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Mirror, mirror
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival watches itself
BY PETER KEOUGH
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
At the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the International Institute of Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts January 22 through 26.


Documentaries play a major role every year in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and this past year they also figured prominently in the film world in general, with features from Le peuple migrateur/Winged Migration to Capturing the Friedmans earning critical praise and commercial success. Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that some of the documentaries offered in this year’s event not only hold a mirror to world ills ignored by the mainstream media but also reflect on their own process. Or perhaps it’s not so appropriate. When the subjects themselves — oppression, injustice, disease, genocide — are so urgent, might it not be narcissistic and irrelevant to waste time on navel gazing?

That’s the gist of what one angry viewer asked at a panel discussion for Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit (2002; in Arabic with English subtitles; 80 minutes; January 23 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts) when it screened last November in the Boston Jewish Film Festival. After a second look at Ford Transit, I have no answer to the question, but also no doubts about the film’s value. It appears at first glance to be a cinéma-vérité documentary about a Palestinian shuttle bus driver carrying passengers between checkpoints in a divided Jerusalem. At this level, it provides a sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious glimpse of what life is like under such conditions. At another level, it deconstructs itself — as the filmmaker himself suggests with perhaps too-subtle hints, some of the material is staged and fabricated. Do not trust the image, the film warns, whether it comes from a socially conscious Palestinian filmmaker or from Fox News.

Does a world in crisis need such ambiguity? Is the elusive nature of truth a more important subject than the truth about human-rights violations? Are the two inseparable? Whatever the answers to such questions, the Rashomon effect of Ford Transit colors responses to a worthy effort like Siddiq Barmak’s Osama (2003; in Pashtu with English subtitles; 83 minutes; January 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with a "special guest" available for discussion afterward), the first film produced in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Osama opens with hundreds of blue-burqa-clad women demonstrating for food and jobs in pre–Afghan War Kabul. The scene is being shot by a "journalist," and like the hero of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, he’s caught up in a disaster that seems partly fictional and partly historic. The Taliban breaks up the demonstration (and the cameraman); one almost expects to hear the line, "Look out, Haskell, it’s real!"

Also real, no doubt, are the conditions endured by the film’s other characters. A harried mother loses her job at a hospital (shut down, that damned Taliban again). Since her husband was martyred in the civil war, and since women are not allowed to appear on the streets unescorted by men, let alone seek employment, she, her 12-year-old daughter, and her own aged mother face starvation. But granny has an idea: dress the girl up as a boy. They cut her hair, she’s dubbed "Osama" by an urchin friend, and through her eyes we see the creepy, twisted world of Taliban oppression.

As an indictment of misogyny, Osama is relentless, its realism raw and strikingly poetic. But as an affirmation of the empowerment of women, it leaves a lot to be desired. Its heroine is a weak sister, responding to hardship by cowering, crying, or calling out for mother. This emphasis of victimization both diminishes the film’s drama and calls attention to its propagandistic intent.

Adelaida Trujillo & Patricia Castaño’s Tomas de guerra/War Takes (2002; in Spanish with English subtitles; 78 minutes; January 23 at 6 and 8 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video screening room and January 24 at 4 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston), on the other hand, calls attention to its intentions. Ostensibly a documentary about the long-running and bloody civil war in Colombia between leftist guerrillas and right-wing governments, it emphasizes not so much that subject (of which most viewers in this country, myself included, are largely ignorant) as it does the personal lives of the filmmakers themselves, as shown in the form of a "video diary" extending from 1998 to 2002. True, the troubles of these largely middle-class professionals are legitimate, but not compared with a conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and has poured tons of cocaine into the US.

So initially I responded to this film with some annoyance. But listening to the filmmakers discuss how their concern for their own "sheltered world" might overcome their normally progressive point of view and blind them to the glaring injustices underlying the violence, I concluded that such self-reflection is the best strategy in covering this story. Not only does it expose the class and power bias latent in "objective" journalism, but it offers a perspective from which those who live in an even more sheltered world than that of the filmmakers can look at how the other 90 percent live.

An alternative to such a thoughtful and empathetic approach is to regard the suffering of others as a freak show. I fear that years of Howard Stern and sadistic "reality" TV have so dulled audiences’ sensitivities that were Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 Titicut Follies to be released today, it would hardly raise an eyebrow. As it is, his new Domestic Violence 2 (2002; 160 minutes; January 24 at 10:30 a.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with the filmmaker in attendance) can’t help drawing comparisons with Jerry Springer and Cops. The most human moment occurs at the beginning, as Tampa police officers respond to a domestic-violence call. Neither the husband, who is the alleged victim, nor the wife, who is being arrested, wants the other party to be taken away. But the police are compelled to follow the letter of a new Florida law, and so they cuff the wife. "I’ll bail you out," the husband says tenderly. "Just like you did me."

So much for them. The rest of the film takes place within the confines of the court as cases are called up and disposed of by judges who seem more patronizing and disgusted than compassionate. In one session, the mostly lower-class, uneducated couples explain to the judge why they should or should not remain together. He passes judgments of sometimes less than Solomonic wisdom. The resemblance to Judge Judy is unnerving, as is the process’s dehumanization of intimate relations.

That dehumanization is not Wiseman’s fault but that of the institutions he examines — which has been the point of his work since Follies. However well-intended, the court debases those it is supposed to serve. Seen only in this institutional context (in the so-called "video court," prisoners are shown on the court’s own TV monitors), the damaged lives of Domestic Violence 2 seem little more than a spectacle to be regarded with pity or contempt but always with condescension.

Seen in the context of the media, such spectacles of human misery and folly serve as entertainment. How would a Diane Sawyer, for example, handle the family in Ditsi Carolino’s Life on the Tracks (2002; 70 minutes; January 24 at 1 and 3 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video screening room). Eddie and Pen and their five children (two their own, three adopted) would love to live on the other side of the tracks. Instead, they’re jammed with the thousands of other indigents of the Philippine barrio of Balic-Balic into crumbling shacks inches from an active local railway line. No doubt a well-intended news show would tug at viewers’ hearts. But Carolino lets her subjects’ humanity speak for itself.

A Lou Dobbs might take the people featured in Carles Bosch & Josep M. Domenech’s Balseros (2002; in English and Spanish with English subtitles; 120 minutes; January 26 at 7 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video screening room, with Carles Bosch in attendance) as examples of how the US is letting itself get screwed by foreigners. Instead, the film achieves both an honest portrait of individual lives and an examination of resonant cultural, political, and historical themes in its account of the fates of a handful of Cuban exiles who found refuge in America. For a brief period in 1994, Castro allowed Cubans to flee to the US without restrictions. Thousands of balseros set sail for Miami in flimsy homemade rafts. Some of those made it, and as the film recounts with sometimes stunning irony, their dream of fleeing impoverished Marxist Cuba for the consumer paradise of the United States involved a few nightmarish twists. Combining Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls and Michael Apted’s 7 Up series, Balseros conjures the epiphanies possible only in real life.

Jos de Putter’s Dans, Grozny, Dans/The Damned and the Sacred (2002; in Dutch with English subtitles; 75 minutes; January 24 at 6 and 8 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston and January 25 at noon and 2 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video screening room) not only mirrors life, it also demonstrates how art can sometimes transcend it, or at least offer consolation for its iniquities. This lyrical and wrenching documentary follows the stories of young members of a Chechen dance group as they leave the ruins of Grozny for a European tour and then return. Their inspiring leader tells them they have a great responsibility to represent their country, whom the world regards as full of bandits and thieves. The tour is a triumph, and on the bus home, a girl relates a dream she had that her father is alive. But he died a Russian prisoner years before, and the war goes on, and the passion and pain behind the fiery performances is made plain.

Whether some of these documentaries fudge the facts or stage some events (but then, staging events in Dans, Grozny, Dans is the event) is less troubling than if they had used the lives depicted in them as arguments to further an agenda or as stereotypes to confirm prejudices. As the best films in this festival affirm, a fundamental human right is the right to be perceived as human.


Issue Date: January 16 - 22, 2004
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