This was Leah's first weekend back in town from Europe. It's good to have her back! Jake and I both missed her a lot.

This was also a weekend of documentary films, among other things.  First we got our Netflix movie, An Inconvenient Truth,  Al Gore's presentation about global warming. It was quite disturbing to see just how fast things have changed over the last 5 years. The icecaps are melting, severe storms are increasing, and there's no change in sight unless we take some action. It's amazing how little attention is given to this topic in politics, but hopeflly that will change with the next election.

Then on Saturday night my friend Cindy and daughter agreed to babysit so we could go on a double-date with Matthew and Judy. Leah got me a membership to the Denver Film Society, and with it came some free passes to the Starz Film Center. This month they were showing a documentary called The Bridge, which is about the high number of people who commit suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The fiilmmaker set up a camera on the bridge in 2004, and wound up capturing 19 of the 24 people who jumped to their death that year. It was one of those movies that gave me this knot in my stomach as I witnessed people ending their lives. The movie was inspired by a New Yorker article called "Jumpers.". We also heard from families of the victims, how they suffered from mental illness, and how their deaths have impacted the people closest to them. It was eerie seeing the final moments of someone's life coming to an end. We had an interesting discussion afterwards with Matthew and Judy, and their impression of the film was much different from Leah and I. But I guess that's what this movie was intended to do: provoke a discussion. I did some research the next day, and found an in-depth ABC News article  (and VIDEO) about how the film was made, and got some background about how the filmmaker was able to capture so many jumpers.

They mentioned some things I didn't know, such as the Golden Gate Bridge has the most suicides of any location in the world, and that an average of two self-inflicted deaths per month occur there, not to mention the hundreds of jumpers that are talked down. Overall, this was one of those movies that is lingering in my psyche days later.