Human Rights Watch Film Fest '15: Violence & Vigilantes

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Features

Published on Friday, 19 June 2015 20:14

Written by Nora Lee Mandel

The Look of Silence

The New York stop of The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, June 11 to 21, 2015, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, provided intense, close-up views of some of the worst problems people inflict on people in the United States and around the world, while seeking solutions, justice, and attention. One unifying theme of many of the worthwhile feature documentaries is the scourge of violence, both in the present and how it reverberates from the past.

VIGILANTES

3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets

In its New York premiere, this timely, intense examination of one killing of an unarmed African-American teenager serves as a revealing case study of justice grappling with the lethal intersection of racism and guns, and the intimate impact on all those involved. The Black Friday 2012 killing at a Jacksonville, Florida gas station made national headlines. Did white, middle-aged Michael Dunn really kill 17-year-old Jordan Davis for playing music too loud? With his story changing a few times, Dunn justifies himself during police interrogations after his arrest the next day, that with the radio blaring hip hop and the four teens mouthing off to him, he was sure he saw one reaching for a weapon and claimed his hail of bullets into the SUV next to his car, in the titular three-plus minutes, was in self-defense because he feared for his life.

Florida is fertile territory for observing the culture wars, what with its Southern redneck traditions, large minority population, aggressive gun ownership, and “Stand Your Ground” laws (that have now spread to 32 other states), plus the state permits cameras in the courtroom, even allowing director Marc Silver’s additions to the regular media pool. The trials are suspenseful, as the defense lawyer hones in on Dunn’s perceptions, creating reasonable doubt that just because the police didn’t find any weapon doesn’t mean the teens didn’t have one.

Outside of court, Silver delves beneath the stereotypes that touched off the fatal encounter, including emotionally revelatory phone calls between the imprisoned Dunn and his fiancée, who becomes a traumatized witness. Contrary to Dunn’s assumptions, Jordan’s friends provide important peer context as we get views the jury doesn’t of their home suburb. His devastated parents are extensively interviewed before, during, and after the trial, though Abigail Disney’s parallel The Armor of Light, which world premiered at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, also focused on their same grief-stricken memories, family photos, and determined drive for justice.

But both wrenching, tearful documentaries on the same case pull their punches by not challenging a general audience directly. While Jordan’s heartbroken father replays his happy son imitating his favorite rap video, the piece that so antagonized Dunn is not played, nor any other hip hop. What if instead of the beautifully emotive jazzy score by Todd Boekelheide, the audience heard the profane lyrics that set off Dunn to confuse the teens’ enthusiastic sing-along as loud threats to his racist paranoia? Do they not trust the audience to still be sympathetic to the victim? (A Participant Media release)

Cartel Land

The organized violence by cartels on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border has generated organized vigilantes frustrated by government response. Director Matthew Heineman embedded for five months with their quasi-military activities to reveal up-close, in what he calls “run-and-gun verité”, capturing both the positives of their grassroots community organizing and their far scarier prejudices and resulting anarchic corruption. At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Heineman was awarded for Directing and Cinematography in the U.S. Documentary competition.

In the U.S., he follows Tim "Nailer" Foley, a hard-bitten, tattooed vet, who heads the armed volunteer Arizona Border Recon, found through a Rolling Stone story on “Border of Madness”. While first Foley is out on night patrols in the desert to stop illegal migrants, who he refers to in colorfully derogatory terms, let alone what he thinks of the Federal government, he visibly softens to the pitiful individuals and turns his wrath on the cartels profiting off their hopes and miseries, and the drug violence they are bringing north. Though these scenes are formless and wandering, it is fascinating as he explains, in military tactics and strategic terms, how he seeks out the spotters who navigate the routes and carries out blocking them to impact them financially.

In the Mexican state of Michoacán, there is even more frustration over the toll from drug violence, specifically the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel, and more disgust at the government’s impotence, what with assassinations of officials who do try and stop them (and thousands of civilians caught in the middle). Up rises a towering, charismatic, cinematic hero, Dr. Jose Mireles, as first profiled in The Wall Street Journal. He sweeps into towns with his armed Autodefensas, as well as T-shirts and the kindly medical clinic services he provides as "El Doctor." Then they all together forcefully hunt down cartel members and chase them out – rarely peacefully (and Heineman is right there when bullets fly). But just when you start thinking that maybe his extreme measures could be justified, he flaunts his above-the-law lack of ethics and morals so brazenly to the camera that the dangers of vigilantism become frighteningly clear. (The Orchard will release it in theaters on July 3.) And if you think nonviolent efforts should be tried, Bill & Turner Ross’s Western, shown in New York at New Directors/New Films, of Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art and still making the festival rounds, shows people on both sides of the border who are risking their lives for peace and progress -- with similar results.

ECHOES OF VIOLENCE

Violence magnifies Faulkner’s warning that “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” in three documentaries for the people caught up in wars.

The Look Of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his eye-popping Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (2012) moves from those braggart perpetrators of Indonesia’s mid-1960’s wholesale murders of any opponents of corrupt authoritarianism to the victims. Families, literally step-by-step, track their relatives from their arrests, to prisons, to torture chambers, to killing fields and rivers of drowning. Even more detailed and more contemporary than similar films that look back at the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, here are witnesses, many complicit, who are still their neighbors or are still in power, who can describe the horrors in (matter-of-fact) detail, and even identify the individual murder and murderer. The focus is on one quietly determined brother, Adi, whose parents considered him a “replacement” for their well-known dead son, as he contemplates not just the facts, but the soul of his country, where his children are growing up amidst lies and a faked history. Oppenheimer’s documentaries not only bravely challenge Indonesia to take responsibility, but inherently demand that the international community press for civilized justice. (A Participant Media release)

Of Men And War

So many recent war films -- fiction features and documentaries -- talk about U.S. veterans are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress from America’s longest war. But French director Laurent Bécue-Renard shows someone actually doing something effective about it – of veterans, for veterans, and by veterans. At The Pathway Home, in northern California, therapist Fred Gusman finds intensive sessions of peer group therapy can help them work out their demons into individual therapy, and prepare for smoother re-integration in society they all desperately want to achieve. Key is how they share and break through the stoic military ethos that is antithetical to opening up to heal. In riveting emotional turns, they recount, for the first time, what they went through, and admit how the violence haunts them, whether what they had to do, or what was done to them and their friends. For some it takes several tries to even stay in the room. In this second of his “Genealogy of Wrath” trilogy, Bécue-Renard was inspired by his grandfathers’ emotionally damaging silence about their World War I experiences and hope that other families won’t have to suffer. When I saw the North American premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight, one of the grateful participants attended in his full dress uniform to proudly demonstrate that the therapy enabled him to continue to serve in the Reserves.

(T)error

The government’s palpable fear that the violence of war can hit home gets very personal in this startlingly intimate portrait of an informant honing in on a potential terrorist, like we’ve only seen in fictionalized features on undercovers with gangs and organized crime syndicates that have actual records of violence. It’s not only eye-opening how the man who calls himself Shariff follows FBI instructions to not only insinuate himself with a Pittsburgh mosque attendee who is suspected of Al Qaeda sympathies, but to do so where he can be taped, very much like the informant heard leading on four young black men in last year’s The Newburgh Sting. But debut feature directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe go further in delving into the sixty-three-year-old’s incredible journey from the Black Panthers to serial provider of questionable evidence on Muslims who trust him too much, and may or may not have violence on their minds.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Director Nelson George’s unique history, the Closing Night selection, is useful and informative background for insight into how a former Black Panther like “Shariff” could go through such changes, and how government informers impacted The Movement, foreshadowing their questionable function now. In addition to finding an extraordinary range of archival footage and rare illustrations, the frank narration is all interviews with former, gray-haired Panthers from across the country. The big revelations in what have been forgotten are the important role of distinctive graphics in their printed materials, and of women for recruiting, organizing, and running community programs, including the popular breakfasts for children, as described here by such activists as Kathleen Cleaver and Ericka Huggins. Even the most idealistic sadly recall how the leadership changed direction under relentless siege from the FBI and local police departments, with dominating male egos turning more sexist and violent in reaction. (Just this week, newly released FBI files uncovered even wider covert activities in the San Francisco Bay area than previously known.) While many of the participants have written their own memoirs, as collective eyewitnesses they provide powerful immediacy.

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