Islam & Women's Rights at the Human Rights Watch Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 22 July 2013 21:39

Written by Nora Lee Mandel

The powerful and poignant documentaries and docudramas of the24th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival were welcomed in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and, for the first time, at the IFC Center, after turns in Toronto; London; and Chicago. Look for selections from this year’s thought-provoking Festival as they travel throughout the year across the United States and Europe.

The Festival is organized around themes that match the program activities of Human Rights Watch, as an international monitoring and advocacy organization—“Traditional Values and Human Rights: for Women, the Disabled, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT”); “Crises and Migration”; and, “Human Rights in Asia and the United States”. But the messages that come through from the brave, resolute, and determined people surmounting very difficult situations aren’t restrained by those categories.

Is Islam Inimical to Women’s Rights? Or Just Muslim Men?

The Human Rights Watch Festival delicately terms one theme as illustrating “Traditional Values and Human Rights: Women’s Rights”, but in damning verité documentation and personal memories, a half-dozen moving films, implicitly or explicitly, point a veritable finger at Muslim male attitudes for keeping Muslim women from education and employment, and even contact with the world outside their home, even abusively so.

Salma is the most egregious example not only of oppression and redemption, but also in exposing how patriarchal attitudes become so ingrained in a society that women enforce them on each other, regardless of laws. Beyond even director Kim Longinotto’s previous profiles of iconoclastic women, from Africa (such as Sisters In Law) to South Asia (such as Pink Saris), this is an inspiring biography. The life story of Salma, born a Tamil Muslim in southern India in 1968, is frighteningly similar to that of the 19th century American slave Harriet Jacobs who escaped to pen an autobiography that spurred abolition, or a domestic version of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. Salma’s crimes were first being born female, reaching puberty in a small village, then refusing an arranged marriage, and, worse, smuggling out richly explicit poetry about how she felt about being locked up in a small room for years in punishment for her stubborn refusal and being manipulated into caving in to a restrictive marriage. And that’s only the first half of her transformative life, that she revisits in her home village in revealing interviews with her extended family, who still have mixed feelings about her rebellion, her writings (her autobiographical novel The Hour Past Midnight is available in English, while her famous poems are currently being translated for publication), her scandalous escape to the city, and her political activities to help girls and women who still suffer today as she did. Even though the local and state Indian government party politics are a bit hard to follow, see this eye-opening documentary before any possible Hollywood bio-pic can simplify the complexities and nuances.

InTall As The Baobab Tree, the Festival closer, director Jeremy Teicher expands from the true stories in his earlier documentary This Is Us that grew out of the autobiographical videos his students made about the issues they face in rural Senegal. Filming in a village two hours south of Dakar typical of sub-Saharan Africa, non-professional actors portray characters whose personal lives closely parallel the (barely) fictional ones. Two sisters want to continue going to the new local school in the nearby town, even as accidents and expectations strain their father’s openness to this modern opportunity, and he resorts to the financial solution of arranging a marriage for the 11-year-old. Her devoted teenage sister undertakes a desperate effort to prevent this in every way she can, from appealing for intervention from elders to working any job she can get no matter how menial, even putting her own dreams on hold. Beyond the authenticity of a score that includes local musicians, including master kora player Salieu Suso, and dialogue in the local Pulaar language for the first time in an international feature film, the story is genuinely affecting as to what will happen to this family, if depressingly honest about limited options for girls.

In Morocco, Camera/Woman is an intimate take on how a Muslim woman can try to forge employment opportunities within the narrow acceptable strictures of helping other women with their weddings. Beyond similar-themed documentaries in the past decade (The Beauty Academy of Kabul and Desert Brides about a Bedouin wedding photographer in the Negev), director Karima Zoubir gets Casablanca divorcée Khadija Harrad to open up about her feelings over the increasing challenges she faces in pressures from her ex-husband and her parents to more respectably support her son, let alone from her landlord and the male wedding planners who hire her. Key to how she deals with her frustrations is the frank girl talk for emotional support she has with divorced friends, a heartening affirmation of the importance of female solidarity within a confined situation.

InGoing Up The Stairs, Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami opens up new horizons for a mature Muslim woman whose life has been circumscribed in the house where she arrived as child bride to a man 30 years older until her grandson asked her to draw for him. Now, like Grandma Moses in Tehran, the illiterate Akram covers every available surface with bright, gorgeous images from her dreams and now awakened imagination (Akram narrates lively explanations as she quickly paints), much to her grouchy, demanding husband’s consternation. Worse, he holds over her the restrictive requirement that she needs his permission to leave the country for an exhibition of her pieces in Paris arranged by the filmmaker, who also promises to be her chaperone to the wider world of art. Whether Akram’s prayers in the women’s section of the mosque will be answered is as suspenseful as enlightening.

Rafea: Solar Mama starts out as if directors Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief are making a promotional piece for Barefoot College, founded in northwest India by Bunker Roy in 1972, which brings mature women, usually illiterate grandmothers, from impoverished villages around the world to their campus for a Ghandi-inspired empowerment program of training them as “solar engineers” who will set up sustainable solar electrification projects and teaching workshops for their communities, providing the first electricity and income stream they’ve had. The non-profit organization even pays for a family chaperone and support for the ones at home while they’re gone for six months, as well as the equipment. Who wouldn’t jump at this educational and entrepreneurial opportunity? Rafea, a Bedouin mother of young daughters, is initially reluctant, but she and her family give in to pressure from Jordanian government officials who want to promote their inaugural participation. Just when she blooms by achieving something, in concert with the other women students from conservative societies, her affronted, unemployed husband sends off a stream of complaints from Amman to India because his second wife is no longer around to wait on him hand and foot whenever he’s not with Wife #1. Such a dramatic example of the stubborn persistence of male prerogatives that’s it’s almost a soap opera, this documentary also continues to be shown on PBS stations.

What similarly comes across in the well-meaning effort My Afghanistan – Life In The Forbidden Zone, that gives mobile phones with HD video cameras to 30 civilians caught in the crossfire of the much fought-over Helmand province, is that Muslim women there are invisible to outsiders. While director/project coordinator Nagieb Khaja really tries to recruit shyly interested women participants over the three years, it looks like the men in their families quash their hopes. At least the farmers and teenage boys include glimpses of how they try to protect young children who are confused eyewitnesses to the noisy chaos (and worse) of living in a shifting war zone. In Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington director Sebastian Junger passionately captures how his friend and photojournalist (and humanitarian) colleague always made civilians a priority in his coverage of such hot spots around the world, particularly children.

Faith & Filmmaking at Human Rights Watch Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 12 July 2013 17:04

Written by Nora Lee Mandel

The powerful and poignant documentaries and docudramas of the 24th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival were welcomed in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and, for the first time, at the IFC Center, June 13 to 23, after turns in Toronto; London; and Chicago. Look for selections from this year’s thought-provoking Festival as they travel throughout the year to: Dallas, TX; Durham, NC; Merced, San Diego, and San Francisco, CA; Mount Pleasant, MI; Philadelphia and Phoenixville, PA; Salem, MA; Washington, D.C., and, Zurich.

The Festival is organized around themes that match the program activities of Human Rights Watch, as an international monitoring and advocacy organization—“Traditional Values and Human Rights: for Women, the Disabled, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT”); “Crises and Migration”; and, “Human Rights in Asia and the United States”. But the messages that come through from the brave, resolute, and determined people surmounting very difficult situations aren’t restrained by those categories.

Don’t Give Them That Old-Time Religion

The very timelyThe New Black delves deeper into the controversy of attitudes towards homosexuality in the African-American community and the powerful influence of its churches. Maryland is a highly symbolic place for director Yoruba Richen to explore the reality of the intertwined politics of race, faith, and homophobia. The state where Frederick Douglass was born into slavery passed the Civil Marriage Protection Act last year that recognized same-sex marriage, but petitioners forced a referendum onto the ballot.

In the run-up to the November showdown on “Question 6” (you may have missed the outcome during the national presidential campaign, so that makes it more thrilling), she follows African-American activists on both sides as they organize and electioneer. Richen intimately presents a very human face to both male preachers thundering at their large, enthusiastic flocks from their deeply felt faith, and lesbians who gain the confidence to come out and lead discussions with their families that provoke profound introspection, and considerable sympathy from the viewer. In contrast, in The Parade, a feature also traveling around North America as part of the excellent Global Lens 2013 series, somewhat inspired by the true story of mucho macho Serbia’s first gay pride parade amidst post-war ethnic tensions, director Srdjan Dragojević uses broad slapstick humor to entertainingly defang homophobia.

Born This Wayis the shockingly real, African dystopian nightmare version of legislating against gay rights. In the Central African country of Cameroon, teachings from the Catholic institutions founded in French colonialism have synthesized with traditional religions to literally demonize homosexuals and try lesbians as witches. Soon after independence in 1960, the country made same-sex relations illegal, imprisoning more people for sexual orientation than any place in the world, let alone charging them based on rumor and looks. Directors Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann’s hidden camera scarily captures the hysteria in a small town courtroom, so the lonely activists who come together, and come out, in the largest city, Douala, at Alternatives-Cameroun, the first LGBT center there, ostensibly for government-approved HIV/AIDS prevention, can be seen as incredibly brave to show their stories on film, including sharing the threats and inquisitive badgering in their difficult daily lives. Outside the country, the documentary is being used to rally diplomatic pressure on long-time president Paul Biya to change the law.

In The Shadow Of The Sun searingly demonstrates that demonization in east Africa goes horribly further in Tanzania for albinos (who have the genetic condition of white skin and eyes due to a lack of melanin pigment). Witch doctors are evangelizing a brutal get-rich-superstition that ritual use of albino limbs and bones will assure good fortune -- 72 murders have been reported over the last five years, with little justice. The danger is so great that well-meaning government protection means rounding them up into pitiful, crowded, guarded compounds, to eke out lives like refugees uprooted from their homes. Director Harry Freeland followed the charismatic albino Josephat Torner around these communities for six years as he goes way beyond the familiar activism of a discriminated minority member. He publicizes albinos’ plight by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest, despite his congenital albinal weak eyes and joints, and offers important mentoring and encouragement to younger ones. (The very difficult and limited choices for teenaged Vedastus to safely get a good education are heartbreaking). Much more, in his native Lake Victoria region that is the heart of the religious hysteria and deadly attacks, he courageously faces down wary bigots, village by village, with peaceful educational exchanges, and even confronts a witch doctor over why and who is encouraging him to promulgate these dangerous beliefs. Josephat may be the most heroic person I have ever seen on film.

In Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, religion is revealed as the crucial flashpoint that tripped up the radical women in the eponymous Russian band, whose arrest and show trial of three of its members became an international cause célèbre, from Amnesty International to Madonna, and a “Free Pussy Riot” anthem by Peaches and Simonne Jones. Directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin provide an in-depth look at the individual women (Katia, Masha, and Nadia), their families, and the Pussy Riot feminist, political performance art collective, with up-close footage that starts months before the arrest, continues through bail hearings, and during and after their trial. (We learn their signature pastel-colored balaclavas aren’t just for anonymity, but are intended to look more “silly” than threatening).

While the media here focused on their anti-President Vladimir Putin musical antics, their 40-second “punk prayer” on the altar of Moscow’s large Christ The Savior Cathedral, blocks from the Kremlin, that was intended to protest the Orthodox Church’s entwining with the government, set off a firestorm of a backlash from militant believers. A group of Orthodox haranguers looks incongruously like a motorcycle gang, criticizes them in religious terms as witches and demons, and, like Putin in a TV interview, are too offended by their anti-patriarchal feminism to even say their name. (One of their proud father’s chuckles that his atheist daughter was raised “a good little Bolshevik” by her Communist grandmother.) This informative and involving documentary continues to be available on HBO On Demand during the summer.

"Helter Skelter" Slices Open The Modeling World

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 11 July 2013 15:56

Written by Renzo Adler

Sitting at a junction between Dorian Gray and Hello Kitty, Helter Skelter (directed by photographer Mika Ninagawa, and showing at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco and the JAPAN CUTS film fest in New York ), is about a supermodel’s candy-colored swath of self destruction. Based on the manga (Japanese comic book) by Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter intersects the much coveted guilty pleasure of celebrity meltdowns with body horror and surgery reminiscent of David Cronenberg in a vibrant and storybook-like backdrop.

Helter Skelter follows Lilico, played by model and actress Erika Sawajiri, an ethereal supermodel that is the only thing on the minds of Tokyoites. Indeed, even other character’s lives have little meaning outside of their relation to Lilico. Lilico is addicted to radical plastic surgery from a black market clinic that is under investigation by a methodical detective (played by Nao Omori) that is also obsessed with her. Most of Lilico’s body is actually artificial or transplanted, and as Lilico’s mind starts to decay, so too does her body, and the film immediately places a scalpel of Damocles over her head. Desperately looking for some kind of control in her jaded life, Lilico uses her sexuality and desirability as a way to play with her doting assistants, but this only staves off decay and madness for so long as Lilico must compete with a new it-girl.

Lilico believes the world revolves around her, but where other films usually emphasize that this is only delusion, everything about Helter Skelter just affirms Lilico’s worldview.  She’s everywhere in TV, movies, magazine, and the police that are supposed to be investigating the clinic where she’s getting her treatments spend most of their time as a Greek Chorus espousing on how beautifully tragic Lilico is. The movie sends mixed signals about whether Lilico is a sociopath or a victim by having the rest of the world be complicit with her egomania.

The camera spends it’s sweet time pouring over Lilico’s (often naked) body. Maybe the film wants to desensitize you to the idea of the human body being erotic and appealing by lingering over Lilico’s form so much that she just becomes a hunk of meat symbolic of the disposable nature of her profession. ...Or maybe it’s very easy to just fill time in the movie with shots of Lilico’s body rather than progressing the story.

A quick jaunt to the internet reveals that Sawajiri has courted popularity and controversy and expressed frustrations with the modeling world she is entrenched in. These parallels with Lilico are more than mere coincidence, Sawajiri stated that’s what attracted her to the role in the first place.

Helter Skelter also plays a precarious balancing act with it’s aesthetics, trying to decide between visuals grounded in reality, or a more garish appearance that keeps with the film’s manga roots. It creates a disconnect when you see everyday schoolgirls talking and milling about in regular old Tokyo, then shift to Lilico’s apartment, which look like a cross between A Clockwork Orange and a super villain’s lair. I appreciate these visual touches and at times they’re absolutely gorgeous, but I just wish the film would make up it’s mind about whether to tell a story grounded in reality, or set in a world gone mad.

Overall, Helter Skelter does bring up some interesting issues surrounding gender politics, identity, sexuality, and self image, but it only skirts around these issues, rather than trying to reach a point more specific than that things shouldn’t be this way, and that these are all part of a self-sustaining cycle of self loathing. Despite these shortcomings in it’s narrative, Helter Skelter still provides a very vibrant visual flair in it’s storybook approach to celebrity meltdowns that we see play out on TV all the time.

Helter Skelter is currently making the film festival circuit at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco (July 27 - August 4, 2013), and New York’s JAPAN CUTS film fest (July 11 - 21, 2013). The original manga will be released by Vertical publishing in August, 2013.