Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2008

This past week and a half I have been volunteering in the evenings at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Human Rights Watch is one of the major international non-governmental organizations that monitors, studies and reports on human rights globally, they are hugely influential (though not as influential as the SHOULD be!) and do a lot of really important work. They are based in New York and have another major regional office here in London. Every year for 11 years, they have had a film festival for human rights-related films. As a volunteer, I was fortunate enough to be able to see a lot of the films for free, and I wanted to mention the ones that I saw. I recommend all of them, and if you get a chance to see them, please do.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
This movie is about the armed conflict that is going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the way that rape and sexual violence are being used as a weapon of war. This is a subject I am really interested in, because I was going to write my dissertation about it. That has since changed, but my subject is still very nearly related. The filmmaker is an American woman who was gang raped in Georgetown, in Washington D.C. She became aware of this situation in the Congo and went there to record the stories of the women victims of sexual violence during the conflict. It is really an unparalleled look into the horrors through which these women have lived and are still living. I cannot convey the depth of the problem here. Suffice it to say this movie is extremely difficult to watch, but the filmmaker does not flinch from the reality. It is above all the other movies the one I most highly recommend.

Under the Bombs
This is a very interesting movie which was filmed largely during the 2006 summer war between Lebanon and Israel. During the bombing campaign, the filmmaker and actors took a few cameras out in the chaotic country and improvised a fictional story about a woman traveling to the south of Lebanon (where the bombing was most severe) to find her sister and her son. There is only one cab driver who will take her there, and though they are distant at first, they slowly form a bond. This was a very compelling story despite being improvised, and it was interesting how they married the real-life events (and sets and destruction, etc) and a fictional, yet really humanizing, story.

The Sari Soldiers
This movie follows six Nepalese women during the recent State of Emergency which was declared by Nepal's king (Nepal until very recently was one of the few remaining absolute monarchies in the world). One is a royalist who thinks having a stable monarchy is better than advancing democracy and creating a civil war. Another is a Maoist rebel, fighting in the rebel army, which is interesting because it is comprised of 40% women. Another is a woman who spoke out against the abuses of the royal army; her 15 year old daughter was subsequently arrested and became a 'disappeared' person; after a protracted legal battle with the state that caught the attention of the world media, she found out that her daughter had been tortured, raped and buried in a shallow grave behind the detention center to which she had been taken; the perpetrators were never really brought to justice. Another is her advocate, a human rights lawyer who has really done remarkable work in advancing human rights in Nepal. Another is a young woman who is enlisted in the Royal Army, which is recruiting and training more women in response to the Maoist rebel army. And the last is a young university student who is a political activist against the repressive regime of the king. All remarkable women, really.

Up the Yangtze
The Yangtze river is the great river in China that has been the lifeblood for the rural populations for centuries. It was recently blocked by a super-dam which is the largest in the world. Although this is touted as an indicator of the huge economic progress of China, the flooding it has caused is pushing many millions of people out of their homelands, even putting entire cities under water. This movie follows a luxury river-boat tour up the Yangtze, which is really a way for rich Westerners to see how the people have lived for one last time before they are pushed off their land and into destitution. Particularly touching and heartrending is the story of a young girl whose family is extremely poor and is about to be flooded out of their shack home. She wants to go to high school, but the family does not have the money to send her and she must go work on this luxury river-boat if they are to survive. There is an extremely difficult scene when they are at the dinner table talking and her parents are saying, "We are sorry, but we can't send you to school, you must go to work or your parents and your younger siblings will have nothing." The girl and her parents are crying and her mother says, "Do you think we would exploit you like this if there were any other way?"
***The filmmakers were present for all these films afterwards for a Q&A session and it turns out the director of this film has set up a charity and has paid for the girl to go to high school, which is great in the short run, but whether it is enough to elevate her and her family out of poverty, I don't know.
This movie is interesting in the way it contrasts the harsh reality of poverty in a supposedly communist China with the reality of China's super-rich and the West's super-duper-rich, gently poking fun at Westerners who are just there for the pretty scenery.

Strange Culture
There is an artist in the States called Steve Kurtz. He does a strange sort of bio-social-art where he tries to educate people about the possible dangers of genetically modified foods through a mixture of science and art. Consequently he does a lot of science work with bacteria, petri dishes, etc, and has some standard scientific research equipment to help him do his art, such as incubators, microscopes, etc, nothing you couldn't purchase yourself off the internet, nothing you wouldn't find in a high school science lab. He wakes up one morning to find his wife of 27 years has died of heart failure in her sleep. When he calls 911 and the ambulances come, they see the equipment and call the FBI, who then investigate him as a suspected bio-terrorist. This movie is an interpretation of his experiences because in fact the case is ongoing and he's not technically allowed to speak about it, so the actors (including the strangely androgynous yet lion-ish Tilda Swinton) give an interpretation of what might have happened. The main actor in the movie may be the most unattractive man I have ever seen.

A Promise to the Dead
When Augusto Pinochet Ugarte deposed the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, he killed everyone in the previous administration, except for the man in this movie. His name was crossed of the list of people meant to be executed by an Allende staff member so that he could live to tell the story of what happened. He views it as his promise to the dead. This movie follows him going to Chile to revisit the old places and discuss the events with his friends who were there at the time.

Well, I don't know if anyone will get a chance to see these movies since most of the filmmakers are struggling for someone to distribute them! Human Rights Watch is repeating the festival in New York City, so I guess that's your best bet.

They were all really diverse films, but they all show that human rights abuses are occurring now everywhere around the world and we're not even aware of them. And I guess the thing that I most concerned me after watching these films is that I would be ashamed, if I knew that these things were going on in the world, to stick my head in the sand and pretend that it's not my problem. I think it's everyone's problem, and of course, learning about it is the first step. So I'm trying not to shrink from that.