Michael Jackson: 1958 - 2009

Upon hearing of Michael Jackson's death yesterday, one of the first things that popped into my head was: "Have you seen my childhood?" I say that as naïvely and as free from cynicism as I can. At its best, pop music both clarifies and enriches receptive souls' personal experience. And the touchtone moments in pop culture exist as a simple purification of every individual's life experience. Speaking personally, the death of Michael Jackson will forever denote the moment I left my 20s behind; it comes literally days before I turn 30. It's a perfect parallel, in a sense. The arbitrary acknowledgement of my wonder years' passing will be forever intertwined with the death of the man who was never allowed a proper childhood, and who subsequently raged with all his creative might against the onset of adulthood. Jackson's music still serves as a crucible for our various compromises and self-imposed psychological barriers. It sounds carefree, but it's impossible to listen to without assessing its creator's hidden torment. Even the smoothest, catchiest, most disco-tastic singles in MJ's back catalog are a little obsessed. (Don't stop 'til you get enough? Got me working day and night?) Which is my own tortured way of saying it sounded great then, and it sounds great now. In the mid-'80s, I always thought of Michael Jackson and Prince as a perfect yin and yang of pop and R&B, the former representing good and the latter evil—or close to it. In retrospect, both were never more compelling (and downright terrifying) than when they confounded that syllogism. (Prince's "God" is as chillingly direct as Jackson's "In the Closet" is hauntingly abstruse.) Time's cruel joke: Now that I'm old enough to appreciate Jackson's artistic persona on its deeper levels, I only want back the simplicity of his showmanship. I want back the days when it wasn't the Eagles sitting atop the all-time list of best-selling albums. I want the Michael Jackson who somehow nailed flawless, effortless quadruple turns easing down the road in The Wiz while wearing size 37 scarecrow slippers. I want him back. Eric Henderson

Michael Jackson's Wikipedia page was updated within moments of the announcement of the glittery gloved one's passing. Twitter crashed harder than it did during the peak of last week's protests in Iran. Two of the major broadcast television networks suspended their primetime schedule to air specials about Jackson, while radio stations across the country cued up songs from his extensive catalogue of hits. One woman called in to New York's Power 105 in tears, repeating, "I loved Michael Jackson! I loved that man!" over and over, before threatening to throw herself in front of a car. You can hear his influence in the music of today's younger pop, R&B, and hip-hop stars, and his own songs, whether it's "Human Nature" or "Remember the Time," rarely sound conspicuous when sandwiched between the top radio hits of 2009. If the self-proclaimed and globally ordained King of Pop's career was in decline—or even over—at the time of his death, you'd never know it. To celebrate the very reason he mattered, still matters, and always will, we've compiled a list of our 10 favorite Michael Jackson singles and videos (in chronological order). Enjoy. Sal Cinquemani

When Marvin Gaye recorded a version of Leon Ware's plaintive long-distance love song, "I Wanna Be Where You Are," little could he have known it would just a few years later sound like comforting "I'll always love you" sentiments from beyond the grave. The gap was far longer in Jackson's case (he recorded it in 1972, one of his earliest singles without the Jackson 5), but again the song now aches with the foreknowledge of something lost:



After a glorious fake-out prelude of tentative, mumbling first-date banter, Jackson and producer Quincy Jones absolutely blow the roof off. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is declaration as explosive imperative, pop music's ultimate side one, track one:



Prevailing wisdom dictates that "Rock with You" and "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" should be cited as Jacko's best disco-era tracks, but "Off the Wall" comes pretty damn close. And this one lyric seems to capture the often bizarre icon's too-short life: "Life ain't so bad at all if you live it off the wall."



The Jacksons's "Can You Feel It" wasn't the first time Michael Jackson blew his socio-musical aspirations out into Cinerama dimensions, but this stately slice of disco represents maybe his first successful stab at synthesizing social consciousness and million-dollar production values. It's the secular forerunner of "Man in the Mirror":



To quote Ed Gonzalez from our 100 Greatest Music Videos list: How fucking cool was Michael Jackson that he could light up a sidewalk with the tap of his foot in "Billie Jean"?



To quote again from that list, never before had a music video, a largely artless marketing tool up until that point, employed plot, costume, and cinema style as expansively as "Thriller":



As the leadoff single from the album that had the dirty job of following up Thriller, "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" seemed an unlikely candidate. It wasn't danceable. It wasn't immediately hooky. For Christ's sake, it was a duet! But aided immeasurably by the endlessly descending chords of a particularly melodramatic chorus, it's Jackson's finest moment as a adult heterosexual male recording artist:



A slow jam of the highest order, "Remember the Time" proved that even when the King of Pop's crown was starting to get a little rusty, his R&B was as smooth as ever:



The blockbuster-budget video, the Jam & Lewis crashes and clatters, the long-awaited collaboration with the only other Jackson who matters. All superfluous. "Scream" boils down to that solitary curse: "Stop fucking with me." Only Michael Jackson could, as late in the "Parental Advisory" game as 1995, make the word sound like a direct slap:



If there's one good thing to come from the sudden passing of the first black artist to get played on MTV, it's that the network is actually playing music videos again, at least temporarily. Specifically, they're playing Jackson's videos—all of them. Or almost all of them. Presumably, they haven't played either version of the controversial 1996 single "They Don't Care About Us." The first was directed by Spike Lee and was shot in a favela in Rio de Janeiro; the second was a less subtle statement about poverty, racism, and the prison system, juxtaposing images of the civil rights movement with Jackson shackled in a prison cell and performing among inmates in a prison cafeteria:

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Yes Men Fix the World

Returning for a second feature-length tilt at gleefully executing anti-corporate hoaxes, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno follow up the inflatable penis suit and feces-generated fast food of The Yes Men with a little more showbiz (staged comic interludes in their debris-filled "underground headquarters") to prank unsuspecting business conferees with fraudulent rollouts of a bulbous rubber survival cocoon (ostensibly from Halliburton) and a new energy source: candles made from the flesh of a gallant, industrially-poisoned Exxon janitor. Proving repeatedly that a passable wardrobe and camera-ready clichés can get them into any chair normally reserved for experts and bureaucrats, the Yes Men most satisfyingly bring temporary but unaccustomed chaos through a BBC News interview where Bichlbaum's offer of Dow Chemical billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster sends the company's stock plunging; the post-catastrophic "SurvivaBall" garb draws straight-faced questions about marketability and long-term wear; and a New York Times print parody exploits Obama-victory ecstasy by trumpeting headlines of instant Iraq withdrawal and sweeping progressive reforms. (This climactic project, though accurately conceived and read as a "dream paper," may have dated fastest of all.)

Even more so than in the previous film, The Yes Men Fix the World indulges in faux-naïve disappointment that, after garnering priceless double-takes of white-collar audiences confronted with the "Golden Skeleton" of monetary human-life calculus or the hypothesis that global warming can be as positively transformative as the Black Plague was in clearing the decks for the Renaissance, the duo hasn't shamed The Man into changing his deregulated, market-dictated ways. Given that Bichlbaum and Bonanno aren't above funny cheap shots like green-screening Tom of Finland art behind a solemn Milton Friedman-school economist, their exposure of ossified free-market mindsets seems more in line with their skills than a call to activism against a global capitalist oligarchy. Careful to elicit blessings upon their deceptions from the downtrodden, be they health activists in Bhopal or the post-Katrina poor being squeezed out in money-mad New Orleans reconstruction plans, the Yes Men ultimately admit to "failure" to fix the world except in the pages of their utopian Times, but their true success comes in discovering a Gulf Coast-rehab expo where the only shelters being marketed are yurts from Kyrgyzstan, or in getting a climate-change skeptic to offer, "Cold-related deaths will decrease significantly."

[The Yes Men Fix the World premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Good Fortune

"You guys will go from last to first," Dominion Farms CEO Calvin Burgess condescendingly tells a crowd of Kenyans at an outdoor PR carnival in Good Fortune as he pumps up enthusiasm for his American company's project to turn a swath of the Yala Swamp into a $30 million rice farm. But Dominion's plan to flood 1100 acres of arable land and construct an irrigation dam takes little account of the area's farmers who are losing their homes and livelihood; they're a collateral nuisance. "My life is based on this soil...We don't want to become [Burgess's] laborers," says farmer and schoolteacher Jackson Omondi, one of three citizen protagonists in Landon Van Soest's documentary who object to the impact that purported anti-poverty programs, devised by foreign corporations or NGOs with the carefully negotiated participation of Kenya's government, will have on their lives. Are they short-sighted, unwilling to see that the status quo blocks "big-picture" progress in the modernization of Africa's continental economy? Perhaps, as a Dominion director sunnily puts it, the Yala farmers simply need to see that the submerging of their land provides a golden opportunity for "changing their careers into fishing and other pursuits."

Lacking any narrator or audible off-camera interrogators, van Soest's film is occasionally wanting in terms of contextual data and confirmation of the Kenyans' assertions (e.g. the link between Dominion's sprayed chemicals and the local incidence of miscarriages). But the crises and dilemmas in the three-part chronicle are informed by the familiar past failings of Western corporate culture and the Kenya regime's prioritization of profit—along with the nation's bloody post-election mayhem in 2007, seen here in the final reels. In the capital of Nairobi, where the Kibera slum neighborhood that's home to one million is being "upgraded" by a joint UN-government effort, a hairdresser threatened with eviction points to local high-rises that were similarly supposed to elevate quality of life for the poor, but were ultimately occupied by the upper class or abandoned amid embezzlement revelations. And in perhaps the most desperate segments, fishing communities on the shores of Lake Victoria are confronted not only by stocks critically depleted by a World Bank-funded export industry and environmental degradation, but the spread of AIDS as increasingly alienated men patronize prostitutes and expose their wives to HIV.

Not merely questioning if a corporate, Western model of aid to Africa can penetrate to the grassroots, Good Fortune sees those most egregiously treated as pawns by outsiders (of varying motives) and domestic powers-that-be as fully aware of their underdog status, and often bleakly resigned to the limits of resistance. "It's better to leave without a fight," sighs the Kibera salon owner, even as the film unexpectedly shows Western ingenuity receiving a near-karmic comeuppance in the Yala Swamp.

[Good Fortune premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Tapologo

A stone's throw from the Impala Platinum mine in South Africa, Freedom Park is a shanty town hell inhabited by sub-Saharan migrant workers that lacks even the most rudimentary community developments (running water, agriculture), and possesses a makeshift economy existing primarily to serve the whims of sexual predators. As a result, roughly 50% of the female citizenry, all of whom are de facto prostitutes, has contracted HIV. The documentary Tapologo circuitously follows a collection of nurses—most of whom are rehabilitated sex workers with AIDS themselves—who collectively founded the Tapologo Hospice in Freedom Park under the wing of a small group of doctors-cum-missionaries from the United Kingdom.

The objective of the hospice seems, at first glance, rather defeatist: The women who man the small pharmacies and make house calls throughout the disease-riddled town are fully aware of the infected population's mortality rate, and in spite of attempts at prevention therapy (condom distribution, AIDS education sessions) the epidemic's grip on the community has not slackened. The dignity of their efforts, however, is aptly summed up by a visiting Irish priest: After an individual has contracted the virus, he observes, Christianly care is the only useful ecclesiastical reaction. The Tapologo nurses not only prolong and improve the quality of their patients' lives but of their own as well, and the smattering of oral histories in the film emphasize the medicinal properties of fraternal strength even in the face of moribund despair.

Structurally, the film would have benefited from pruning; much information is repeated out of necessity as we revisit the same characters multiple times and gradually piece together their autobiographies. And the attempt in the center of the documentary at representing a full day at the hospice with title cards heralding the start of each hour features far too many distractions—for example, cutaways to lengthy monologues from figures outside the facility—to properly capture the frenzied cadence of the profession. But the directors' judicious patience with their subjects allows them to capture some remarkable storytelling, and even more impressive are the silent montages cycling through five-second video portraits of the hospice's non-English speaking staff. Their worldly, fatigued stares are the most eloquent thing about Tapologo: They communicate the experience of having one foot in the grave but marching forward, regardless.

[Tapologo premieres June 23 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Mrs. Goundo's Daughter

Bestriding the line between global documentary and social exposé, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter lingers for one squeamish hour on the resilient African tradition of female genital mutilation (or FGM, as it is bureaucratically abbreviated). Juxtaposing interviews with the immigrant of the title—a Malian excision victim seeking asylum in the United States to protect her daughter from a similar fate—and footage captured in her homeland during FGM rituals, the film ponderously examines the practice's tribal significance.

The expected observations are repeated, ad nauseam, including not only vocal support of clitoridectomy as a device to mitigate the natural proclivity of women toward sexual perfidy, but step-by-step descriptions of the procedure itself as well—which up until a decade ago was performed en masse with a single blood-laden scalpel. This provides a wealth of teeth-gritting moments, but the filmmakers neglect to provide more nuanced context that might tourniquet their audience's befuddlement after the initial shock wears off. We're never told, for example, precisely how FGM proliferated so profusely in Islamic nations, so while it appears to possess an aura of sanctity comparable to male circumcision, the lack of historical detail recklessly demonizes its practitioners (both male and female) rather than discovering how they came to inherit the tradition.

Still, the facts of the ritual's steadfast observance are as culturally fascinating as they are tragic (for example, it's common for young girls to be abducted by relatives or neighbors and excised without their parents' knowledge or permission), and in its frequent conversations with female refugees, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter probes the subaltern core of Mali's feminine psychology. Victims of FGM need to convince themselves that they have been abused—by counting the number of weekly deaths from excision, or by recounting the resulting difficulty in childbirth, or by complaining that while husbands support FGM, they favor the sensation of a complete vulva. It occurs to none of these women that even the concept of mutilation may be inherently damaging or subjugating without the attached risks. What Malian society needs is a distaff system of corporeal demystification and celebration—only a culture saturated with intense yonic fear could view asexualizing violence as empowering.

[Mrs. Goundo's Daughter premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Look Into My Eyes

The title of Naftaly Gliksberg's Look Into My Eyes is an overt reference to its climax, in which the director—outside the courtroom where Holocaust denier Horst Mahler is standing trial—compels one of Mahler's "followers" to stare into his eyes, an act the man doggedly avoids because "Jewish people are part of the devil." Yet moreover, the documentary's moniker functions as an articulation of Gliksberg's modus operandi of visiting an assortment of locales (some of which he has ties to) and candidly discussing prevailing attitudes about Jews and Israel.

Given that the director places himself squarely in the camera's gaze, as well as chooses certain extreme-case examples who deliver familiar over-the-top soundbites, the doc resembles Bill Maher's button-pushing nonfiction comedy Religulous. Whereas Maher approached his non-representational interviewees with condescension, however, Gliksberg proceeds with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and dismay, the latter becoming increasingly palpable during chats with people who profess fondness for Jews and then advocate ugly, clichéd stereotypes. A West Virginian big shot with the white supremacist National Alliance—whose anti-Semitism is of a predictable sort—proves far less chilling than a nearby church pastor who assures Gliksberg about his tolerance, only to then add that Israelis are a rude lot who only treat Christians well in order to earn their tourist money, and that by not following the 1914 Balfour Declaration the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.

Still, by only cursorily concentrating on himself, the son of an Israeli rabbi who cast aside his orthodoxy (and his religious wife) upon moving to Paris in his early 20s, Gliksberg forgoes providing highly personal context that might have made up for the haphazard nature of his inquiry, which plucks out topics—the 1991 Crown Heights conflict between blacks and Jews, a notorious French comedian—seemingly at random. Though positioned more as one man's private investigation than as a definitive survey of current global anti-Semitism, the film somewhat falters on both counts, expressing its grief and horror over the persistence of irrational hate frankly and poignantly, but via an easy-target framework from which one can draw only superficial conclusions.

[Look Into My Eyes premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Afghan Star

Afghan Star sets out with a delectably postmodern agenda: Closely following four contestants in the eponymous television program, Afghanistan's burqa-busting answer to American Idol, the documentary compassionately argues that one region's pop detritus is another's ideological maturation. After NATO chased the Taliban out of their war torn, totalitarian playground at the urging of the U.S. in 2001, remaining inhabitants were faced with the perplexing novelty of freedom of speech—at least as far as the Qur'an would allow. Broadcasting companies were quickly organized but overcome with the awkwardness of rebuilding media outlets after nearly two generations of stifled silence. The solution was, naturally, to seek a preexisting entertainment model and adapt it for Islamic viewers, and since a flood of American imports had already captivated the celebrity-starved nation, Afghan Star was developed—not only as a source of euphonic escapism, but as a sly way of uniting Afghanistan's collection of perpetually embattled provinces (contestants on the show are drawn from as many diverse corners of the country as possible).

Director Havana Marking's social observations resonate most effectively when she concentrates on the titular TV show itself, and its widespread cult, much of which diagonally illuminates the political context of the populous. After years of enduring unrewarded labor and ubiquitous terrorism, even the most indigent and rural of citizens are obsessed with which member of the ragtag pool of singers on Afghan Star will go home next, especially since the population's own text message votes make the choices. And the performers themselves—despite appearing astoundingly aged in spite of their twentysomethingness—seem to represent the resurrection of what has been for the last 30 years a dormant Afghan culture: A conservative but nonetheless jubilant and even campy musical celebration of Middle-Eastern consciousness (connecting these dots for us, the film shows clips of hilariously kinetic mid-'80s music videos from Afghani TV, most of which sound and look like outtakes from "Addicted to Love"-era Robert Palmer).

There are also, however, reminders that Afghanistan doesn't need the Taliban to subjugate women—they can manage it well enough on their own. Setara, a youthful female contestant, doffs her head-wrap during a passionate number and dances with her hair freely jostling along to her hip rotations. The response from even the girl's fans is spontaneously brutal, with droves of Afghan Star viewers willing to uphold their Muslim taboos with the death penalty. This subplot is essential to understanding the warped, transitional state of Afghan psychology, but it causes the film to lose focus and ethical perspective: Stalling the pop competition's optimistic trajectory, the directors occasionally even sink so low as to use the uncertainty of the alleged heretic's fate for visceral tension.

This misfired episode isn't quite enough to sour the entire documentary, but it does effectively curdle one of its most admirable points: That the voting system of Afghan Star could be viewed as nascent democracy. As the final winner is announced and the end credits roll our thoughts turn not to Thomas Paine or Montesquieu, but the sadistically topsy-turvy republic of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Regardless of the governing method, Islamic nations will forever function within the autocratic grip of intransigent fatwas.

[Afghan Star premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: My Neighbor, My Killer

Fast on the heels of Munyurangabo's brief New York run comes Anne Aghion's My Neighbor, My Killer, a documentary that, like Lee Isaac Chung's fictional film, examines the legacy of Rwanda's 1994 genocide. What the movies have in common is that, while directed by outsiders (Chung is Korean-American, Aghion French-American), both scrupulously avoid the glossy reductivism of higher-budget American productions that tend to render historical atrocity both overly familiar (because of recognizable genre tropes) and comfortably distant (because a lack of immediacy). While Chung uses local actors, films in the Kinyarwanda language, and confines the bulk of the action to a single local setting, Aghion deliberately avoids making concessions to viewers unfamiliar with the conflict and, with the exception of a few brief radio snippets, provides very little contextualizing information. Despite the films' weaknesses (in Munyurangabo, a last-minute plot development that seems to absolve the protagonist of having to kill, in My Neighbor a fragmented fly-on-the-wall perspective that, while illuminating, also risks a certain amount of confusion), what is at stake in the two projects is a new authenticity lacking from other Western treatments of the genocide, a respect for the Rwandan people and an understanding of the ways in which tragedy must give way to reconciliation in order for the devastated nation to continue.

Reconciliation is the watchword for the villagers in My Neighbor whether they like it or not. Aghion's video feature, her third project to treat the aftermath of the genocide, tracks the implementation of Gacaca, a unique judicial process instituted by the Rwandan government designed to force an understanding between victim and perpetrator, as it unfolds in a single village. A collection of filmed fragments taken over several years, My Neighbor begins with the release of several alleged war criminals from prison and their return to their native village where they live side-by-side with their victims. Then after eliding several years of (at least hypothetical) reintegration, Aghion films the villages holding open air trials in which townspeople stand up and directly confront the alleged murderers of their husbands and children.

Although the director takes a deliberately nonjudgmental approach, the trial process as it's presented seems of at least questionable efficacy. In the first stage, the returned prisoners mostly avoid contact with the victims and, in the second, mostly deny their direct involvement in atrocity. Along the way Aghion captures some revealing moments of conflict—a gathering in a makeshift bar in which victims sit beside an alleged perpetrator uneasily sharing a beer, the entire concluding trial sequence in which the words of the victims ring out with enough measured outrage to counter the defendants' weak denials—which speak more to the difficulty of reconciliation than to its possibility, or even desirability. If ultimately the work's fragments—like the Gacaca process itself—fail to fully cohere, then the project's privileged look into a unique experiment makes it at least valuable as a document in our ongoing understanding of the lasting implications of genocide.

[My Neighbor, My Killer premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Youth Producing Change

A second collection of short films created by youth from every far-flung corner of the world and packaged for the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Youth Producing Change is almost self-evidently something of a grab bag. But even if the point is obviously to celebrate the intent more than the final product, it's always surprising to hear the state of world affairs as reflected by those who, at least as far as politicians are typically concerned, see more than they tell. The opening piece, I Live in Mozambique, plays a little like a brief addendum to Jean Rouch's Moi, un Noir. Admittedly, Rouch's first-person ethnography took place on the other side of the continent in the Ivory Coast, but both films share a vibrant sort of optimism, all the more impressive in the case of Mozambique's Alcides for the fact that he has seen both his parents die in the previous year to AIDS. His is a rare sort of optimism that can admit his brother collects discarded bottles so he can fill them with contaminated water and sell them. On the flip side in every possible sense is Aquafinito, an American student's exposé of the bottled water industry and its Chinatown-esque machinations against humanity's inherent right to have access to public water supplies. Though it comes off a tad privileged when held against the likes of Mozambique, the animated fable Leila, or, closer to home, In My Shoes (a stylish and all-too-brief dual-pronged portrait of teen homelessness in New York City), Aquafinito is likely still more informative and thorough than any investigative journalism you're likely to see from most American mass media today. Nevertheless, the anthology's true heart reveals itself in pieces such as Noe's Story and Sako, unfettered and determined self-portraits of children who have to fight for their right to be represented by what remains one of the most powerful forms of mass communication in the entire world.

[Youth Producing Change premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Back Home Tomorrow

The documentary Back Home Tomorrow blazes out of the gates with a form/content double-shot—high-contrast, Meirellesian HD images capturing every spec of dirt and grue clinging to the petrified face and heaving torso of a seven-year-old Afghan boy injured after playing with an undetonated mine. "Call my father! I'm dying," he sobs, as premature awareness of his own mortality dawns incongruously on his cherubic face before directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini show the right arm that now ends at the halfway point and the flaps of skin that used to be his left hand's fingers. The boy, Murtaza, is at the center of two parallel stories. The other involves Yagoub, a 15-year-old boy refugee from Khartoum whose medical crisis—he needs an expensive surgery or else his heart will continue to expand within his chest, killing him within a year's time—is presented against the imposing aftermath of the second Sudanese Civil War. Lazzaretti and Santolini frame Yagoub's struggle against his own suggestively symbolic heart muscle within scenes depicting his mother's resigned reaction to the price tag ($5,000, which may as well be a million...and, in fact, is, in Sudanese pounds) and his community's emphasis on highly physical, full-contact masculinity (the filmmakers dwell at length on an almost balletic wrestling match). Both Murtaza and Yagoub are victims of war; the former is trapped inside a hospital during a long and painful rehabilitation, while the latter is kept outside by the alternately prohibitive and exploitive costs of medical care. That said, their stories are unique enough that one wishes they'd each been given their own individual film. While it doesn't diminish the inherent emotional power of each boy's plight to put them through the gauntlet of crosscuts, there is enough disjoint to put the entire project's narrative thrust in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Lazzaretti and Santolini are diligent enough documentarians that they capture moments of moral clarity, such as when the weeping mother of a mine victim thumbprints her consent to the surgery, using a piece of her own anatomy to allow doctors permission to remove the same piece from her son.

[Back Home Tomorrow premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Remnants of a War

"I should have a normal job," gripes a young Lebanese man to one of his teammates on a bomb-clearance squad in Remnants of a War, and the flat, unsentimental reply comes: "You talk like we're in Europe." In the wake of Israel's 33-day invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 (in response to Hezbollah kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, and only six years after Israel had withdrawn forces that had occupied Lebanon since 1982), thousands of cluster munitions fired or dropped in the southern part of the country had left uncounted unexploded "bomblets" in orchards, homes, and roads. With casualties mounting after residents returned from exile in Beirut, only to be maimed or killed by a hidden "dud" that was stepped on or dislodged, private companies recruited citizens to assume the bulk of "de-mining" patrols from an overwhelmed United Nations disposal unit. The title of Jawad Metni's documentary refers doubly to the legacy of the bomblets' menace and the crippled economy that forces the film's trainees to turn to bomb clearance—it's postwar Lebanon's only growth industry. (One engaged couple works together on a bomb team in the hope that their marriage will finally come off when they've earned enough to buy a house, after seeing earlier savings eaten up by wartime relocation and the fizzling of their pre-bombardment careers.) Academics and Human Rights Watch analysts place the population's struggles into historical and geopolitical context, and despite perhaps an excess of atmospheric down-time dancing scenes, Metni foregrounds the ever-present threat the Lebanese are trying to erase by punctuating his footage with isolated, medium-long shots of the crack and puff of another munition being detonated by the de-miners in a verdant, sunny landscape. Remnants of a War's explicit questions linger: What would another occupation bring, and when will Israel and the U.S. join 111 nations in signing a cluster-bomb ban agreement?

[Remnants of a War premieres June 17 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: In the Holy Fire of Revolution

On its surface, Masha Novikova's In the Holy Fire of Revolution, which follows the Russian chess champion and activist/politician Garry Kasparov as he and his comrades in The Other Russia movement wage a campaign battle against Vladimir Putin and his supporters, would suggest The War Room Russky-style. Unfortunately, the doc doesn't sizzle like its title, but merely fizzles out. Novikova, instead of digging deep into the heart of the former Soviet Union, is merely content to toe the party line, trotting out all the usual dissident suspects to needlessly remind us that Putin's Russia is a thug state. The main problem with Revolution is that it tells us nothing new, but merely shows us what anyone who's tuned in to any international media outlet since the turn of the century already knew. That Kasparov's contingent would hold their meetings in a crumbling, commie-drab building by candlelight since the electricity was cut off, and that a young mother working for the Kasparov side could be brutally attacked with a baseball bat, is sad, but not the least bit surprising or illuminating.

Not to mention the least bit cinematic—and trying to liven up the boring proceedings by interspersing footage of Kasparov's sedate chess matches with propagandistic rallies doesn't do much to help Novikova's cause. While white subtitles on a usually white background make the translation nearly impossible to discern, the straightforward interviews with Kasparov are even more frustrating. Here is a gregarious man every bit as media savvy as Vladimir Putin, who knows when to play the strongman and how to soothe an insulted war vet. And yet Kasparov's manipulation of his own image—revealed when he shows a photojournalist which poses work best—doesn't even occur until an hour and a half into the film! Though The Other Russia refers to the 85% of the population not benefiting economically from Putin's reign, Novikova's exclusive focus on Kasparov and his fight for this hardworking silent majority comes at the expense of the other 15% that could have given her doc the dramatic tension it sorely lacks.

Indeed, Kasparov's party's first clash with Putin's supporters doesn't happen until a full 45 minutes into the film. And Revolution only gets interesting when Kasparov begins to lose his chess player's cool, calling members of Putin's Young Guard "worthless" people with "vacant eyes." And speaking of youth, where is the Internet in all this political organizing? While Kasparov is forever complaining that state-run media keeps his message from getting heard, not once is anyone in The Other Russia shown attempting to organize young activists online. With such wild accusations of Kasparov as an "American pawn" and a "journalist for The Washington Post" being thrown by Putin's youth movement, there is no doubt that these "vacant-eyed" twentysomethings are tuning in and logging on. So if anemic activist filmmaking like this, as uninspired as the monotonous protests that probably make Putin chuckle, is any indication of Russian apathy, it's no wonder the chess champ lost to a master political player—who won with the same percentage of the total vote as the number of squares on a chessboard.

[In the Holy Fire of Revolution premieres June 15 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Kabuli Kid

Kabuli Kid boasts the neorealism of contemporary Iranian cinema (and its American practitioners, like Ramin Bahrani), a mode that lends its story authenticity even during excessively didactic moments. In a beaten-up Kabul where citizens bemoan the fallout of U.S. bombings with a resignation born from familiarity with conflict, taxi driver Khaled (Hadji Gul) picks up a woman wearing a blue veil, who then leaves her newborn son in his cab. Unable to find the missing mother, Khaled—who criticizes women for covering their faces, yet nonetheless treats his wife as a servant and openly wishes she had begat him sons instead of daughters—finds himself stuck with the infant. It's a scenario Afghan director Barmak Akram mines for neither cutesy humor nor undue mawkishness, the filmmaker delivering a story not about a man redeemed by an adorable cherub, but rather, about the grim realities of life in war-ravaged Kabul. Losing work and income because of his babysitting duties, the strain compounded by his father's complaints about his chosen job, Khaled goes to increasingly desperate and unpleasant ends to relieve himself of his newfound burden, attempting to pass off on others the problem that's landed in his lap.

The film's socio-political chatter frequently lacks subtlety, raising issues with a bluntness at odds with the otherwise patient, naturalistic atmosphere. If too eager to italicize its larger concerns, however, the film's attention to detail is redeeming, frankly capturing a national mood comprised of pride, bitterness, self-interest, and defeatism. The exploitative greed of Kabul's marketplace vendors operates hand-in-hand with the not-my-problem selfishness exhibited by social service workers, with Akram depicting his milieu and its inhabitants as struggling to face the obligations that arise from their complicated circumstances. Refusing to resort to bogus uplift, the director posits characters as recognizably flawed individuals, and his tale as one—ending with the articulation of a child's name—whose happy ending remains in question.

[Kabuli Kid premieres June 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Snow

The desolate and benumbed shell of an eastern Bosnian village in 1997 is the setting for Snow, as a population of a dozen survivors of the Balkan strife—save for one elder, all women and children—wait in vain for their missing husbands and children to return. Young widow Alma (Zana Marjanovic), occupied with the daily work of preparing fruit and vegetables for difficult-to-reach markets, is seen in recurring sequences twisting her scarf slowly around her head, bathing her limbs hurriedly en route to morning prayer, attempting to crowd out her fresh trauma with the everyday. She and her fellow mourners are pushed to resolve their pain when a Serbian representative of foreign developers offers to buy their land, touching off existential confrontations within the community as well as in the hearts of these scarred mothers and wives, who venerate even the eyeglasses and disposable razors left behind by their lost mates. Director Aida Begic does well in establishing the women's dogged labor as grief put into memorial, kinetic action, as well as with the magical-realist figure of the village's sole, terrified young boy, whose rapidly growing hair and panicked dashes through the countryside are spurred by the terror of his nightmares. Less smooth is the heavy weight put on the visiting land-sale agents, whose final confrontation with the matriarchs leads to an awful revelation and the falling of the previously allusive snow. Alma's punishing, weak-hearted mother-in-law (Vesna Masic) unexpectedly rallies from illness to unleash her will to remain in her native place; told condescendingly, "You deserve better living conditions," she snaps, "Yeah!" and orders the land buyers about like lackeys. Snow finds unity of purpose in different responses to its villagers' tragic inheritance—the Muslim elder's "Allah sees it all," and Alma's visceral answer to what constitutes a normal existence: "Us."

[Snow premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Crude

At the center of Joe Berlinger's Crude are distressing images of Ecuador's Amazonian soil and water turned sludgy and toxic from foreign oil drilling. Concisely and infuriatingly illustrating the link between ecological devastation and corporate colonialism, these scabrous views of rainforest-turned-waste-pits are the starting point for the veteran documentarian's tough-minded chronicle of a court case that has spun decades and showcased the most viscous effects of conglomerate interest. The protracted tug of war depicted is between Ecuadorean activists (led by lawyer Pablo Fajardo and environmentalist Luis Yanza) and Chevron over the contaminating effects of the oil company's maneuvers on the land. Despite 30,000 indigenous people acting as plaintiffs and Chevron's own estimation of 17 million gallons of spilled petrol, the class action lawsuit endures endless delays, judicial labyrinths, and prevaricating officials.

Following a still-unresolved case over the course of three years, Berlinger gives voice to both sides of the conflict. As personal accounts of birth defects and cancerous deaths contrast with Chevron spokespersons denying effects and passing blame, however, the outraged compassion in the filmmaker's reportage becomes evident. A polished and haunting work of humanistic journalism, the film is passionate enough to follow its subjects in the ground-level combat of street demonstrations and office showdowns, and astute enough to understand the important roles a Vanity Fair article or a Trudie Styler endorsement can play in a cause. Crude is both a tribute to human-rights tenacity and a sobering account of the multinational-Moloch greed that can keep justice in limbo.

[Crude premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Age of Stupid

Looking back from the vantage point of a devastated, CG-crafted future, Franny Armstrong's cautionary climate change tale The Age of Stupid outlines the present day ills that, in the film's hypothetical setting, effectively made the world uninhabitable by 2055. As the Sydney opera house burns and the Taj Mahal lies in ruins, Pete Postlethwaite sits in the global archives—a digital repository of all that's valuable in our vanished civilization—recording a jeremiad against our current age of willful ignorance. In between teary laments, the actor, playing some combination of last survivor and himself, introduces clips from the archive, documentary snippets from the present day that make up the bulk of the film's content.

Taking the form of individual profiles, these segments chronicle the collateral damage of global warming and its principal agent, the unending quest for oil (Iraqi children seeking refuge from the war in Jordan, a Nigerian village decimated by Shell's involvement in their area) as well as the efforts of a few activists to combat climate change, both locally and globally. But if Armstrong seems to endorse these gestures of individual activism, her film nonetheless registers a largely pessimistic attitude toward their efficacy, as in a lengthy segment chronicling the dogged efforts and eventual defeat of one man's project to install a wind powered farm in the English countryside. Only a global system of carbon rationing, a plan outlined in a voiceover interlude, seems to earn Armstrong's full endorsement as a means of averting the film's imagined apocalypse, but given the oil companies' stranglehold on world government that the director outlines throughout the movie, the implementation of such a program seems hopelessly quixotic.

Moving between macro-level interludes and micro-level portraits, framed by a worst case future scenario (though one that, per an introductory title, is "based on mainstream scientific projections"), Age of Stupid communicates something of the massive global impact of our careless, though officially encouraged, consumption as well as the human cost of such a program, even if Armstrong's outsized ambitions threaten to dissipate some of the movie's force. Still, while steeped in an inevitable negativity, her film is nothing if not rousing (though less through its sci-fi scare tactics and more via its portrait of the widespread damage already being inflicted on the planet), and if its mode is unapologetically didactic, then in a society in which 60 percent of the people believe, scientific evidence to the contrary, that man has no appreciable impact on climate change, then perhaps a round of didacticism is precisely what we need.

[The Age of Stupid premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try a Gun

A good friend of mine worked at Planned Parenthood on the West Coast a few years ago. Though she was and still is fiercely pro-choice, she eventually left the clinic because administering abortions, even early ones, was too emotionally and mentally taxing for her. It never occurred to me that her job might have put her in physical danger, or that the protesters she encountered daily (it was a conservative town, after all) might have had some sort of impact on her decision to leave. In fact, she never even mentioned the picket lines to me. I spoke to her last night and asked if she'd ever felt at risk while working at the clinic. She told me she always felt safe. She also asked me not to mention her name in this piece.

Of course, my friend worked at Planned Parenthood during the Bush administration, which enacted the first federal law criminalizing second-trimester abortions and which went so far as to define birth control as abortion. The pro-life movement was getting what it wanted, and according to the National Abortion Federation, the number of reported death threats, clinic bombings, and attempted murders of clinic employees decreased between 2001 and 2008.

That all changed when, after losing control of the House in 2006, the right lost both the Senate and the White House last November. Since then, there has been an uptick in rightwing extremist violence. Threats against abortion providers reportedly spiked in January and have continued to increase throughout the first half of the year, coming to national attention less than two weeks ago with the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed legal late abortions and who was gunned down in his own church by Scott Roeder, a known member of the anti-abortion movement. Tiller became the first death at the hands of anti-abortion extremists in 11 years—and the eighth since Roe vs. Wade.

It's important to call Tiller's murder, and the thousands of other acts of violence, vandalism, burglaries, kidnappings, stalkings, threats, and mischief that have taken place in the name of the anti-abortion movement, what they are: acts of domestic terrorism. Indeed, Tiller's murder was a political act, as was the shooting of a security guard at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday. James von Brunn is a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Holocaust denier; he is also a convicted felon, which means the .22-caliber rifle he used to murder Stephen Tyrone Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was obtained illegally.

Both Roeder and von Brunn were seemingly lone wolves, but they are part of a larger movement of rightwing extremism that has emerged from the dark, shadowy corners of this country in recent months and which was accurately and prudently forecasted by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis earlier this year. The report, unambiguously titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," cited a perfect storm of economic hard times, the election of a black president, the promise of social change, and the return of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans susceptible to the recruitment of white-power militias, as grounds for the alert. It was eloquently referred to as a "piece of crap report" by the likes of this piece of crap blogger, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was forced to issue an apologia of sorts—despite the fact that the study was started during the previous administration.

That Roeder and von Brunn may have been lone wolves does not absolve others in the ideological groups to which they belong from culpability. Anti-abortion organizations with which Roeder is affiliated are indeed responsible. Operation Rescue—whose founder, Randall Terry, claimed that the anti-abortion movement was not responsible for Tiller's murder and then in the same breath proclaimed that the doctor "reaped what he sowed"—claims that Roeder has never been a member, contributor, or volunteer for their organization. But convicted terrorist and current Operation Rescue senior policy advisor Cheryl Sullenger has admitted to having multiple phone conversations with Roeder about Dr. Tiller. According to Rachel Maddow, who has admirably refused to let the story die while most mainstream news outlets have, Operation Rescue kept tabs on Tiller both on its website and on Sullenger's Twitter account. And as is evidently the practice of many anti-abortion groups, the organization posted the addresses for both Tiller's private home and church on its website. His church. What other purpose would it serve to post that information other than to furnish activists and extremists—that is, would-be assassins—with the necessary information to commit their crimes?

And crimes are exactly what these people are committing. In a piece for Air America, "Dr. George Tiller Didn't Have to Die," Amy Goodman detailed Roeder's offenses, including gluing shut the doors of a nearby clinic twice during the week leading up to Tiller's death, and suggested that simple law enforcement could have prevented the gruesome murder. Both Goodman and Maddow have called attention to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes blocking or damaging an abortion clinic's entrance a federal crime. FACE went largely unenforced under George W. Bush and clearly remains ineffective today.

Last night, Michigan representative Mike Rogers told Chris Matthews that crimes by fringe extremists like Roeder and von Brunn have "no connection to mainstream politics." But the rhetoric that propels, emboldens, and even creates these monsters comes directly from the mouths of the Republican establishment. Bill O'Reilly made repeated reference to "Tiller the Baby Killer" on his TV show, claiming that the doctor "execut[ed] babies about to be born," and compared his practice to the slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Von Brunn believes that Barack Obama isn't an American citizen, that—according to his own website—the president was "sent" to the United States to further the "Jew/Negro" agenda. In February, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby questioned Obama's citizenship, telling a local resident "I haven't seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president." And as recently as this week, the unofficial "Voice of the GOP," Rush Limbaugh, declared that the only thing Obama has in common with God is that "neither of them has a birth certificate."

This kind of incendiary race baiting and hate speech might be good entertainment, but it makes for risky politics. And it puts human lives at risk. Those on the left have been gleeful that the GOP is drumming itself out of the mainstream, but the right has been incessantly drumming a dangerously bigoted beat for months, propagating the kind of myths, lies, and conspiracy theories on which those on the outer fringes feed, breed, and kill.

PJ Harvey and John Parish: The Beacon Theatre, NYC - June 9, 2009

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court

"Without justice, people have no respect for each another," one victim of the atrocities in the Congo offers in Pamela Yates's The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court. "If this is left unpunished, it will happen again," he adds. Opening the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival with a whimper rather than a bang (as did last year's underwhelming cinematic salvo), Yates's film follows ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his dedicated deputies as they seek to bring to trial the worst of the worst war criminals of our time. Unfortunately, the doc is no fascinatingly addictive character study a la Sin City Law writ large, but rather a clinical procedural better suited to classroom use than for theatrical release.

The problem with a dry, straightforward examination of the ICC, established in 2002, is that its daily workings, like that of any bureaucratic body, move at a snail's pace. Sure, traveling to Uganda to investigate the Lord's Resistance Army (one of the ICC's first cases), then to the Congo, Colombia, and finally Darfur, gives the film a global context, but simply talking to victims in those countries to gather evidence is not as visceral an experience as actually witnessing those crimes through a photojournalist's lens. A picture is worth a thousand words and Reckoning has more substantive words than compelling images. And this lack of artistry in the filmmaking is actually hurting Yates's cause. It's hard to see how many would be driven to log onto her "IJCentral social network for global justice," a link for which is given at the end of the film, merely by watching overworked prosecutors watch atrocity footage on computers at their sleek, modern desks. The effect is less disturbing than distancing.

As is the numerous scenes of those justice seekers sitting around tables pouring over the cases. Shots of monolithic government buildings seen while a description is given of the involvement of Colombia's top officials in the paramilitaries are uninventive. A scene of soldiers standing around (as the word "Paramilitary" superfluously appears onscreen) is as ho-hum as the oft-repeated historical footage of the Nuremberg Tribunal and of Argentina's trial of its Junta. Rather than grab us by the throats and hearts, Yates's unemotional doc has the effect of lulling us into complacency. Even the sad string score and soothing sound of the smooth narration—seemingly taken from a textbook, with lines like "This court would be shaped by the office of the prosecutor" spoken as if the narrator were addressing a middle school class—do nothing to make us want to learn more about this critical institution that faces as much apathy and antagonism from the global community as it does from the international baddies. If the best the director can do to represent the ICC is to cut from press conference speeches to boardroom meetings (between the ICC and NGOs, between the ICC and the communities seeking justice, between the ICC and the UN), it's doubtful the film will tilt the snubbing superpowers of Russia, China, and the United States into joining. Reckoning renders this crucial judiciary of last resort about as inspiring as a conference call.

[The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court premieres June 12 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]