friends who decide during one Norwegian winter to go to this isolated and uninhabited bay in Norway. They’re both surfers, and this bay has some great surf, so they want to spend their time living and surfing in this remote location. They arrive at the location in autumn time and they build their own house out of driftwood and rubbish that keeps getting washed up on the beach. What they build is incredible. It’s a very nice house, given that it’s been made with scraps.

And then the film is about them surfing and surviving in this harsh and dark Norwegian winter. It is beautifully shot. Considering it’s just the two of them who are living there and doing all this filming, it is pretty spectacular. The film came out in 2012, which is earlier than drones became popular and a common part of films, but there are drone-like shots that are filmed by one of the guys paragliding off of a mountain to then film the other one as they’re surfing in the water.

While watching it, I was constantly cold. There must be something in the mirror neurons, watching them surf in these head-to-toe wetsuits while the ground is covered in snow, just knowing that the water must be so, so cold – and also knowing that it takes a special kind of person to be able to survive this kind of isolation, with endless time inside this tiny house with nothing but the two of them to entertain themselves. It’s a short documentary, totalling only 46 minutes, but they are able to tell an incredible story in this time.

When it first came out, it was at lots of independent film festivals, and I think it won a number of awards. It’s called Nordfor Sola, and I watched it on Netflix.

00:34:25

Val

The final documentary I’m going to mention is called Val, and it is about the actor Val Kilmer. Val Kilmer is now in his early sixties, and in more recent years he has struggled with throat cancer and had a procedure that meant he now has to speak out of a voice box. But all through his career, he had a video camera with him, like every day of his life. On the set of all these movies, he just seemed to document everything.

So this documentary is a look back at his life using all of this archival footage that has been pieced together, with his son doing the narrating for it, interwoven with where they’re at now and current events mixed in with all this archival footage.

I found Val to be a fascinating human. To feel the need to constantly film everything, whether it be of himself or others, and just to see how his life has played out – I didn’t know a huge amount about him before the film; I knew him from films like Top Gun and The Saint, and I knew he had played Jim Morrison in a film about The Doors, but I hadn’t actually seen it. But even though I knew very little about him, I found this to be a really great documentary and put together incredibly well, and with an amazing soundtrack.

The soundtrack is really incredible, and I’ve listened to it a lot since I saw the film. It’s got lots of The Doors, obviously, but also Brian Eno, Gary Numan, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Nick Drake, The Velvet Underground, Aphex Twin. There’s a beautiful piano version of Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’ So check out the film and check out the soundtrack as well. It’s called Val, and I watched it on Amazon.

So that is it for my yearly roundup. As I said at the top, I always love hearing about the things that you’ve loved over the last year, so please email me and let me know. It’s info@seven-health.com. We are now set up and settled in Scotland, so I’ll be back with a more regular routine with podcasts rather than simply rebroadcast ones like it’s been for the last month. I hope you’re having a nice start to 2023, and I will catch you soon.

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