The Impossible is based on the true story of one of the survivors, Maria Belon, a Spanish tourist who was lounging by a pool in Thailand along with her husband and three young sons when the tsunami hit. Director: JA BayonaEntertainment grade: B–History grade: B+. Can you imagine what it does for a person like Daniel to feel useful? US election 2020 polls: Who is ahead - Trump or Biden? The Bennett family – Henry (Ewan McGregor), Maria (Naomi Watts), and their three sons – travel to Thailand for a Christmas holiday.

He discovered that he could understand the Odyssey with only two or three comprehension questions per book and keep up the relentless pace of a college course, studying whether he was in the mood or not (special ed can be very forgving. Dan received many shocks and rose to many occasions. Even more limiting, he is dependent on an adult to bring him to the task, keep him working on it, and hold his hand while he spells. When we are finished we will re-watch “Professor Andy’s” lecture from Wesleyan’s The Ancient Greeks course. Maria Belon is also impressed with her on-screen character. He thought it was his own personal water park everyday, but he's 14 and he's got great athletic abilities, and I'm not close to either of those things," she adds. .css-8h1dth-Link{font-family:ReithSans,Helvetica,Arial,freesans,sans-serif;font-weight:700;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;color:#FFFFFF;}.css-8h1dth-Link:hover,.css-8h1dth-Link:focus{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}Read about our approach to external linking. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Pinterest. Belón has praised the film's accuracy, noting only one difference in the colour of one of her children's toys: "The ball was yellow and in the film it is red," she told the BBC. Dan’s were “not impossible” and under Al Filreis’ gentle urging he managed to say those words aloud to however many hundreds of people were watching around the world. This is a post by Michael, Daniel’s father. VideoBrothers play tabla to the BBC theme tune, The Countdown: President Ariana and astronauts vote, The three-year-old orphaned by war. The threat of an agonizing death did not change his trust in God. Read about our approach to external linking. This whole world is new to him: standards, peers, comradeship and competition. Belon says her family agreed their stories could be told as long as the film-makers "took care of the soul of the story". The Impossible stars Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts - video interview, Les Misérables: not as revolutionary as it seems, The Guardian Film Show: Life of Pi, The Impossible and Jack Reacher - video reviews, According to Spanish newspaper Diario de Avisos. "Some people who have gone through that kind of shock and disaster, it's hard for them, but she's incredibly articulate and it was really helpful to have that constant reminder of just how serious it was," says Watts. "Tom loved it. "You know what that feels like to be in love with your children. But there are also in-the-flesh encounters stemming initially from Al Filreis’ commitment to openness and his invitation to his students to drop by Kelly Writers House at Penn. VideoThe three-year-old orphaned by war, Composer with dementia meets students he inspired.

The director says the tsunami survivors he met provided him with "a filter of truth" which helped him choose "the right way" to tell the story. As a peer reviewer he experienced the anguish of hating a badly written essay but not wanting to give a failing grade. Although Dan doesn’t yet read for pleasure on his own he learned to read the 500-800 -word essays of his classmates, and this young man for whom writing a couple of sentences on the letterboard had been a big deal began to be able to write and construct an argument in logical order.

"The rest is exactly the same."

At the age of 17? Video, ICYMI: The puppy born green and other curiosities, 'It's devastating... watching my community burn' Video, 'It's devastating... watching my community burn', Brothers play tabla to the BBC theme tune. But it certainly…deepens it somehow," says McGregor. We don't have that kind of love for any other people in the world," he adds.

The story of a tourist family in Thailand caught in the destruction and chaotic aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But Watts has been rewarded for overcoming her fear of water with a Golden Globe nomination for best actress and she is being tipped as a possible Oscar contender for the role. Then there were the online essays to write and peer-review.

He glowed with pride when his peers gave him high marks, and suffered the one time he got a less-than-passing grade from his peers (he did well enough on the other essays that he still passed the course). The Impossible is an accomplished and effective movie, and accurate in the story it chooses to tell – but it is ungenerous in portraying a disaster which mainly affected south and south-east Asians from a totally European perspective. So it seems as if every element which Coursera has invented to make its online courses more college-like has had some role to play in the reduction of this one teenager’s disability. The film seems unaware of its own politics – though it certainly has some. Here, The Impossible comes into its own: it is a masterpiece of disaster film-making. It is impossible to overstate the benefit and happiness that Coursera has brought to our son Daniel and our family. And with his induction into this world came something that would surprise some critics of MOOCs: Daniel experienced a dramatic decrease in his sense of isolation. .css-14iz86j-BoldText{font-weight:bold;}Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor star in The Impossible, a film based on the true story of one family who were caught in the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami.

More than 83,000 new infections were reported on Friday, with deaths and hospital numbers also rising. Daniel in the lion's den is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible.

Could blood plasma help treat coronavirus? Video. They succeeded only because of their strong will. By the time someone sent me Daphne Koller’s TED talk and we discovered Coursera, we were well into the groove of teaching Dan at home. What Daniel will do with all this remains to be seen.

ICYMI: The puppy born green and other curiosities. The biggest shock was having to keep up.

By Rachel CurtisEntertainment reporter, BBC News. "I think before the tsunami I was blind.
Reading one sentence at a time makes for slow going, so to make it worthwhile for both of us I started reading Danny A Midsummer Nights Dream which is delightful at that pace. True to life … JA Bayona's The Impossible.

Directed by J.A. Emboldened by meeting Professor Filreis, Danny asked me to write to Peter Struck and he met us too. She describes Watts' performance as "extremely professional, extremely talented, extremely generous and beyond any expectation". Her husband Enrique Alvárez and their children have appeared at the film's premieres. "The ball was yellow and in the film it is red," says Belon, referring to one of her son's Christmas gifts. Ewan McGregor, who plays Henry, says his 16 years of real-life parenting experience helped him with the role. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Daniel’s name means "God is my judge," and in this Maria is tended to by a villageful of kindly Thais, whose job seems to be rescuing white holidaymakers while not saying anything. Many of the details shown on screen match real-life reports, with one notable exception. On 26 December, 2004 a powerful earthquake off the Indonesian coast triggered a tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean, killing more than 230,000 people. Bayona recreated the tsunami with a mixture of digital effects and real water surges.

The Impossible is 'beautifully accurate', writes tsunami survivor, Argo – Ben Affleck's gripping CIA thriller sends reality into a tailspin, Zero Dark Thirty's torture scenes are controversial and historically dubious, Lincoln: more jaw-jaw than war-war. The Impossible is an accomplished and effective movie, and accurate in the story it chooses to tell – but it is ungenerous in portraying a disaster which mainly affected south and … Five years ago (next month) our severely autistic son Daniel had a major breakthrough. US Covid cases surge to record daily high, Could blood plasma help treat coronavirus? Watts praised her off-screen counterpart for the courage it took to share her story. He trusted his cast with "a lot of improvisation" and filmed key scenes unscripted. Bayona. Maria Bennett's real-life counterpart, María Belón, has a story credit on this production. Then there were the quizzes. Daniel is a 17 year old who has severe Autism. Meanwhile, their elegant beach resort is so jam-packed with rich white people that it could be mistaken for the Republican national convention. But few people know the challenges these people had to face. The teacher who created this breakthrough, Soma Mukhopadhyay, also taught us how to read to Daniel: read him a sentence, stop, ask him a comprehension question, get his answer on the letter board, go on to the next sentence, ask another question…. True, the online lecture format made it easy for me to stop the video and ask Dan questions, and we could repeat things he didn’t get the first time, but basically Dan had to keep up. "Ewan, Naomi and Tom threw themselves into the characters in a very brutal way," says Bayona. Soon my “comprehension” questions went beyond “what’s happening” and became about rhyme, symbolism, metaphor and dramatic structure. Director J A Bayona has said that he changed their nationality because it was easier to secure a substantial budget with international stars McGregor and Watts on board. edX now offers Professor Nagy’s course which studies the Iliad from a completely different point of view. Plato’s Apology is discussed in the Wesleyan course and also in “Know Thyself” from the University of Virginia. "It was a bit painful sometimes during the whole process of working on the movie but it is pain that is worth going through because we truly believe in this film," says Belon. Coursera seemed like a possible bridge between home schooling and what Dan called “going to a real school,” but it turned out to be much more. It is impossible to overstate the benefit and happiness that Coursera has brought to our son Daniel and our family. It didn’t matter to Daniel: as long as he was answering questions, he was following the story, and the tougher the questions the more he loved it. © 2020 BBC. They fly business class, Maria gets snippy about having a sea view from her room, and husband and wife have an awkwardly scripted conversation about whether she should go back to her job as a doctor after taking several years off to have children. Historians can probably let that one go. We took Dan there and Al spent time with him, and the TAs, familiar from the video lectures, were friendly and accepting and Dan began to get a sense that there might be a community he could be part of some day that had nothing to do with autism.