Mondo – Part 8 of 8
The title character in this film, Mondo, is a Gypsy boy of eleven or twelve who lives in the streets of Nice, in southern France. As he wanders around flashing a winning smile and asking strangers if they would like to adopt him, we meet other people of the streets and see how they live from day to day.
This film does not have the tragic power of Pixote or Salaam Bombay but don’t let its lyrical pace and occasionally overt sentimentality fool you. It’s not all gloom and doom in the streets – anyone who has worked with street children will agree that there are many who have the same charm and vivacity as Mondo, children whose absolute poverty seems not to have destroyed their innocence but to have intensified it.
Yet like Pixote and Salaam Bombay this film is also a tragedy though not so much a tragedy for Mondo as for the society in which he lives. It shows how even in the most developed countries we have not developed adequate institutional means of caring for children such as Mondo and so
we lose them, and the loss is ours, more than theirs.
Mondo is one of a trilogy of films of Gypsy life directed by Tony Gatlif. Ovidiu Balan, who
plays Mondo in this film, also appears briefly in another film in the trilogy, aged about 15.
So Beautiful as Cruel…
We don’t know what we Have till we lost It…
And Sadly in This World the Street Children are just like missing Dogs without a Past and no Future… I Hope then Every Soul Who Watch this Film Cry even just One single Tear…
Where is Mondo? In Every Lost Child in Our World…
IMAGINE…
there’s no heaven…
all the people living life in peace…
a brotherhood of man…
NOW MAKE IT REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
sharing all the world…
“Guihaume s’abiho
Vestis soun jargau,
E dis à sa fiho :
Istas à l’oustau ;
Debanas la sedo,
Gardas lou troupèu,
Móusès vòsti fedo,
Largas lis agnèu.”
That was from the song at the end: “Pastre Di Mountagno”, which is an old song that is a Christmas carol (A French one).
This is really as good as it gets!
I was even hugging the monitor at one point during this movie!
beautiful film, mondo where are uuuuu mondooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
because those people dont really care about him, they “want to show” that they care, but they dont actually. So he is just like a dog on the floor. It’s a critic to this cold and “indiffernt” society.
why is there a dog there too i dond get it
Nice history
‘Mondo’ is based on a short story by J.M.G. Le Clezio. Mondo brings out the best in people and Nice become a lesser place when he moves on. Mondo’s friends are: street magician and acrobat living with a Turkish Kurd singer, a lone elderly jetty fisherman who talks of the sea and teaches Mondo how to read, a man Mondo calls ‘Dadi’ – a homeless Scotsman with an aristocratic background, and an old woman named Thi Chin – the widow of an executed political radical.
It’s sad how many children live like this.