/

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2007

This year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival features one of the strongest lineups in the program’s history.

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2007
Photo: Zeitgeist Films

This year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, a co-presentation between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Human Rights Watch, features one of the strongest lineups in the program’s history. Twenty films and three shorts, in addition to a special New Visions screening of two works-in-progress (A Jihad for Love and Project Kashmir), decorate this 18th edition of the festival. Among the New York premieres: the Algerian War drama Mon Colonel, co-written by Costa-Gavras; Carla’s List, about prosecutor Carla Del Ponte’s daunting journey to pursue criminals who perpetuated crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia; Election Day, which charts incidents of voter fraud, disenfranchisement and general ineptitude during our 2004 presidential election; and Manufactured Landscapes (pictured above), which ruminates, according to the program, on “the aesthetics and social and spiritual dimensions of globalization around the world today” in a manner evocative of Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread. For a full schedule of films and ticket information please see the festival’s main program. Ed Gonzalez


Banished (Marco Williams, 2005)

We were unable to preview Banished before the publication of this feature, but the subject of Marco Williams’s documentary, a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize at the last Sundance Film Festival, is thought-provoking. The film allows the director to explore the legacy of slavery in small towns in Georgia, Missouri, and Arkansas, where African-American families were violently thrown out of their homes by their white neighbors in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Banished will play once on Thursday, June 21 at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival before returning to New York City on October 10 at Film Forum. Gonzalez


Carla’s List (While Marcel Schüpbach, 2006)

Carla’s List observes the 2005 efforts of International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to locate and bring to trial the outstanding seven fugitive war criminals under arrest. “I stay out of politics,” claims Del Ponte, but the film’s behind-the-scenes access to her day-to-day work at The Hague reveals otherwise, as politics proves a constant hindrance to her work’s completion. The hypocrisy of countries pledging support for the detainment of Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ante Gotovina (Del Ponte’s prime targets), yet simultaneous refusing to productively aid in their capture, underscores the prosecutor’s quest, which must, by mandate, be concluded by late 2007. While Marcel Schüpbach effectively uses his up-close-and-personal footage to reveal the barriers to Del Ponte’s success, his non-admittance into various closed-door conferences and secret meetings—and consequent use of narration to fill in the gaps—weakens the fly-on-the-wall film’s you-are-there dramatic urgency. Nonetheless, the director pinpoints his subject’s tireless pursuit of justice as a force besieged by diplomatic convenience and selfishness, and one that remains steadfast even in the face of continuing setbacks as well as criticisms from the media and the Mothers of Srebrenica, who question whether justice is possible 10 years after the loss of their relatives. Their anger and frustration are entirely justified, though as the film illustrates, the target of their disappointment and disgust shouldn’t be the indefatigable Del Ponte, but rather an international community too slow to stop genocide, and then too self-interested to apprehend its perpetrators. Nick Schager


City of Photographers (Sebastián Moreno, 2006)

Cameras serve as instruments (if not outright weapons) of social protest and retaliation in Sebastián Moreno’s City of Photographers, a nonfiction account of the Chilean photographers who took to the streets to document demonstrations and military brutality during Pinochet’s reign of terror in the 1980s. As Moreno’s father was one of those brave guerrilla photojournalists, his film is not only a historical record but also a personal tribute to those who risked life and limb to expose the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the country’s ruthless dictator. Interviews with the camera-wielding rebels in question intermingle with their stark black-and-white snapshots and television footage of the era’s urban turmoil. Complementing the notion that photographs were agents of change is Moreno’s representation of these pictures—via mothers wearing portraits of their murdered children on their lapels—as acts of remembrance and revitalization defiantly opposed to Pinochet’s methodical process of murderous erasure. The documentary ably captures resistance to tyranny at its most courageous (and self-sacrificial). Equally impressively, however, is that the film manages to remain reverential while tackling both the confliction and guilt felt by some of its self-critical subjects, as well as the corrupting seductiveness of lethal conflict, the latter point via admissions that the addictive rush of facing and overcoming one’s fear of death led some to question whether they were, in one candid photographer’s words, “becoming some kind of blood creep with no values. Was I picturing pain for my own glory?” Schager

Advertisement


Cocalero (Alejandro Landes, 2006)

Coca is currency in Bolivia, so one concrete (and unintended) consequence of our country’s War on Drugs, with its brutal eradication program in the 1990s which sent marines and local military to uproot and napalm coca farms, was to unify popular resistance into a mass movement. Organizing themselves into unions, Bolivian peasant coca farmers finally succeeded in electing one of their own, Aymara Indian Evo Morales, as the country’s first socialist and indigenous president. In the vivid and fluently shot Cocalero, a finalist for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Brazilian-born documentarian Alejandro Landes and Venezuelan-Spanish cameraman Jorge Manrique Behrens tag along as the dynamic yet accessible populist wages his 2006 electoral campaign from the storm-clouded mountains of Cochabamba to the steamy forests of El Chapare. While the burly candidate shrewdly watches for signs of yankee-instigated coups d’état and fields trick questions from right-wing TV personalities (“If you are elected, will we be invaded by Cubans?”), local unions conduct voting rehearsals for the unlettered. Top quality visuals convey his supporters’ energy and the movement’s optimism, right up to a crossroads moment as Evo locks arms with Fidel and an especially exuberant Hugo Chávez. Robert Keser


The Devil Came on Horseback (Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, 2007)

Jangaweed is Arabic for “devil on a horse.” Do not forget that name—or its translation. In the Darfur region of Sudan, the Jangaweed, a militia group sponsored by the government, has been largely responsible for the genocide that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced from their homes. Directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, whose documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt is currently in theatrical release, The Devil Came on Horseback explores the tragedy in Darfur through the eyes of a marine captain, Brian Steidle, who took a job with the African Union, armed only with “a camera, pen, and paper.” After the area exploded in violence, a heroic Steidle shunned his role as an impartial observer in order to shed new light on the genocide, photographing the horrors committed against Darfur’s black Africans and interviewing members of the Jangaweed who readily admit to being funded by officials in Khartoum. Sundberg and Stern’s aesthetic is seemingly indebted to Tony Scott (sketchy uses of speculative sound effects, fancy camera angles and whip flashes, and an over-reliance on maps and typewritten fonts), but their insult is not so grand as that of the international community’s inaction in the region. Devil Came on Horseback both explains the rationale for the chaos in Darfur in terms we can all understand and asks us to follow Steidle’s lead by demanding our leaders to act now in order to save the helpless people of Darfur. God help us if we don’t. Gonzalez


Election Day (Katy Chevigny, 2007)

On November 2, 2004, the day of the Bush-Kerry showdown, filmmaker Katy Chevigny deployed a dozen-plus film crews across a great swath of the country, from Wisconsin to Florida, to track a cross-section of the American citizenry exercising their franchise. The result is the masterful verité documentary Election Day, which cuts across race, class, and ethnicity to give us a snapshot of a politically-informed and galvanized America. Included in this dense fabric: a bulldog-like Chicago poll-watcher; American-Indian activists struggling to turn the tide of their community’s traditionally low turnout; a Muslim woman urging her family to vote; lower-class black voters weary and frustrated by polling discrepancies; an ex-felon casting his ballot for the first time; working-class parents struggling to make ends meet, cynical of America’s widening economic gap; and an Australian election observer, clearly concerned about the intolerably long voter wait-times, and inadequately equipped polling stations. Underscoring all these stories is their subjects’ enduring and passionate belief in democracy. For her open-hearted yet gently caustic style, Chevigny proves herself a worthy inheritor of Frederick Wiseman and his Direct Cinema compatriots. The verité sights and sounds give us a charming, engrossing glimpse of everyday America, and, in the shrewdness with which they’re cut together, offer an unmistakable critique of the voting system, and—seen three years since the Bush reelection—of the tragic path we’ve been led down since. Jay Antani


Enemies of Happiness (Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem, 2006)

Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem’s hour-long documentary Enemies of Happiness details the final stages of Malalai Joya’s 2005 campaign (in the first democratic election held in 35 years) for a seat on the Afghanistan parliament. Joya lives in what can only be described as a constant, ever-mutating state of threat. The curtains on the windows of her apartment are always drawn, blocking out both the sun and the prying eyes of anyone who might wish her harm. She has staunchly and publicly decried the identity-obliterating nature of the burka, but wears one, nonetheless, as a protective measure during her occasional journeys into the outside world. A consummate politician, Joya campaigns publicly in the safest towns and privately via television and Hal Phillip Walker-like audio recordings. She is also a tireless confidant to and arbiter for various Afghan citizens, intervening in one couple’s vicious divorce proceedings and counseling a young girl who is to be married against her will. A 100-year-old woman walks two hours from her village to pay homage to Joya, offering herbal medicine and recollecting her days as a planter of land mines. She speaks of Joya’s democratic ideals with a gleam in her eyes. No mere hagiography, Enemies of Happiness is more an anecdotal collection of personal incident and action that culminates in a series of harshly realized truths. Even in victory, Joya recognizes the things that have been sacrificed and lost in her pursuit of the moral high ground, and as she takes her seat among the 200-plus members of the Wolesi Jirga, an all new threat emerges: the prospect of anonymity amid the myriad voices of a damaged nation. All that has come before is mere prelude. It is here, to paraphrase Western playwright Tony Kushner, that the great work begins. Keith Uhlich

Advertisement


Everything’s Cool (Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, 2007)

Everything’s not cool. That’s the message of Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand’s ironically titled doc, which hopes to further close the gap that separates what scientists know about our global warming and what the general public does not. Gold and Helfand’s aesthetic largely subscribes to the Michael Moore School of Filmmaking, with peppy graphics and subject-appropriate pop songs like “She Blinded Me With Science” used to reinforce points that really don’t need much reinforcement—at least not for anyone who’s beyond sold on the issue that our environment is fucked. Still, Everything’s Cool understands that a pretty face like Jake Gyllenhaal’s in The Day After Tomorrow is sometimes necessary to sell an important story, and the documentary is notable for continuing where An Inconvenient Truth left off, delving into the political censorship that has kept global warming a non-issue in the United States for so long, and doing so through a uniquely character-driven method that shows how foot soldiers like Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan and Weather Channel climate expert Heidi Cullen continue to fight the good fight against ghouls whose hands are in the pockets of the country’s gas and oil companies. Gonzalez


Hot House (Shimon Dotan, 2006)

In Hot House, Romanian-Israeli documentarian Shimon Dotan takes a hard-nosed look at the social and political culture of Palestinians doing time in a high-security Israeli prison. It’s an intense experience, not only for its content, but its breathless approach as Dotan explores as many angles to the Israeli-Palestinian issue as he can pack into each moment. Particularly striking is the astonishing level of access Dotan seems to have had. He interviews a wide canvas of prisoners (many of whom are serving multiple life terms) who speak openly of the reason for their incarceration (most commonly, their collaboration in suicide bombings), the inner workings of prison life, and the general state of the Palestinian struggle. As a polemical backdrop, Dotan uses the 2006 Palestinian elections—a contest that saw the radical policies of Hamas gaining ground over the more moderate Fatah party. Brilliantly shot, edited, and executed, Dotan’s documentary accomplishes a portrait of two sides locked in a cycle of vicious, violent futility, in which the children and wives of the imprisoned suffer the most (a visitation scene is particularly wrenching to watch). For a full review click here. Antani


A Jihad for Love (Parvez Sharma, 2007)

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival collaborates for the first time with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program to showcase scenes “from two much-anticipated films supported by the DFP that explore the question of faith and the Muslim experience today.” The first is Jihad for Love, directed by Parvez Sharma and produced by Sandi Simcha DuBowksi (Trembling Before G-d). Filmed in 12 different countries and in nine languages, the documentary is described as exploring the “complex global intersections of Islam and homosexuality.” For more information on the film, click here. The second film in this New Visions “work-in-progress” program (screening only once on June 16) is Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel’s Project Kashmir. Gonzalez


A Lesson of Belarusian (Miroslaw Dembinski, 2006)

A Lesson of Belarusian is first and foremost a rousing little testimonial to the activist chutzpah of a group of Belarusian students trying to promote opposition to the dictatorship of President Alexander Lukashenko. It is also—unintentionally and somewhat distractingly—a substantiation of Borat’s outrageous aesthetic. At least during sections culled from the guerilla work of its student subjects, it becomes necessary to erase the Sacha Baron Cohen comic vehicle from the mind to truly appreciate Miroslaw Dembinski’s documentary. A Lesson of Belarusian lacks for focus, and though foreigners may cry out for background into Belarus’s political nightmare, it is nonetheless successful at capturing a country gripped in terror by the “ambitious sticks” of Lukashenko’s militia, promoting a brand of fearless opposition that we can all understand. A Lesson of Belarusian will have its New York premiere at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, preceded by the shorts Pizza Surveillance Feature and Virtual Freedom. Gonzalez

Advertisement


Lumo (Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Nelson Walker III, 2007)

Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Nelson Walker III’s powerful Lumo brings attention to the women, all victims of rape, in war-torn eastern Congo, undergoing treatment at HEAL Africa, an NGO dedicated to helping those brutalized by sexual violence. For the physical and psychological damage it inflicts, rape is a diabolical—and relatively little discussed—instrument of war. Perlmutt’s documentary bravely sheds light on the war’s silent sufferers. In particular, he singles out the eponymous Lumo, a shy young village woman, who endures one operation after another in hopes of repairing the catastrophic tearing in her vaginal lining. Lumo is a window through which we get to know a clinic full of scarred but courageous women, and the activists determined to heal body, soul, and society at large. For her vulnerability, her innocence, her sense of hope, Lumo becomes both a symbol of the peace that is still possible, and a target for everything the war wants to destroy. This is, by nature, difficult material, and the tone, perhaps unavoidably, has an ennobled heft about it. That, in no way, takes away from the perseverance of these women to reclaim their lives, their dignity, and the compassion that informs Perlmutt’s project. Antani


Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, 2006)

The lengthy tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes is a thing of beauty. Mesmeric and mysterious, it takes in the seeming totality of a cavernous Chinese factory, and attains, by its close, a subtle and lasting sense of horror. It infects the senses and the mind in ways that recall the work of David Cronenberg, specifically his interrogative short film Camera. Like Cronenberg’s mini-masterpiece, Manufactured Landscapes is a film very much aware of its own existence, of the mechanisms that brought it about, yet it never again reaches the transcendental heights of this pre-credits prelude. The work of still-photographer Edward Burtynsky is the film’s ostensible subject, but Baichwal is more concerned with macro-meditating on the quickly deteriorating state of planet Earth. (The press notes, no surprise, lead off with enthused praise from Al Gore.) Baichwal’s technique is scattershot, at worst recalling the trance-doc pretensions of John & Jane Toll-Free, with which it shares a similarly problematic nightclub sequence (a cliché that should be retired post-haste: the discotheque as numbing seventh circle of hell). But there is plenty here to recommend, particularly Baichwal’s understated yet damning examination of Burtynsky, who is several times seen manipulating his subjects, via cash payoffs or god-like directives, for maximum effect. It reveals the great divide that quite often separates a globally conscious work of art from the anything-goes processes of its creator, a necessary observation and insight that Baichwal ultimately fails to direct at herself. Uhlich


Mon Colonel (Laurent Herbiet, 2006)

Applying his customary formula of exposing a controversial political injustice within a slick thriller framework, Costa-Gavras sets his script for Mon Colonel during the Algerian struggle for independence, notorious for France’s clandestine torture of suspected terrorists. Starting in the present with an uninvolving whodunit about the assassination of an authoritarian colonel, the film moves to extensive and more compelling flashbacks that etch out the escalating horror in 1956 as the imperious colonel bends a young adjutant to his will, forcing him to devise legal angles to justify his methods of fighting “the world war against communism and terrorism.” Olivier Gourmet, longtime collaborator of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers (who co-produced here), lost over 50 pounds to play this complex but volatile warrior who puts the command in commanding officer, while the tightly clenched Robinson Stévenin suffers as his conflicted protégé and the eightysomething Charles Aznavour springs an effective 11th-hour surprise. Handsomely shot in the Atlas mountains near Constantine, this directorial debut of Laurent Herbiet (assistant on Resnais’s last two films) looks elegant and certainly provokes plentiful parallels to today’s post-Abu Ghraib world, including an indictment of craven politicians who authorize emergency anti-terrorist laws in a purported mission to “civilize” the Arab world, though arguably America’s quagmire stems as much from its inexorable juggernaut of a war machine. Keser


Pizza Surveillance Feature (Micah Laaker, 2004)

Micah Laaker, a design manager for Yahoo! Developer Network, supplied the visual elements for this biting little commentary on privacy infringement scripted by Phil Gutis, Director of Legislative Communications at the American Civil Liberties Union. The short runs just a little over two minutes and traces how a man’s personal privacy is invaded while trying to order delivery. “If the Patriot Act continues to grow in scope, you may get more than mushrooms with your next pizza,” warns the program notes. Pizza Surveillance Feature, which can be viewed on AtomFilms, has been making the rounds since its completion in 2004 and was recently featured in Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism. Gonzalez

Advertisement


Project Kashmir (Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel, 2008)

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival collaborates for the first time with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program to showcase scenes “from two much-anticipated films supported by the DFP that explore the question of faith and the Muslim experience today.” The first is Parvez Sharma’s Jihad for Love and the second is Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel’s Project Kashmir, which Human Rights Watch heralds for exploring the “war between countries and war within oneself by delving into the fraught lives of young people caught in the social/political conflict of one of the most beautiful, and most deadly, places on earth—Kashmir.” For more information on Project Kashmir, click here. Both films will screen one time only (on June 16) as part of the festival’s “work-in-progress” program called New Visions. Gonzalez


The Railroad All-Stars (Chema Rodriguez, 2006)

Filmmaker Chema Rodriguez has a soft spot for the prostitutes plying their trade in La Línea, Guatemala. Angered by the injustices committed against them on an almost daily basis, these prostitutes form their own soccer team and make it all the way onto the evening news, if not into the hearts of the nation’s people. Rodriguez doesn’t illuminate the horrors these women suffer at the hands of customers, lovers, and police, or elaborate on the hypocrisy that has Las Estrellas eliminated from one soccer league, but she evinces great compassion for her subjects by allowing them to reminisce about the cruel pasts that clearly motivated their decisions to sell their bodies. These women are terrible soccer players, but their persistence is something remarkable. Take their team captain, for example, a gay man who, after being thrown out of his house by his parents, managed to finish high school by prostituting himself. He says, “I graduated with pure force between sodomies.” It may not be the most appropriate catch phrase for people wanting to let their freak flag fly, but it gets to the essence of these underdogs’ fierce persistence. Gonzalez


Sari’s Mother (James Longley, 2006)

Stuart Klawans writes of James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments: “No truth about the war can be found in [the film]. Longley discovers only truths—in individuals, in masses of people, in landscapes—that fit together provisionally, if at all. That is the heartbreaking lesson of Iraq in Fragments, and its indispensable art.” Sari’s Mother, a short work Longley culled from unused footage captured during the Iraq in Fragments shoot, follows a similar tack, though where Klawans might intuit profound heartbreak, I sense a vague and problematic reliance on aural/visual poetics. Taken on its own, Sari’s Mother is impressive only in its technical abstraction, in the way, for example, that Longley (working as his own cameraman and sound recordist) uses the audio tracks of his interview footage as voiceover counterpoint to sequences of young Sari (infected with AIDS due to a botched blood transfusion) and his stalwart mother negotiating the Iraqi medical system’s trickle-down bureaucracy, its highly selective ministrations made further tenuous by the ongoing sectarian war. I can’t fault Longley for bringing us closer to these individuals, but something is missing here, an intangible, non-aestheticized context that I suspect could only be provided by voluminous annotations and footnotes. Uhlich


Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2007)

The “society of fear” of post-9/11 America is the subject of Strange Culture, San Francisco native Lynn Hershman Leeson’s account of the Kafkaesque spiral experienced by college professor and conceptual artist Steve Kurtz after his wife died in her sleep in 2004 and his scientific studies were used to bring bio-terrorist charges against him. A mix of news footage and reenactment (with Thomas Jay Ryan and Leeson axiom Tilda Swinton appearing both as the real-life married couple and as themselves), with Kurtz himself commenting on his ordeal, the film is as much of a multimedia project as its subject’s exhibits (the man was prepping an interactive project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art at the time of his wife’s demise), with its engaged outrage tempered with a lightness of touch that rescues the film from being a picture of slogans. Fernando F. Croce

Advertisement


Suffering and Smiling (Dan Ollman, 2006)

In Suffering and Smiling, Nigerian playwright Osagiee Osaziee likens the state of political affairs in Africa to a story about mice who plan to outsmart a predatory cat by placing a bell around its neck; everyone knows what has to be done, but nobody has the guts to do it. This look at third world corruption refreshingly focuses on its material from an insider’s perspective (no Constant Gardener condescension here), painting a poignant image of a diverse populace well aware of their greedy leaders’ willingness to do the bidding of Western governments and corporations; the only thing that differentiates these embittered citizens is to what extent these injustices have eroded their spirits. Taking center stage is Femi Anikulapo Kuti, a political activist following in his father’s footsteps as he attempts to enlighten and empower his fellow Africans through the power of song. Bring the noise! Rob Humanick


The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, 2007)

The Unforeseen evokes the point-of-view of a divine being observing our species’ modern history and mourning what they’ve borne witness to. The development of Barton Springs in Austin, Texas is an undertaking of great economic potential, but it is one quickly impeded upon when Mother Earth responds to the tumorous presence of these entrepreneurs. Employing a dreamlike tone and lush, organic textures, the film suggests An Inconvenient Truth meets The New World (Terrence Malick serves as executive producer here and his presence is tangibly felt), and it is through this hypnotic interweaving of sight and sound that the film’s warnings against the excessive pillaging of our natural world take on a profound, spiritual resonance. Humanick


The Violin (Francisco Vargas Quevedo, 2005)

Humanity gets a fairer share in The Violin than in Bruno Dumont’s Flanders, and the wider variety of emotions on display makes the violence endured by the characters more affecting. Set during an unnamed Latin American country’s civil war, Francisco Vargas Quevedo’s film pits guerrilla rebels against oppressive military forces, with an elderly violinist (a wonderful Ángel Tavira) traveling between the two groups in an effort to help out his son, one of the rebels. The story’s penchant for peasant nobility and aged sagacity is kept in check by Vargas’s unsentimental admiration for the characters’ revolt, and by a sensitivity to the complex emotional connections of music that brings to mind Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp. Croce


Virtual Freedom (Gef Senz and Maung Maung Aye, 2006)

Virtual Freeom, by Australian filmmakers Gef Senz and Maung Maung Aye, is described by Human Rights Watch as “animation, exile and the internet—a Burmese love story online.” The five-minute video short, along with Micah Laaker’s Pizza Surveillance Feature, precedes Miroslaw Dembinski’s A Lesson of Belarusian, which screens on four different occasions during the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Gonzalez

Advertisement


We’ll Never Meet Childhood Again (Sam Lawlor and Lindsay Pollack, 2007)

The struggle for equal rights—particularly the modest desire to live with a hope for tomorrow—is given a heartbreaking voice in We’ll Never Meet Childhood Again. International support aided Romania in combating the effects of HIV during the 1990s, yet the country continues to struggle in caring for the ill and neglected. Through the NGO Health Aid Romania, willing couples adopt HIV-positive children—often four or more at a time—in an effort to give them the care, nourishment, medical attention, and love they need if they’re to have any hope of living through adulthood. A young death at the hands of the virus is an ever-present threat, making such altruistic actions and uninhibited love even more admirable. By deliberately interweaving specially recorded interview footage with archived home movies of these makeshift families, the filmmakers paint a moving portrayal of one society’s forgotten souls. Humanick


White Light/Black Rain (Steven Okazaki, 2007)

White Light/Black Rain opens with modern Hiroshima teens claiming ignorance about August 6, 1945, their cluelessness about the date of America’s atomic bombing providing context for the existence of Steven Okazaki’s documentary about the survivors (most of them kids at the time) of WWII’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. The film’s bedrock is first-hand recollections, all heartrending accounts of human anguish and endurance reinforced by archival photos and film footage. Eschewing any overt discussion of the decision to drop the nukes, the director nonetheless lets slip his own sympathies during a juxtaposition of devastated Hiroshima and celebratory Times Square which spuriously implies that American euphoria was over Japanese suffering rather than their loved ones’ escape from combat duty. However, aside from this misstep and cursory interviews with relevant American pilots and scientists, White Light/Black Rain is wrenching in its glimpses of past disaster and present sorrow, its subjects’ scars evident on their bodies as well as in their tremulous, morose voices. Okazaki’s doc is a project of commemoration, gracefully capturing the diverse sentiments felt about those momentous August days, from anger toward the U.S., to bitterness toward Japan’s leaders, to a feeling that death and destruction (even on such a massive scale) are an unavoidable facet of war. While the final, overarching attitude is one of warning, a This Is Your Life clip of a Japanese man uneasily reunited with an atom-bombing American pilot encapsulates the film’s more lingering impression: of surviving and healing as an ongoing (and, to some extent, impossible) process. Schager

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.