Monday, December 8, 2025

Day 4854: Annual Awards Banquet & ‘Girls Move Mountains’ & Aspen Trees.

"Damaged": junk papers collage, photo, digital. (j.long)

Want music?

Click: Michael Jackson, Rock with You.

It's that time of year, you can feel it in the air, you can see it in the way people drive and just a general feeling of hurry up. For us, in Demura Sensei's Genbu-Kai Karate-do, it is our annual awards banquet.

Sensei's Thanh Nguyễn, Karoush Bassiri and many others have planned and worked hard to make this years event extra special.

I forgot my phone! Michelle Suzuki lent me her phone and I saw...

I apologize for missing photos that I should have taken, but hopefully these photos show what a lovely, fin evening was had by all.

2GN2S

All images courtesy of Anna Huix

‘Girls Move Mountains’

A Portrait of Women Playing Soccer in Remote Pakistan

In the Karakoram Range on the northeastern border of Pakistan, a group of Indigenous women and girls is defying conventions with a seemingly simple pastime: soccer. The Gilgit-Baltistan Girls Football League is a bastion of independence and autonomy amid a traditionally conservative environment. “In our culture, girls were brought up to be brides,” says Karishma, the co-founder of the league, in a short documentary about the movement. “Everybody doesn’t want to be a princess.”

Titled “Girls Move Mountains,” the striking film is by Anna Huix, who visits this remote region and tags along with members of the Wakhi people as they practice and compete. As Huix shows, soccer is much more than a game for participants, who put themselves at risk in order to play. “As a child, Karishma faced harassment for wearing soccer attire, and as a woman, she battles online bullying from aggressive crowds challenging the rights of girls in the mountains,” the Barcelona-based filmmaker writes.

While news clips highlight the backlash against the league, we also see Karishma’s grandmother, who supports the women and shares that she would have played the game had it been available to her.

If you’re in New York, you can see “Girls Move Mountains” at a screening for Dumbo Film Festival. Find more of Huix’s work on her website and Instagram. You also might enjoy Celia D. Luna’s portraits of these skateboarders.