The truth, so the Gospel of John tells us, shall make you free. Maybe some day, but in the meantime the truth often imposes an obligation to act, which is why most people would prefer to remain in the dark. For many of the filmmakers and the subjects of their films in this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, neither ignorance nor inaction is an option.

Such is the case with James Nachtwey, who’s profiled in Christian Frei’s harrowing and poetic War Photographer (2001; January 26 at 1 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room). What could compel someone to journey to Rwanda and Kosovo to capture on film the most unspeakable images of human evil? Ambition? Sado-masochism? Voyeurism? Frei’s technique of filming ongoing trauma from the point of view of Nachtwey’s camera (a technical tour de force) and the scenes in which magazine editors discuss how to fine-tune the misery in one of Nachtwey’s photo essays suggest that the photographer might have such dubious motivations. But the man himself and his photographs dispel such doubts. Serene, detached, and utterly compassionate, Nachtwey states that his purpose is " to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference. "

The pictures didn’t do the trick when it came to Rwanda, where despite the dissemination of some of the most grotesque images of genocide since the Holocaust, 800,000 persons were butchered with machetes and hoes and the world remained indifferent. Steven Silver’s poignant The Last Just Man (2001; January 25 at 4 and 6 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston and January 29 at 7 and 9 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room, with the filmmaker in attendance this Saturday) tells the story from the point of view of Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission there. Constrained by UN directives largely imposed by a US that was gun-shy after the Mogadishu debacle, Dallaire could do little more than watch the nightmare unfold. His ashen and tearful impotence in the face of inhumanity perhaps mirrors our own.

Not all good intentions are for naught, however. In Afghanistan Year 1380 (2002; January 25 at 2 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston), Fabrizio Lazzaretti & Alberto Vendemmiati’s gritty, cinéma-vérité follow-up to Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin (2001), Italian surgeon Gino Strada and his British colleague, Kate Rowland, calmly tend grotesque injuries in their nonpartisan medical clinic in Kabul as the fortunes of war change around them. US B-52s cut the sky and victorious Northern Alliance troops chase the Taliban from the city as Strada and Rowland treat the wounded on both sides, and also the innocent children whose limbs have been blown away by landmines. The film ends with a dogged optimism that arises not so much from the prospects of peace and reconstruction as from the determined spirit of healers such as these.

In other cases, good intentions are not enough. Kurdish-American Jano Rosebiani’s Jiyan (2002; January 24 at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with the filmmaker in attendance) opens with images of the gassing of thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja as perpetrated by our then ally, Saddam Hussein. Strong stuff, and it raises the stakes for the film’s hero, Diyari, who has returned to his native Kurdistan from America to open an orphanage. He befriends two local kids, the disfigured little girl of the title (her name means " life " ) and her cousin Shérco, and takes in the bittersweet suffering of the town while avoiding troublesome flashbacks from his own past. First-time director Rosebiani is no Abbas Kiarostami, however, and except for a few striking images — a girl in a pink dress on a swing in the middle of nowhere — Jiyan is clumsy and mawkish.

A more artful and ambiguous account of an exile returning to a troubled homeland is Iranian/French director Reza Khatibi’s Seven Days in Tehran (2002; January 24 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts and January 30 at 7 and 9 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room, with the filmmaker in attendance this Friday). Khatibi himself plays an Iranian/French filmmaker, also named Reza, who’s heading a Paris TV crew making a documentary about Iranian youth in the wake of the election of progressive president Khatami. Reza, however, is much more uptight than the young people he interviews, and he cuts them off when they air their discontent. Meanwhile, Franck, a member of the crew, has met an old Iranian classmate from the Sorbonne who is terminally ill. A metaphor for the Iranian intelligentsia? Let’s hope not. The good news is that Khatibi’s fluid, handheld style is spontaneous, witty, and authentic.

If a little self-involved. But not when compared with Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi’s in August (2002; January 25 at 6 and 8 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room, as a co-presentation with the Boston Jewish Film Festival). In this diatribe against what the filmmaker sees as the cruelest month and a perfect metaphor for the seething rage and violence endemic to his country, Mograbi plays nearly all the roles — himself, his wife, the pissed-off producer of the film he hasn’t finished — as he ruefully examines Israeli society and his function in it. For a break, he ventures off to record what’s happening outside. What he finds would daunt Michael Moore: the people on the street — hawks, doves, soldiers, Arabs — turn from the object of their anger to confront the filmmaker and his camera.

James Longley’s Gaza Strip (2002; January 24 at 6 and 8 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston, with the filmmaker in attendance) offers a more objective look at the unending Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Longley filmed for three months in the tiny embattled territory of the title following the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister, recording without voiceover narration and in cinéma-vérité style the subsequent clashes between Palestinian residents and Israeli security forces.

The film focuses on the experiences of Mohammed, a cynical, stone-throwing, 13-year-old Palestinian newspaper boy. The images are brutal and absurd — a child eviscerated after playing with an unexploded warhead, Palestinians in vans and horse-drawn wagons trudging along the beach to avoid roadblocks. But devoid of any context beyond the headlines of the papers Mohammed delivers, Longley’s effort offers more provocation than clarity.

The events foregrounded in Gaza Strip provide the backdrop for the domestic drama of Hany Abu-Assad’s oblique but affecting Rana’s Wedding (2002; January 25 at 3:15 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with the filmmaker in attendance). A spirited young Palestinian woman, Rana, must get married before the end of the day or leave with her father for Egypt. Rejecting the list of suitable grooms her father gives her, Rana seeks out her boyfriend, Khalil, a theater director held up in the siege of Ramallah. Her doubts and misgivings parallel the intrusions of an ugly political reality — roadblocks, tear gas, stones, bullets, and death. The final scene might have fit into a traditional screwball comedy but for the automatic weapons and flak jackets.

Rana’s Wedding suggests that despite the chaos and misery, traditional institutions — the law, for example — can prevail. Three documentaries in the festival explore that possibility. Patricia Guzmán’s The Pinochet Case (2001; January 25 at 1 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts) follows the attempt by Spanish authorities to make the former Chilean dictator answer for the thousands who were tortured and murdered and made to disappear during his 27-year reign. The results are inspiring and infuriating; the testimony by the survivors of his inhumanity, their insistence on retaining their humanity when their tormentors try to reduce them to objects, is unforgettable.

Peter Kinoy & Pamela Yates’s Presumed Guilty (2002; January 25 at 2 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room) is like an especially riveting and relevant episode of L.A. Law as it interweaves a number of cases pursued by the San Francisco Public Defenders’ Office. They win some and they lose some, but the defenders themselves — including the son of Japanese-Americans interned during WW2, the nephew of a man murdered by racists, and a Vietnam vet haunted by his past — inspire faith, if not in the system, then in those who serve it.

Not so Jon Osman & Jonathan Stack’s Justifiable Homicide (2001; January 24 at 6 and 8 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room, with one of the filmmakers and star Margarita Rosario in attendance), the outrageous story of Antonio Rosario, a Hispanic teenager from the Bronx gunned down under suspicious circumstances by the police in 1995. His mother, Margarita, would not let the case rest, and the subsequent investigation makes for an exciting and outrageous detective story that leads as high as the office of then mayor Rudy Giuliani. (Those who have canonized Giuliani after September 11 might have second thoughts after watching him bully Margarita on a radio talk show.)

Perhaps the best case for facing the truth, acting on it, and also having a good time is made by Annie Goldson & Peter Wells’s Georgie Girl (2001; January 26 at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and January 28 at 7 and 9 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room). Why don’t we get political candidates like this? Born George, Georgina Beyer became the first Maori/transsexual/former-sex-trade-worker to become a member of parliament in New Zealand, or anywhere else for that matter.

The key to Beyer’s success seems to be her insight into suffering, discrimination, and marginalization. Raped and beaten up at one point in her difficult youth, she resolved never again to be treated like an object, and never to let anyone else be so treated. Years later, the voters in rural, redneck Wairarapa County agreed. Maybe the truth can make you free.