Sick of Sparrow/Spidey/Shrek sequel syndrome? Rediscover meaning in movies with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival’s program of 24 films (June 14-28, hrw.org/iff/2007/ny), including documentaries, fiction and animated features that shed light and put human faces on pressing current social and political issues.
Festival programmers screen 500 films, selecting those with the most gripping stories and greatest artistic merit, each vetted for accuracy. Subjects range from global warming (Everything’s Cool is a toxic comedy doc that begins where An Inconvenient Truth ended) and the proliferation of nuclear weapons (White Light/Black Rain, using footage of nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a powerful warning that threats of nuclear war are very real today) to electoral corruption (Election Day shows 12 Americans fighting to have their votes counted in various locations, including NYC and—no surprise, here—Florida).
Women’s rights are a big theme: Lumo follows a Congolese woman who, cast aside by family and fiancé after she’s brutalized by marauding soldiers, finds solace and solidarity at a special hospital for rape victims—just imagine life in a place where such a hospital is a necessity. The Railroad All-Stars is about Guatemala prostitutes who form a soccer team (move over Gracie) to gain attention so they can publicize the abuse they suffer from customers, lovers and the police. And, Enemies of Happiness is Eva Mulvad’s portrait of Malalai Joya, the 28-year-old woman who in 2003 challenged the warlords ruling Afghanistan and, threatened repeatedly with assassination, ran for parliament in her country’s first democratic elections in 30 years.
Environmental concerns are illuminated in Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen (produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford), a documentary portrait of Gary Bradley, farm boy turned real estate developer, who transformed 4,000 pristine West Texas acres into subdivisions, thereby threatening a much-favored natural hot spring. Contrasting Texas’ environmental policies under Governor Ann Richards and under her successor, George W. Bush, the film chronicles the destruction of the natural world by the cannibalizing effects of unchecked development and weighs economic growth and property rights versus the public good and sustainable development. In Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal follows epic landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky to China and Bangladesh, where he captures images of the transformative effects of massive industrialization. By showing how humans become cogs in the imported industrial machine, Baichwal alerts us to the toxic and alienating effects globalization has on the people it’s supposed to benefit.
Genocide is the subject of Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came On Horseback. Told from the point of view of ex-Marine Captain Brian Steidle who accepts a six-month post with the African Union as an unarmed monitor in Darfur, Sudan. The injustices and violence Steidle witnesses (and documents with extremely graphic photographs) transform him from military man to observer to activist against the genocide and war crimes that have taken the lives of at least 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million people in Darfur since early 2003.
Mon Colonel, a powerful drama written by Costa-Gavras and directed by Laurent Herbiet, revolves around one of today’s pressing moral dilemmas: Is the use of traditional military solutions appropriate and do they work when the nature of war has changed from conflict between government-organized armies to armed struggle against terrorist guerillas who wear no uniforms? That question is further pressed by Hot House, a documentary showing how thousands of Palestinians—while imprisoned in Israeli jails for three months to life sentences on security charges—impact the ongoing conflict to an astonishing degree and are becoming future political leaders.
