The rights stuff

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, 12-21 March 2008
The Ritzy, Clapham Picture House, Gate Cinema, Greenwich Picturehouse,
Renoir, ICA
www.hrw.org/iff

(London 5 February 2008) - The 12th Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival, which takes place in six London cinemas from 12 to 21 March, offers a powerful line-up of films that challenge and inform our world view. Whether it's the untold story of US female soldiers in direct ground combat in Iraq in Lioness, Ariel Dorfman looking back to Pinochets bloody coup in Chile in A Promise to the Dead, American artist Steve Kurtz facing 20 years in prison for having test tubes in his apartment in Strange Culture; or the extraordinary interviews with 14 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in White Light / Black Rain, this years festival covers a lot of ground.

Twenty-five festival films explore a variety of global issues with compelling narratives from 19 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Chad, Chile, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, former Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Liberia, Nepal, Palestine, Sudan, Uganda, and the United States.

Many of the festivals films have received awards and plaudits. The much talked about Persepolis won the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize and has been nominated for an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature). Persepolis is a beautiful and spirited film set during Irans Islamic revolution. Its heroine is an outspoken young girl who remains wilful in the face of repression. The films creators, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, will attend screenings of the film that will be shown at a benefit gala on 12 March and at the opening of the festival on 13 March.

The Sundance Film Festival 2008 awarded the Special Jury Prize to Lisa Jackson for The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Jacksons film exposes the extent to which rape is now endemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and provides inspiring examples of resilience, courage, and grace amongst the survivors.

On March 20, the festival closes with two films that have also won international acclaim. War/Dance is an extraordinary story about young Ugandans who pull themselves out of the clutches of civil war through song and dance. War/Dance has been nominated for an Academy Award (Best Feature Documentary) and has already won the Best Director for Documentary at Sundance 2007. Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, by 19-year-old Hana Makmalbaf, is a deeply felt political allegory about the impossible situation facing girls and women in Afghanistan today. This film has been selected to show as an Official Selection of the Berlin Film Festival 2008.

Of particular interest at the festival is the sheer number of women filmmakers, many of whom have made films about women. Co-directors Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers will attend screenings of their extraordinary film Lioness about a group of five women soldiers known as Team Lioness who give candid insight into their experiences in Iraq, where, in violation of official policy and without proper training, they supported marines in direct combat.

Filmmaker and rape survivor Lisa Jackson will attend screenings of The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, featuring sensitive and unflinching interviews with both survivors of rape and rapists themselves in war-torn DRC. In Iron Ladies of Liberia, Liberian journalist Siatta Scott Johnson documents the first year of Africas first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who fights to overcome the brutal and ruinous legacy of former president Charles Taylor. In The Sari Soldiers, Julie Bridgham spent over three years following six women in determined efforts to shape Nepals future in the midst of an escalating civil war against Maoist insurgents and the kings crackdown on civil liberties.

Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Josh Kornbluth, and Peter Coyote are featured in Lynn Hershman-Leesons Strange Culture, which chronicles the travails of justice that have befallen US artist Steve Kurtz, who finds himself facing 20 years in jail. Lynn Hershman-Leeson will attend the screenings of Strange Culture, a fascinating, highly provocative documentary about post 9/11 paranoia and the risks artists face when their work questions government policies.

Human Rights Watch launched its International Film Festival 19 years ago to educate and galvanise a broad cross-section of supporters through the power of film, and this year one festival title links directly to the work of Human Rights Watch. In The Dictator Hunter, Human Rights Watchs Reed Brody is tireless in his pursuit of Chadian dictator Hissene Habré. If you kill one person, you go to jail. If you kill 40 people, they put you in an insane asylum, says Brody, who will attend the festival screenings. But if you kill 40,000 people, you get a comfortable exile with a bank account in another country, and thats what we want to change here.

The pursuit and documentation of dictators underpins three other films in this years festival. The 2,000 hours of footage from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is culled to 69 minutes to create a taut and stirring narrative in Michael Christoffersens Milosevic on Trial. And in Kalinovski Square, the celebrated Belarussian director Yury Khashchavatski continues his longstanding and personally dangerous film confrontation with Europes last dictator, President Lukashenko of Belarus. The film addresses the rigged 2006 elections, including Lukashenkos surreal propaganda machine as well as astonishing scenes of the pro-democracy rallies and protests in Kalinovski Square.

Former cultural advisor to Salvador Allende and internationally respected playwright Ariel Dorfman will attend screenings of A Promise to the Dead, which documents his return to Chile with filmmaker Peter Raymont in late 2006, at the time Augusto Pinochet, Dorfmans long-time nemesis, is dying. On September 11, 1973, Dorfman was spared the fate of most of his colleagues when Chiles military, led by Pinochet, attacked and killed democratically elected President Allende and his ministers at the presidential palace. Years later, Dorfman discovered that his name was struck off the list of people who Allende called to stand against the attackers, so that he could live to tell what happened that day.

The festival will also show two other films to celebrate Ariel Dorfmans life and work: Prisoners in Time (1995), which Dorfman wrote with his son Rodrigo Dorfman, stars John Hurt as Eric Lomax, a former British soldier who was tortured as a POW of the Japanese and who, 50 years on, still suffers daily bouts of post-traumatic stress. Prisoners in Time will be shown in a double bill with My House Is on Fire (1997).

Chile and memory also feature strongly in Calle Santa Fé, which director Carmen Castillo will introduce. In this deeply personal documentary Castillo retraces the path from resistance to exile, from the inspiring days of Allende to the long, sombre years under Pinochet, and remembers the men and women who rose up against his tyranny. Staying in South America, documentary filmmaker Maria Ramos turns her lens on Rio de Janeiros juvenile courts and detention centres in Behave. Ramos allows us to watch court cases play out, successfully and subtly getting around a law which forbids the filming of juveniles in court, and reveals a system overwhelmed despite the efforts of the no-nonsense Judge Luciana Fiala.

Accelerating globalisation, and the failure of governments and corporations
to protect environments and citizens, is explored in three documentaries at
this years festival. Filmmaker Daniel Gold will attend his toxic comedy,
Everythings Cool, which explores one of the most intriguing and troubling
questions among international environmentalists: why have Americans lagged
so far behind the rest of the world in accepting global warming?

Jennifer Baichwals Manufactured Landscapes is a stunning portrait of Edward Burtynsky, an internationally celebrated photographer who specialises in large-scale studies of industrial vistas. The film is also an exploration of the aesthetics and social dimensions of Asias massive industrial revolution. Baichwal follows Burtynsky to China and to Bangladesh, and compares Burtynskys epic photographs with the tedium workers endure and the sometimes toxic and alienating impact of globalisation on the very people the transformations are supposed to benefit. The spotlight stays on China in Up the Yangzte, in which Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang focuses on the building of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River and how it represents the end of a way of life and livelihood for 2 million people.

The festival explores the devastating effects of violence and warfare in five deeply dramatic films. In White Light / Black Rain, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki talks to 14 survivors of the US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of whom have never spoken publicly before, as well as to four Americans intimately involved in the bombings. The interviews reveal deep suffering and extraordinary resilience. In 2008, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Okazakis film stands as a powerful warning to todays world that we cannot afford to forget what happened on those two days in 1945.

Three films in this years festival look at the consequences of the continuing violence in the Middle East. Lebanese filmmaker Philippe Aractingi walks a fine line between fiction and documentary in his award-winning film Under the Bombs. Filmed in Lebanon on the first day of the ceasefire of the Israeli-Hezbollah war of summer 2006, Under the Bombs combines real footage of the massive destruction with a moving narrative story that highlights the suffering of ordinary civilians. Aractingi will attend festival screenings with actress Nada Abou Farhat.

Georgi Lazarevskis documentary This Way Up is about an old-peoples home for Palestinians in the West Bank. A few metres from their front door rises the wall of separation that the Israelis built to stop suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel. But the wall, much of which is built within the West Bank, has isolated the residents from their childrens visits, the outside world, and even the staff that look after them. The brilliant use of a quietly humorous guide with his trademark knitted cap, weathered face, and appreciation of a cigarette serves to emphasise the human tragedy of this divider. Playing in the same programme as This Way Up, Open Heart highlights the plight of the Palestinian healthcare system struggling under occupation.
The life of a Palestinian couples baby is threatened by congenital heart
disease. Their challenge is not only to get lifesaving surgery for their
son, but also to make the uncertain trip through Israeli checkpoints.

Violence has raged across Sudans region west of Darfur since early 2003 and claimed at least 200,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Ted Brauns Darfur Now follows six individuals, who adopt different strategies to achieve one goal to end the crisis. In the production notes for The Dictator Hunter, Reed Brody says, I feel lucky to have grown up when more people believed in their ability to change the world. Darfur Now is an inspiring example of how committed individuals can still make a difference.

Box Office information:

Ritzy Cinema: 0871 704 2065 / www.picturehouses.co.uk
ICA: 0207 930 3647 / www.ica.org.uk
Clapham Picture House: 0871 704 2055 / www.picturehouses.co.uk
Renoir: 0871 704 2055 / www.picturehouses.co.uk
Gate Cinema: 0871 704 2058 / www.picturehouses.co.uk
Greenwich Picturehouse: 0871 704 2059 / www.picturehouses.co.uk

Notes:

For nearly 30 years, Human Rights Watch has been on the frontlines of the
struggle to defend the human rights of people around the world. We conduct
on-site investigations of human rights abuses in some 70 countries worldwide
and publish our findings in reports that are known for uncompromising accuracy. We use these reports in high-level policy discussions and in the media to shape the public agenda, shame abusers, and press for change. Nineteen years ago, we created the Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival to educate and galvanise a broad cross-section of concerned
supporters through the power of film. Since that time, Human Rights Watchs
International Film Festival has become a leading venue for distinguished fiction, documentary and animated films, and videos with a distinctive human rights theme. Through the eyes of committed and courageous filmmakers, we showcase the heroic stories of activists and survivors worldwide. We seek to empower our viewers with the knowledge that personal commitment can make a very real difference.