New Visions: Sundance Documentary Film Program 'Work-in-Progress' Screening
The screening of the New Visions program at this year's HRWIFF marks the inauguration of the series showcasing upcoming documentaries that were made in collaboration with the Sundance Documentary Film Program. The interactive program combines both panel discussion and open forum formats for the discussion of the process of collaborative filmmaking, as well as excerpts from the films themselves (each roughly 20 minutes in duration).
The first film preview is A Jihad for Love, by Parvez Sharma who was accompanied by the film's producer, Sandi Simcha DuBowski, the director of the groundbreaking documentary, Trembling Before G_d that explored homosexuality in the Orthodox and Hasidic Jew communities. The collaboration between Sharma and DuBowski seems particularly suited since A Jihad for Love is a companion piece of sorts to DuBowski's film, an intimately told panorama of the gay experience throughout the broad spectrum of Islamic communities around the world, from conservative societies where homosexuality is outlawed such as Egypt and Iran, to secular Islamic societies such as Turkey (where many gay Iranians seek refuge to avoid persecution), to non-Islamic, free societies such as France and South Africa where, despite the protection of civil liberties, people continue to be persecuted, often from within the Islamic community. One of the main narrative arcs presented in the film is the story of a young Egyptian man, shown with his face obscured, who was prosecuted by the government as part of the "Queen Boat 52" (a group of gay men who were arrested on a floating nightclub in Cairo under assorted charges intended for prostitution) and who, before his retrial, escaped to France to avoid prosecution. After years of secrecy and despite the financial hardship of starting over as an immigrant in foreign land, the young man is ready to embrace his newfound liberation, and allows Sharma to photograph his undisguised face as he enters his new apartment.
The second film preview is an equally fascinating and illuminating collaborative personal journey, Project Kashmir by long-time friends Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel who, having grown up in the United States, had never had to confront the minefield of deep seated emotions and cultural biases that define everyday life in the disputed region of Kashmir, where the war for control still rages on, and people, in their profound distrust, have stopped talking to each other. Guided by an anonymous telephone informer who is quick to advise the filmmakers not to take anyone's word at face value (and least of all, the press), Kheshgi and Patel attempt to navigate the treacherous maze of occupation, insurgency, unrest, censorship, and religious animosity, slowly pulled apart by their own increasing identification with the opposing factions of the interminable conflict. As a Hindu in an Indian-occupied land, Patel immediately finds herself in a position of privilege, often afforded access to places and information that Muslims are denied. Meanwhile, Kheshgi, a Muslim, excluded from the community that has openly embraced her colleague, naturally gravitates towards the plight of the persecuted Muslim majority. Barely speaking to each other by the end of the film excerpt, Kheshgi and Patel's experience serves as a powerful example of the dehumanizing toll of systematic oppression and injustice, and the importance of open communication and honest dialogue in the path towards moving forward and reconciliation.
Posted by on Jun 20, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2007, Human Rights Watch
During the Q&A for Manufactured Landscapes, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal indicated that the idea for the film came from photographer Edward Burtynsky's comment that for every building that rises from the ground, there is a corresponding hole somewhere else where the raw materials have been mined for the construction. This idea of an overarching, interconnected, shifting equilibrium that fuels our material consumption echoes throughout Baichwal's organic rumination on the repercussions of globalization. Opening to the extended take, tracking shot of a large appliance factory in China as row upon row of visually undifferentiable materials are fabricated (in a languid traveling shot that bears the imprint of Peter Mettler camerawork, most notably in 
As in Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem's Enemies of Happiness, James Longley's Sari's Mother, the edited "fourth fragment" from 
One of the clear highlights at this year's festival is the appearance of human rights activist and outspoken political figure, Malalai Joya at the Q&A for Enemies of Happiness, who, 
Francisco Vargas's admirable first feature film, The Violin deceptively starts on a seemingly tangential, wrong note by opening to an underlit, vérité-styled shot of what has become an all too familiar (and arguably gratuitous) image of military atrocities in the face of guerrilla warfare - the arbitrary round-up and brutalization of civilians in an attempt to extract information, the torture of prisoners, the raping of women. But the obscured, bleak, rough hewn images then subsequently - and unexpectedly - give way to the sunlit, distilled beauty of the rural landscape as an elderly farmer and street musician, Don Plutarco (Ángel Tavira), his son Genaro (Gerardo Taracena) and grandson Lucio (Mario Garibaldi) prepare for their trip to town, hitchhiking for rides in the backs of passing trucks, before making their way to the town square, stopping in the doorways of cafeterias and along main streets to play music and solicit charity. An encounter between Genaro and a cheese peddler at lunch time, and subsequently, between Genaro and an attractive, young hitchhiker, reinforces the atmosphere of implicit secrecy and covert resistance that pervades the film (a bracing reality that is established in the film's confrontational opening sequence) - the exchange of objects and information performed tacitly through casual gestures and passing glances. Returning home to the sight of women, children, and the elderly in flight after the military descended on the village in order to root out insurgents, Genaro attempts to gain access to the occupied village in order to retrieve a supply of ammunition that has been stashed away within their property to no avail, chased away by soldiers who spot his surveillance. But Don Plutarco has another idea for gaining access into the farm. Trading a year's worth of crops for a burro and carrying only his violin, Don Plutarco ingratiates himself into the company of the stern, yet genial captain (Dagoberto Gama) by playing his violin. However, as the insurgency rages on, can the idealistic notion of music as a uniting medium truly coexist with the cruelty of war? Shot in stark, elegantly composed black and white images, The Violin tonally evokes Henri-Georges Cluozot's The Wages of Fear in its creation of tension through the performance of the mundane. In hindsight, it is this atmosphere of disarming nothingness that ultimately reconciles the film's oddly incongruous opening sequence - a sobering reminder that the capacity for inhumanity and instinctual survival resides in everyone: silent, ever-present, unabated, and inextinguishable.
During the Q&A for Strange Culture, filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson explained that the unorthodox, mixed format approach to the film evolved organically as a result of the Department of Justice's ongoing prosecution of the film's primary subject, SUNY Buffalo arts professor and experimental artist, Steve Kurtz, that continues to limit his ability to fully participate in the film project by rendering him unable to discuss certain matters associated with the case. Ironically, this imbalancing, oddly structured, interweaving patchwork of real-life footage and actor-improvised sequences, documentation and deconstruction, appropriately complements the film's provocative exploration of the uneasy and disturbing broader social implications that have been raised by the federal government's zealous prosecution of Kurtz and co-defendant, University of Pittsburgh genetics professor, Robert Ferrell. Kurtz's neverending nightmare began on May 11, 2004 with a personal tragedy: the sudden death of his wife and creative collaborator Hope from heart failure. Summoning 911 for help after discovering that his wife had stopped breathing, the police conduct a routine survey of their home and immediately find the collection of Petri dishes, bio-organic cultures, assorted unregulated (and non-hazardous) chemicals, and lab ovens that they had been using to create a bio-themed, interactive installation that had been commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, along with an invitation advertisement postcard for their art collective, the Critical Arts Ensemble that had been designed with calligraphic images that appeared to be Arabic writing. Alarmed by the unusual paraphernalia that had been discovered inside the home, the police call in federal agents, seal off the house, and impound Hope's body under suspicion of bioterrorism. However, despite concluding that the suspicious substances were innocuous and not used to build weapons of mass destruction, the government has refused to drop charges and instead, continues to pursue the case against Kurtz and technical adviser, Robert Ferrell, spearheaded in part by assistant district attorney, William Hochul, whose own career was, not surprisingly, fast tracked as a result of his successful prosecution of the Lackawanna Six. Combining elements of documentary, re-enactment, serial comics, and even metafilm, Strange Culture poses the integral question of artistic freedom in an age of aggressive and increasingly emboldened federal government prosecution. At the heart of Kurtz and Ferrell's legal quagmire is the implicit assault on free speech that the case represents, an attempt to intimidate and suppress work deemed critical of government policies (and by extension, policies within its alliances of special interest groups). Having collectively surrendered a measure of individual freedom under a demoralized and vulnerable climate of post 9/11 paranoia and an untenable war on terror, the compounding tragedy of Kurtz and Ferrell's case is a potent and harrowing reminder of the price exacted by our illusive search, not for a sense of security, but for an impossible return to innocence.
Alternately humorous and heartbreaking in its candid and unflinching portrait of the exploited lives of low rate prostitutes living in the shantytown of La Línea in Guatemala City (an emblematic place of abject poverty built along the marginal buffer zones of railroad tracks that also evokes Ditsi Carolino's 
During the 1980s, a loose network of politically committed photographers sought to document the atrocities of the Pinochet regime from within the country, establishing a press accredited alliance known as the Association of Independent Photographers (AFI). Capturing the atmosphere of protest and unrest in the streets (most notably, in the daily vigils of women seeking answers for the fate of the desaparecidos, usually husbands and sons who were abducted by government), documenting covert sites of torture and execution, and converging en masse to hot spots of activity in order to effectively chronicle the government's repressive tactics of press intimidation and police brutality as a means of suppressing dissent, their collective body of work inevitably evolved to become the most intimate, highly visible, and incontrovertible testament on the transgressions of the CIA-backed military dictatorship. Often working with members of the foreign press on the distribution of their photographs as a means of drawing attention to the country's struggle, their photographs would become integral to the engagement of international community in exposing the abuses and ultimately discrediting the Pinochet government. But beyond the poignant and reverent tribute to the personal sacrifices and everyday heroism of these dedicated photojournalists and the collective toll of their tireless commitment to document their nation's struggle and raise public awareness for the government's flagrant human rights violations (the filmmaker, Sebastián Moreno Mardones' comments on piecing together second-hand memories of the turbulent period from his father's assembled AFI-era photographs suggests his attempt to insulate his family from the uncertainty of the group's ideological imperative), what makes The City of Photographers particularly contemporary and insightful is revealed in several photojournalists' own ambivalence towards their own increasing complicity in the creation of the images (particularly towards the end of the struggle), often deployed into the pre-arranged sites of social action by the protestors themselves, a duality that reflects their complex role as both observers and embedded insurgents in the resistance, from photographing fellow colleagues' maltreatment and abuse at the hands of police, to a subsequent tragic episode involving the accidental blinding of a child at the hands of the police maltreatments a photographer tells the boy to uncover his face (which he had instinctually covered with his hands at the sight of violence) in order to sensationalize the image of police brutality at the precise moment that an officer swings a baton over the boy's eyes. It is this provocative, self-reflexive inquiry into the implication of the media in the creation and desensitization of violent images that inevitably makes their story continually relevant, a reminder of the need for self-equilibration in maintaining the integrity of the photographers in their complex role as documenters of the sociopolitical reality and stagers of the spectacle.
Something of an aesthetic hybrid between an impassioned cinéma vérité and the bracing docu-fiction of Peter Watkins, Road to Guantanamo is a provocative, confrontational, and impeccably crafted, if oddly sterile and incongruously stylized re-enactment of the plight of the Tipton Three, a group of working class, British Muslim young men on holiday from the West Midlands who, having traveled from the U.K. to Pakistan and Afghanistan on October, 2001 for an impending wedding and a cross-country road trip to their ancestral homeland, found themselves caught in the crossfire during the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan to root out Osama bin Laden and dismantle the Taliban power structure that harbored him. Inadvertently detained in Afghanistan due to illness, the friends soon found themselves hopelessly strayed from the popular big city destinations, staying instead at a rural border village to recuperate during the untimely start of the military incursion into Afghanistan as the Allied Forces launched a large scale campaign to round up potential Taliban partisans and Al-Qaeda militants for transportation to the covert, extraterritorial detention facilities of Guantanamo on the southern tip of Cuba for intelligence gathering. Forced to evacuate when the village is subjected to heavy bombardment by advancing Allied troops, the friends, along with the displaced villagers, are unwittingly deposited along a stretch of open field for safety, and into the waiting hands of the Northern Alliance where the seemingly suspect coincidence of the young men's ethnicity, religion, age, citizenship, and circumstance singles them out as fitting the characteristic profile of radical extremists recruited by Al-Qaeda, and sends them on a brutal and unimaginably harrowing course to the limbo of indefinite Guantanamo detention as they are skirted away without trial for further deprogramming and interrogation. Interweaving archival footage, testimonial transcripts, and re-enactments of the young men's nightmarish plight, filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross explore similar issues of civil rights abuses, racial profiling, and political exploitation as Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse's sobering, incisive, and excoriating documentary 
An animated cartoon featuring rough drawn, under-detailed Playmobil-like characters driving away from their idyllic suburban homes and into a gas station to fill up their tanks for the morning commute to work sets the droll, idiosyncratic tone for the pointed social commentary, yet tongue-in-cheek humor of filmmakers Martin Marecek and Martin Skalsky charming, offbeat, witty, and incisive documentary, Source, as the long cartoon gas pump line ultimately connects to a real-life shot of an oil pump at a derelict, oil soaked open field in Baku, Azerbaijan, the site of the country's first oil well. Hailed as both the future and salvation of the country, the oil industry dominates much of the country's economy as well as its consciousness, even if the windfall of profits rarely, if ever, trickle down to the everyday workers who labor in unsafe conditions at the poorly maintained oil fields, nor to the nearby villagers who live in an environment of elevated radiation levels, polluted air, toxic fields, and contaminated waters. Targeted by international conglomerates for supply and development (most notably, BP), the funding and profits often end up exclusively in the hands of corrupt politicians embedded at all levels of government. A human rights activist acerbically comments on the extent of the graft through the U.S. government's inequitable treatment of the two contemporary, fraud-laden elections from the former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, where the U.S. quickly validated the election of Ilham Aliyev (son of the former president Heidar Aliev), even as it joined the oppositional chorus citing massive voting fraud in the election of Eduard Shevardnadze - the chance for democracy in action stifled in Azerbaijan by the presence of oil and the need for predictable - if endemically corrupt - political stability. Composed of a series of irreverently edited interviews featuring an eclectic cast of characters - impassioned human rights activists, bumbling oil company spokesmen (in particular, the running gag of a bemused oil executive whose interview keeps getting interrupted by telephone calls on a direct government line that never seem to go through), talking head politicians, exploited workers, dispossessed landowners whose property deeds have been confiscated and modified by the government to accommodate the pipeline construction (including a displaced village elder and self-described poet whose farmland has been bisected by a pipeline that now runs through the center of his field), abandoned women who have been set up in primitive condition camps while their husbands leave to work in faraway old fields, and a souvenir shop sales clerk who shows off their most popular tourist tchotchkes (where politically themed matryoshka dolls of the Aliev "dynasty" sell alongside the Osama Bin Laden terrorist nesting dolls) - and laced with incisive black humor (in particular, a hilarious cartoon re-enactment of the filmmakers' flight from local authorities and hiding of the incriminating videotape up a tree before being arrested and subsequently released through diplomatic intervention), the film is an infectiously engaging, yet astute and relevant exposition into the exploitive politics of resource economy.
A bold, impassioned, no-holds-barred look at the profoundly deleterious effects of artificial price setting by commodities trading in western financial markets (most notably New York and London) and the inherent inequity of the World Trade Organization's policies on the livelihood of impoverished farmers in developing countries, Black Gold traces the lucrative coffee trail to its humble origins in Ethiopia at the plateaus of Yirgacheffe where a genial, dedicated businessman and tireless fair trade advocate, Tadesse Meskele visits one of the many small farms that make up the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union whose interests he represents at international markets, corporate sales, and trade shows. Citing the World Trade Organization's unjust practice of continuing to allow government farm subsidies in determining trade policies that economically favor the agricultural products of nations engaging in these subsidies - thereby undervaluing the true cost of the products and imposing a great disadvantage on developing nations from competing fairly in the world market - Meske serves as a guide to the sobering reality of increasingly abject conditions and constant threat of famine faced by these farming communities, as infrastructures for clean, potable water, medical facilities (including financially strapped, volunteer crisis centers forced to turn away "moderately" malnourished children in order to maintain enough provisions to treat the severely malnourished), and plans for opening schools remain on perpetual hold as the villagers are unable to raise enough money to sustain even the most basic quality of life projects in their community, even as Ethiopian coffee is still highly regarded as one of the finest coffees in the world, and coffee itself has become a popular staple on the commodities exchange and a booming global industry. Contrasting the image of desperate farmers receding ever deeper into poverty - or worse, turning away from coffee farming towards the more lucrative market of narcotic plants - as the paper-based commodities exchange price remains artificially low (an imposed, non market-based price system used by international suppliers of most major coffee companies to undercut the purchase price of coffee offered to farmers) against the images of curious, but ultimately superficial barista competitions, connoisseur taste tests (where the flavor of Ethiopian coffee is invariably singled out by the judges), and Seattle coffee tours that trace the genesis of Starbucks, filmmakers Nick Francis and Marc Francis presents an audacious, trenchant, and unapologetic examination of corporate exploitation, economic imperialism, and the myth of globalism.
Composed of three self-contained chapters that integrally represent the figurative image of the country divided, not only by ethnic and religious sectarianism, but also by the further destabilization of an undefined and politically - and culturally - intrusive occupation, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments exquisitely fuses the aesthetics of Godfrey Reggio in the artful presentation of decontextualized, self-expressive landscape (most notably, in the accelerated, time lapse interstitial sequences between regions) with the immediacy of objective, indigenous documentary. Opening in the working class district in Baghdad where young Mohammad, an apprentice mechanic struggling with his studies and his conflicted emotions over his heavy-handed, but compassionate and well-intentioned boss and mentor (and surrogate father figure) who ridicules his poor performance at school, even as he encourages him to stop working in order to concentrate on his schoolwork, the first chapter tersely encapsulates the complicated reality of postwar Baghdad, as children must increasingly compromise their education, childhood, and ultimately their future for economic survival. The second chapter takes place in southern Iraq during the Shia'd Uprising, as seen through the eyes of a young Shiite cleric and disciple of Moqtada Sadr's Shiite Revolutionary as the faithful perform their atonement ritual on a public street and the Islamic militia subsequently sets off on a (sometimes brutal) campaign to return the region to the strictures of Islamic law and purge the contamination of occupation and secularism. Vacillating between images of law enforcement and vigilantism, enlightened spirituality and intolerance, the chapter incisively articulates the delicate balance between maintaining social order and repression inherent in a theocracy. The third chapter is shot from the lush, agrarian region of a northern Kurdish village, as two childhood friends are inevitably separated, not by war or ideology, but by cultural tradition of familial duty as Suleiman must abandon school in order to work for a brick factory and tend to the family farm for his aging father. Concluding with Suleiman's acceptance of his humble destiny, the chapter evokes Mohammad's earlier articulated hopefulness for a better life for his family and his community, bringing to full circle the complex image of a diverse country still burning in the wreckage of an imposed war and ensuing violence, fragilely - and eloquently - held together by the dreams of children.
A penetrating, affirming, and bracing examination of what the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan would deem as "one of the great trials of the twentieth century", filmmaker Anthony Giacchino's Camden 28 broaches on similar issues of Bernadine Mellis' 
A fascinating chronicle of the landmark tort case brought against Unocal on behalf of fifteen displaced Burmese villagers who were raped, beaten, enslaved, tortured, and even killed by the Burmese army in service to Unocal for the construction and security of the Yadana pipeline linking southern Burma to Thailand, Total Denial is a dense, intimate, and often overwhelming exposition on the insidious, blind-eye approach of large corporations - and in particular, the oil companies Total and Unocal - towards conducting business within the countries of corrupt, repressive, and illegitimate regimes with known histories of human rights violations. Guided by human rights activist, Ka Hsaw Wa, a native Karen (Burma's largest ethnic minority) who cut his activist teeth with the violently suppressed student demonstrations for democracy in 1988 (for which he was arrested and tortured) who has been gathering the testimonies and documenting the plight of the displaced villagers as they hid in the jungles between Burma and Thailand, the film exposes the interrelated political and economic machinations that knowingly enable the perpetuation of human rights violations with relative impunity. Following the ignominious trail of corrupt symbiosis - from Unocal's creation of a series of shell companies that obfuscate their involvement (and the extent of their involvement) in these unethical practices, to government intervention in the legal action (former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage campaigned to sway the court into dismissing the lawsuit without going to trial), to the Burmese army's long history of dealing with independence movements of ethnic minorities through brutality and genocide, to a kind of myopic, powder keg diplomacy that favors silence and willful ignorance in order to achieve short term national goals than in confronting the reality of human rights abuses and global dynamics in order to forge a long term solution - and juxtaposed against the haunting testimonies of the face obscured, Burmese "John Doe" litigants as they recount their traumas of repeated village burning, intimidation, extortion, forced labor, and violations suffered at the hands of Burmese army in an attempt to clear and depopulate the area around the construction site and logistics infrastructure, filmmaker Milena Kaneva presents a probing, illuminating, and incisive exposition into the everyday reality of the incestuous alliance of politics and big business economics.
Quis custiodet ipsos custiodes? - "Who guards the guardians?" - muses famed civil rights attorney, Dennis Cunnigham during an informal breakfast interview with his daughter, filmmaker Bernadine Mellis. A self-confessed dropout during the early 1960s whose passion for civil rights crystallized during a train ride home after the 1963 March on Washington that galvanized the Civil Rights movement, Cunningham has spent his entire career defending civil rights of all people against the abuse of authority and overreaching government, from the brothers of Attica who staged a revolt in 1971 for inhumane prison conditions, to the Black Panthers whose influential Chicago leader, Fred Hampton was killed by the Chicago police during a targeted raid instigated by the FBI. On the final stages of trial preparation for a long and hard fought court date on a civil lawsuit brought by the late environmental activist Judi Bari and fellow activist Darryl Cherney against the FBI twelve years earlier, the case represents the disturbing tactic and dirty politics of government's involvement in undermining radical organizations, subversives, and resistance movements (arbitrarily) deemed a threat to their central authority and national order. At the center of the civil action is the still unsolved car bombing of Earth First organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney during a period of delicate negotiations with the logging industry to end the protracted (non-violent) protest over deforestation of the redwoods and work towards an agreement on responsible logging and resource renewal. Cursorily and conveniently characterized at the instigation of the FBI as an eco-terrorism plot gone awry - with the perpetrators seemingly hoisted by their own petard - at the onset of the crime scene investigation, Bari and Cherney would be immediately arrested at the hospital while still in intensive care and the news of their foiled plot expediently broadcasted for public consumption (and ridicule) despite Bari's own revelations of received death threats and intimidation at the scene of the explosion. With the charges subsequently dropped due to lack of evidence, Bari would then pursue a civil case against the FBI for their role in impeding the bombing investigation with knowingly false conclusions to forensic evidence (a "hidden in plain sight" bomb which had been mounted in the underbody of the car, and box of "matching" nails found in the trunk of the car that were neither from the same origin nor even the same type of nails) with the deliberate intent of discrediting the bombing victims and the Earth First movement. Chronicling the day to day activities of Cunningham and the Bari legal team as they prepare for the start of the trial, review depositions and testimonies, discuss strategy for closing arguments, and wait for the jury verdict, The Forest for the Trees provides an provocative, impassioned, and sobering perspective of the long, often frustrating uphill road to justice against government misconduct and abuse of power, and a reverent homage to the dedicated, principled few who, in guarding the rights of the persecuted, serve as the ever vigilant sentinels for the rights of all.
On a typical summer night in inner city Baltimore, a children's game of cops and robbers shootout plays against the morbid backdrop - undoubtedly in familiar imitation - of a real-life police arrest of a teenager on a neighborhood street. A single statistic posted on black screen provides a sobering context to the children's "art imitating life", role-playing games: that 76% of all African American males in Baltimore city schools do not graduate from high school. A dedicated middle-school school counselor and program recruiter named Mavis Jackson seeks to remedy this grim statistic by assembling some of the city's greatest "at risk" boys into a school auditorium in order to confront the reality of their situation, explaining that that by the age of 18, as an African American young man in Baltimore, their futures can take on three paths: an orange jumpsuit and a pair of Department of Corrections "bracelets", a black suit and a brown wooden box, or a black cap and gown and a diploma that can also serve to open up opportunities for them. Handing out an information package and application form for a two-year boarding school in Laikipia, Kenya called The Baraka School, Jackson encourages the children to give serious consideration to the educational opportunity, citing that graduation in The Baraka School offers them entry into the city's most competitive schools where most then go on to graduate high school. An introverted, musically inclined (and emotionally closed) boy named Devon who lives with his doting grandmother (and away from his financially unstable, drug-addicted mother) dreams of becoming a preacher. An argumentative boy with a natural aptitude for mathematics named Montrey aspires for a career in science. An academically struggling student named Richard and his thoughtful younger brother Romesh are encouraged by their supportive, strong-willed mother to undertake the journey, realizing that it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to change the direction of their future (Asked what would happen if only one of her sons had been accepted into the program, she immediately answers that one would become a king, the other, a killer). Far from the distraction of their desperate surroundings and impersonal institution of the public school system, the boys begin to academically (and emotionally) thrive in the challenges of their new environment, returning home for summer vacation with a newfound sense of maturity, deliberativeness, and character. However, when heightened terrorist concerns and global politics intervene and threaten the future of The Baraka School program at a critical stage in the boys' development, their learned life lessons are soon put to the test. Following the real-time progress of the Baraka boys throughout their formative years (since their recruitment to the school in 2002), filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady capture the depth of intimacy, conflict, poverty, and desolation experienced, not only by the children, but also by their well-intentioned families and guardians who realize the weight of their children's demoralizing environment but feel powerless and financially unable to easily change their circumstances - a sentiment articulated by a concerned father who debates the issue of safety to a program official after hearing the heightened security warnings for the school by commenting that his son has a greater chance of being killed on his own neighborhood street in Baltimore than he does by becoming a victim of a terrorist attack in Africa. In presenting an equally bittersweet, tragic, and affirming portrait of the boys' bifurcated trajectories since their Baraka School experience, the film presents a haunting and complex portrait of poverty, marginalization, and disenfranchisement that defies socially expedient trivializations of human worth, ability, perseverance, and destiny.
In an incisive encounter in The Education of Shelby Knox, (then) high-school student Shelby from Lubbock - a devout, abstinent, southern Baptist, child of conservative Republicans, and fierce advocate for comprehensive sex education in the classroom as a means of curtailing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, stemming off widespread health misinformation, and promoting important life (and life-saving) skills - turns to her charismatic, spiky-haired youth pastor, Ed Ainsworth for advice in a moment of spiritual crisis. Recognizing the inherent failure of the George W. Bush-backed, faith-based initiative, "abstinence only" program that teaches only marital relations and fails to address the concerns of - and effectively excludes - the gay population who cannot marry, young Shelby (an amusingly typical, hyper-romantic teenager who still envisions the man of her dreams in grandiose, operatic gestures as someone who could play the role of the Phantom to her Christine in The Phantom of the Opera) has become an unlikely ally in the school's gay student movement towards equal rights and representation. Struggling to reconcile her religious beliefs with social reality and her innate compassion for the marginalized, she muses that "God could not have made all these people just so He could send them to Hell." Nodding with the (apparent) gesture of an understanding heart, Ainsworth then embarks on a bafflingly open-ended (if not condescending), veiled allusion to Shelby's "questionable" faith by remarking that Christians have had a traditionally long history of intolerance and that, when he listens to her articulate her inner turmoil, what he is hearing from her is "tolerance" (and yes, the audience let out a collective sigh upon hearing this comment). Remarkably capturing Shelby's infectious effervescence, fearlessness, sense of egalitarian justice, and unwavering integrity of faith, filmmakers Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt have created a whimsical, yet potent, inspiring, and affirming portrait of the true meaning of moral activism and spiritual service.
One of the festival highpoints (and certainly one of my personal favorites) from this year's slate of films from the 
During the spring of 2004, as the Iraqi city of Falluja slowly metamorphosed from secondary, wartime infrastructure target to the emerging epicenter of an escalating (and increasingly emboldened) Iraqi insurgency, soldiers from a squadron of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division stationed in the volatile city struggle to adjust to their amorphous, undefined, and intrinsically irreconcilable roles as law enforcers, occupiers, and goodwill ambassadors in a foreign land. For a few hours each week, the young soldiers are directed by their superior officers to go out into the streets in full body armor for mandatory, pre-scheduled "public relations" where they canvas as many streets as possible in order to psychologically reinforce their presence and visibility in the city, initiate contact with the townspeople (usually through an interpreter) in an often fruitless attempt to gain their trust and gather information, and, with alarming frequency, play reflexive games of survival as militants seize the opportunity to take pot shots and launch last-minute offensives in their direction. The dangerous, frustrating, and often surreal encounters experienced by the soldiers underscore the seeming futility of their reluctant role as a peacekeeping (rather than combat) force in the openly hostile, war-ravaged town. Unfamiliar with the language and local customs, the soldiers' relationship with the town has become palpably acrimonious (especially following the death of a fellow soldier from their squadron): distrustful glances from the Iraqis are often retaliated with verbal hostility and profanity (in English) by the disrespected soldiers; a soldier is reproached by several village men at a public square for committing a cultural faux pas a few days earlier by publicly detaining (and later releasing) an unaccompanied Iraqi woman to headquarters for routine interrogation; another soldier attempts to engage the townspeople in friendly conversation, but then hurriedly truncates the uncomfortable dialogue after receiving a blunt earful of how bad the standard of life really has become for the average Iraqi civilian since the invasion. Returning to the barracks, the soldiers receive little respite from their ambivalent roles and conflicted sense of duty as superior officers conduct periodic "pep talk" debriefings in order to encourage their re-enlistment and continued service, often raising the specter of their troubled youth, reinforcing their insecurity over their level of maturity and responsibility (and accomplishment) and preparedness for civilian life, or appealing to their economic reality with the promise of a college education and a life-long career. Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds were embedded with the soldiers for the duration of the filming of Occupation: Dreamland, and the result is immediately apparent in the sense of intimacy, conflict, disorientation, and pervasive sense of danger and uncertainty captured by the film. Far from a concrete, immediately identifiable characterizations of good and evil, victim and transgressor, what is revealed in these irreconcilable quotidian images is a complex cross-cultural, postwar portrait of human desolation and moral ambiguity that festers within the vacuum of compassion, communication, social order, and authority.
A smuggled video footage of a communal market in North Korea provides a profoundly sobering context to the grave, protracted, man-made humanitarian crisis caused by the government's systematic diversion of international food aid to party loyalists at the expense of ordinary citizens (often from the rural provinces) as children scour the mud for occasional morsels of food (mostly grain biproducts). Despite the Chinese government's knowledge that North Korean defectors will face torture and certain death if captured, the government has instituted a policy of forcibly repatriating North Koreans found within their sovereignty, irrespective of formal appeals for asylum. For these desperate people, the only hope for survival lies in making a dangerous cross-country journey into China undetected with the goal of reaching a third country (often Mongolia) by any means necessary, aided along the way by a loose alliance of well-intentioned ordinary citizens operating in a multinational, underground railroad system between the northern border of North Korea and China. Composed of several breathtaking (and heart-rending) actual footage along their flight to freedom and interviews from several covert operatives - including an outspoken humanitarian named Chun Ki-won (dubbed by human rights activists as the "Schindler of Asia") - as they plot their escape, rehearse their strategy for formally seeking asylum, initiate contact with their host families (often South Korean relatives), and finally attempt, often in vain, their one chance at freedom (as in the case of the MoFA Seven who delivered a formal, written plea to the Chinese government for asylum and were immediately arrested and deported), Seoul Train is an intensely visceral, illuminating, and deeply moving document of inspired activism against a seemingly unconquerable tide of moral apathy, bureaucratic inertia, and inhuman politics.
During the Q&A for the film, filmmaker David Redmon explained that the initial concept for Mardi Gras: Made in China revolved around the idea of exploring the interconnection between pop culture, ritual, and globalization. To this end, the idea of tracing the origin of a disposable commodity - Mardi Gras beads - seemed ideally suited in linking the economies and social cultures of the U.S. and China. Contrasting the inebriated chaos of revelers at the Mardi Gras parade in the French Quarters of New Orleans for which the beads represent a figurative (if transitory) capital - and therefore, power - that can be traded for pleasure (women exposing themselves in exchange for the trinkets) with an insightful profile of the child workers earning the equivalent of ten cents an hour (mostly adolescent girls who, as the owner explains, are more obedient and manageable) at China's largest bead manufacturing factory, the film presents a sobering portrait of crass consumerism (as appropiately articulated by a truck driver on holiday who dismisses the plight of the Chinese workers by shouting the idiotic mantra "Don't know and don't care. Beads for boobs!"). Conducting a series of interviews with a group of girls living in the communal dormitories on factory grounds, what emerges is a familiar pattern of rural poverty, undereducation, and familial obligation to provide financial support. In the end, what is revealed between the two seemingly disparate cultures is the commonality of human commodification and exploitation, and the delusive ephemerality of material happiness.
Shot in vérité-styled camerawork and natural lighting, Omagh is a hauntingly powerful, illuminating, and uncompromisingly rendered account of the August 15, 1998 car bombing of a high-traffic market square in the peacefully integrated Northern Ireland community that massacred 29 civilians and injured over 200 others. Shot from the perspective of Michael Gallagher and his family, an automobile repair shop owner who lost his son and business partner, Aidan, the film is a taut and indicting account of the surviving families' frustrated quest for truth and justice for the atrocity. Engineered by radical separatist groups (most notably the breakway faction calling itself "Real" IRA) at the height of delicate, politically sensitive negotiations between Sinn Fein and the British government as a desperate means to undermine the Good Friday Peace Accords, what emerges from filmmaker Pete Travis' scathing, but sensitively realized portrait is a disturbing tale of ordinary people repeatedly entangled - first, in a protracted war for sovereignty and subsequently in a high-stakes game of diplomacy - in a compromised (and perhaps, irreparably doomed) investigation mired by national security intelligence failures, bureaucratic incompetence, and, most insidiously, a systematic pattern of stonewalling from all levels of public authority in the sacrificial name of national and political expediency to protect government informants and covert operatives within the radical organizations from exposure, prevent the collapse of the brokered cease fire, and continued push to move the peace process forward. In the end, what emerges from the families' commitment to the memory of their lost loved ones is the resilient voice of human solidarity that refuses to be silenced, victimized, or reduced to political pawns.
Una de dos is set against the rural backdrop of Argentina in 2002 as a protracted recession and a government-instituted, desperate measure austerity plan to rescue the national economy from insolvency through the devaluation of its currency and announced default on its foreign debt has led to widespread rioting and worker strikes in the cities that has effectively crippled the country's economic backbone. A low-level mob courier trafficking in counterfeit currency, Martin, is directed to discontinue operations and maintain a low profile until contacted. Inevitably, Martin's return home to the rural province that is seemingly removed from the chaos and socio-political instability of the urban areas (an abandoned train platform and overlooking tracks reinforces this appearance of isolation) illustrates the far-reaching repercussions of the economic crisis as neighborhood shop owners are forced to turn away friends and family by refusing to operate on credit, workers struggle to devise ways to subsidize their wage shortfall (often in vain), local businesses are shuttered indefinitely (in an incisive sequence of the three young women strolling through the empty market streets that is seemingly only inhabited by stray dogs (a scenario that recalls the running motif of Béla Tarr's 
Favorably recalling the rigorous imagery, desolation, and despiritualized landscapes of Chantal Akerman (most notably, in the opening sequences of the U.S.-Mexican border wall and off-camera interviews of 
Charming, humorous, and endearing, it is easy to see why BBC journalist Sean McAllister decided to chronicle the life of flamboyant, irrepressibly outspoken, and widely popular entertainer (and notoriously unapologetic womanizer) Samir Peter who, in his heyday, was once dubbed the Liberace of Baghdad, and who, since the Iraqi War, now bides his time playing the piano in the near empty lounge of a heavily fortified hotel housing Western workers (mostly journalists and privately contracted security forces) stationed in the region as he waits for the approval of his visa in order to immigrate to the United States and join his two daughters and estranged wife. Filmed over an eighth month period in the power vacuum of a post-Sadaam Hussein Iraq under the increasingly volatile and escalating climate of frontier lawlessness, terrrorism, armed resistance, and kidnapping of foreign workers, The Liberace of Baghdad is an insightful first-hand portrait of the conflicted and demoralizing climate of everyday life in postwar Iraq as the ideals of liberation and freedom become increasingly obscured in the psychological prison of social insecurity. However, despite Peter's unparalleled ability to provide a compelling, provocative, engaging, and intimate account of the erosive toll of occupation and insurgency on ordinary civilians, I cannot help but question the integrity of the filmmaker who, either through colossal naïvete or sheer recklessness, seemed to willingly (and deliberately) continue to put his publicly high-profile subject in harm's way in order to get "the story", even after discovering first-hand in several close-call episodes the brutality of the retaliation by insurgents on those whom they perceive to be collaborating with Westerners (most notably, a neighbor's assassination in front of her child for her employment with a Western contractor, and in Peter's U.S. immigrant daughter and her family who have returned to Iraq to visit her remaining siblings.) Beyond the filmmaker's inept camerawork (including a nausea-inducing extended sequence of repeated quick pans capturing Peter's conversation with his daughter) and tangential, egocentric diversions away from his subject (including a remarkably unoriginal interstitial shot of him filming himself in a mirror), it is this moral conduct that ultimate undermines the integrity of the film as McAllister seems to have lost sight of the fact that by possessing a British passport, he is allowed to leave at anytime (and in fact, does) while the people whom he has filmed must live with the consequences of - and risk retribution or perhaps even death for - his exploitive, self-aggrandizing exposé.
A compendium of self-contained multicultural stories featuring ethnically, economically, and existentially diverse children, each at the cusp of a pivotal turning point in their young lives, Living Rights examines the contemporary relevance - and often divergence - between the humanitarian statement crafted by 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child that sought to define and uphold the fundamental living rights of children, and the reality of the lives of these children whom the charter seeks to protect. Article 29, which espouses the "development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential", provides the ideological framework for the film's first case study: a 16-year-old boy named Yoshi, diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (a form of autism in which the person possesses normal intelligence, but has cognitive difficulty in interpreting non-verbal communication or understanding non-literal syntax) who has been placed into a special school for the mentally disabled. Juxtaposing Yoshi's candid, confessional-styled, direct address to the camera on why he should be allowed to transfer to a traditional high school with quotidian episodes culled from his personal life, the film (and Yoshi) makes an insightful and compelling argument on inclusion and otherness, and in the process, challenges - and more importantly, inculcates - society's own preconceived ideas of what it truly means to be "normal": his frustrating experiences at school in which he complains of his lack of intellectual challenge (Yoshi has been placed in a class in which some of his classmates exhibit more severe forms of mental disability) and of being over-praised for performing the most mundane tasks; his bouts of melancholia that reveal his low self-esteem (being teased by other children, his feelings of exclusion, his self-consciousness over his imperfections); his articulateness and creativity (particularly in drawing and painting) in expressing his ideas.
At the 2003 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, I had the privilege of seeing an unassuming, underseen film shot in cinéma vérité style by Ditsi Carolino entitled 
On an unassuming afternoon in September 1989, Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, a 35 year-old physician, medical university professor, and human rights activist, was riding home on her bicycle after having finished grading the final examinations from her Anatomy class when she was gunned down on an anonymous street in her native city of Jaffna by unknown (or at least, publicly undisclosed) assailants. Over fifteen years later, the still-unsolved murder continues to reveal the trauma and underlying senseless tragedy of her assassination on her family - her two young daughters, her estranged husband, her parents, her younger sisters - and especially, her older sister, Nirmala, who blames herself for initiating Rajani into the ethnic struggle that would ultimately claim her life. Virtually inseparable during their privileged, upper middle-class, westernized Christian childhood, Nirmala and Rajani's seemingly disparate ideological trajectories - Nirmala in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) movement and Rajani in the Marxist movement of the 1970s - would converge towards their homeland's post-colonial struggle for national identity as the Tamil minority (who were perceived to have been favored by the British and subsequently, were systematically marginalized under the government of the newly formed country) and Singhalese majority engaged in a bitter and protracted civil war in Sri Lanka. Nirmala, then a member of the Tamil tigers fighting for an independent state, had repeatedly sought assistance from her sister to secretly treat the wounds of injured guerillas - an act that, from the LTTE's perspective, can be construed as a validation of her allegiance to the organization. However, Rajani's political motivation would not be so easily defined. Championing instead the cause of the silent, innocent victims of the devastating, multi-pronged conflict among nationalists, Tamil separatists, Marxists (People's Liberation Army), government forces, and even Indian peace-keeping forces, Rajani defied the role of partisan revolutionary and instead, focused her energies on creating some semblance of normalcy and rebuilding a future for the people of Jaffra by helping to re-open the region's bomb-damaged university and forming the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) who sought to chronicle the human rights violations perpetrated on the people of Jaffra irrespective of factional responsibility. Even Rajana's husband Dayapala acknowledges his own (then) limited view of the significance of his wife's activities during this period, commenting to Nirmala that his concept of political activism had been of armed struggle and not humanitarianism, commenting "We didn't consider human rights as politics." However, as Rajana became more outspoken and internationally recognized in her group's efforts to document the atrocities, culminating in the publication of the manuscript, The Broken Palmyra, insurgents began to view her activities as undermining their cause - a perception that is widely believed to have contributed to her death. Through filmmaker Helene Klodawsky's evocatively interwoven composition of nostalgically r