Bella DVD
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 Rating: - "God closed my eyes. Now I can see."
A young woman and her male co-worker walk through the busy streets of New York City. As they approach a homeless man selling paper animals, they notice he is blind. The homeless man asks the woman to describe what she sees on the street in return for a free paper animal. She looks back and begins cynically illustrating what is going on. People are busy; they're hectic; they're like a moving clock, all moving fast and doing their own thing, not noticing one another.

"I wish I could see that," says the smiling blind man.

This, in a scene, describes what director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde is driving at throughout Bella. In this world, everyone has multiple options. There is often the view that we can look at the world as dark and full of despair and focus on what we don't have, or we can look at the world through the lens of joy, opting to view our daily struggles as a chance for hope to find us.

Bella is a lovely film, which, although at times heavily character-driven, leaves the viewer better off for having watched it. Some might consider it a political or agenda-driven film. I didn't see it that way at all. To me, Bella represents another voice in a world, which largely projects one option, and this new voice is one that refreshingly offers hope to everyone in a very non-intrusive way.

You can make a case for this being considered a God film. If you did, however, you would first have to admit that this is the first such film done in a way that leaves us victimized neither by a Christian agenda nor by the pathetic waves of poorly crafted screenplay and underlying thought. For me, I was actually happy when I finished watching Bella, and considering the new barrage of independent films with dark subtext, that is a rarity.

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