Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

We look at the special, sensational and shocking cinema on show.

Mar  9 2006

Since its inception in 1978, the Human Rights Watch organisation has been a prime mover on the international scene, monitoring, documenting and protesting worldwide human rights abuses and the so-called democratic ‘deficit’. Its voice, tireless activity and moral force have become increasingly essential in today’s world, whether they’re exposing abuses perpetrated by Burundian Vice-President Alice Nzomukunda; highlighting the judicial execution of ten prisoners (with another 21 condemned to death) in Iran; demanding that President Bush forces Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharaff to step down as army chief, hold free and fair elections and reconstitute civilian rule; or addressing the issue of compensation for internally displaced people in Turkey – to name just four of its recent interventions.

HRW’s often arduous and brave work also includes media monitoring and news gathering, as well as liaising with victim support; on an international scene riven by state political repression, it’s found a need to expand and develop new strategies to encourage both individual and political organisational action. HRW’s appreciation of the importance of film and media in developing political awareness led, 17 years ago, to the inception of its highly popular international film festival as both a showcase and, progressively, a means of helping make movies with distinct human rights themes.

This tenth such festival has its opening benefit gala on Wednesday 15, following by a dispersed schedule, with many world and international premieres of fictional films, animations and documentaries, plus introducttions and actor and director Q&As, at the Clapham Picture House, Curzon Mayfair, Gate, Greenwich Picture House, ICA and Ritzy. Alongside the movies, the Royal Court has again collaborated with HRW to produce a series of short plays that will be put on before selected screenings; there are also educational programme screenings aimed at students ages 13 and above.

It’s a broad spectrum but, expectedly, Iraq and Afghanistan are represented, the former with two feature documentaries. James 'Gaza Strip' Longley’s Sundance-award-winner 'Iraq in Fragments' is highly recommended; a beautifully shot, fascinating and informative portrait of the ordinary realities of life for representatives of the three conflicting communities – Sunni, Shia and Kurd. Longley spent three years on the project, so inevitably its portrait of 11-year-old Baghdadi apprentice Mohammad, a Najaf Moqtada Al-Sadr supporter and a family of Iraqi Kurds in Arbil, plays as a survey of recent ethnic and religious conflict rather than topical developments, but it’s a searing vision of this historical miasma. ‘How can it happen, brother?’ one victim screams in moving and shocking footage of Medhi Army raids. ‘We were saved from Saddam’s oppression, now you’re bringing another.’

The Spanish filmmaker Javier Corcuera’s 'Winter in Baghdad' also assesses the impact of American policy in Iraq, mainly through assembling individual responses (notably a group of semi-destitute children), giving an overview of the last three years and preambling with footage of the hopeful meetings of UN representatives. And Magnus Bejmar and Simone Aaberg Kaern’s absorbing and exciting 'Smiling in a War Zone' traces the absurdities of the war on terror in the air as Kaern conducts an eventful 6,000-mile flight from her home country of Denmark to Afghanistan to meet female fighter pilot Farial.

One of the main strands will consist of a welcome four-film tribute, in association with DocHouse, to exemplary documentarist and National Film School graduate Kim Longinotto. It includes her first two features with Claire Hunt, 'Eat the Kimono' (1989), which profiles unconventional Japanese feminist Hanayagi Genshu (the recipient of right-wing death threats), and 'Hidden Faces' (1990), on the conflict between modernity and tradition as experienced by young Egyptian woman Safaa Fathay; the iniquities of Kafka-esque courts in 'Divorce Iranian Style' (1998); and (with Florence Ayisi) her latest, Cannes Prix Art Essai-winning 'Sisters in Law', on female judges in south-west Cameroon.

The disastrous impact of Peru’s 20-year ‘war on terror’ against The Shining Path, the movement founded by Maoist Abimael Guzman, which resulted in the death of 70,000 Peruvians, is made all too vivid in Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy’s 'State of Fear', a fine blend of documentary and judiciously selected archive material. There are also films about Sri Lanka (Canadian Helen Klodawsky’s 'No More Tears Sister' on the decades-long ethnic ‘civil’ war), race and religious issues in India (Shonali Bose’s 'Amu'), another typically firebrand film by Fernando Solanas on the economic crisis and its aftermath in Argentina ('The Dignity of the Nobodies'), the losers and the winners in ‘the promised land’ of post-apartheid South Africa ('Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon'), the slaughter of women in Guatemala, revolutionary aspirations in Azerbaijan, films on Israel (the controversy-laden 'Paradise Now'), race relations in Brazil, a drama on Britain’s last hangman, 'Pierrepoint', and much more.

The opening gala and reception will present writer-director Robert Edwards’s ambitious, broad, political satire 'Land of the Blind', with the director and members of the cast present. Ralph Fiennes narrates as the converted prison guard Joe, who forms a friendship with playwright-turned-terrorist Thorne (Donald Sutherland) in an unnamed political dictatorship led by the film-obsessed ‘Baby Max’ (Tom Hollander), a cynical manipulator conceived as an amalgam of historical figures from the Emperor Maximilian to Kim Il-Sung. Although it will not appeal to all, it’s a sorrowing, rather than crusading, course through the calamities of twentieth-century political history, part talky Orwellian nightmare and part cinema nuovo denunciation. Thorne’s line, ‘Nobody standing by is innocent’, could be a touchstone phrase for the festival itself.

The Human Rights Watch Tenth International Film Festival runs from March 15 to 25. www.hrw.org

• 
•