Our second installation of the TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is here give you the very best of Katie, Nicole, Giulia, Gina and Kerry! More blogs means more to love this Valentine’s Day week, and more social action means a healthier and happier world for everyone. Check out our most popular posts of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

5 Ways to Take Action and Get Action On Valentine’s Day

Top 10 Guilt-Free Valentine’s Day Jewelry Gifts: Show Your Valentine You Have a Heart

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Nicole:

Kiva: Microlending to Change Lives

Top 10 New Releases to Inspire Social Change

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Giulia:

Alicia Keys Uses Grammys to Help Keep a Child Alive

V-Day Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary!

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Gina:

Top 10 Movie Characters That Make A Difference

Art As Politics In “The Silence Before Bach”

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Kerry:

Tap Project Gets Donations Flowing For Safe Global Water

Levon Helms’ “Dirt Farmer” Wins Grammy Gold

Pere Portabella’s The Silence Before Bach is why I live in New York City. Whenever I feel a little lost in the big city and dream of living somewhere greener with cheaper rent, I remind myself that I live in a city where I can go to the local movie theater and see something as wonderful as Portabella’s Bach.

A lyrical look at the life and music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the film explores the relationship between image and sound. Portabella gives us Bach’s music on many instruments, some classical, some modern. The images that accompany the sound appear at first to only be connected through the simple relation of the image to the sound, but as the picture progresses the narrative fragments slowly start to connect, revealing a hidden portrait of the composer and of how music plays a role in life today.

For a film filled with sound, it’s actually very quiet, it’s simple and never shouts the answer to the audience.

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