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.

Economics & the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 10 July 2013 15:47

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.

Economic Inequality: Giving Voice and Face to the Poor

99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film has a highly unusual provenance, but it tells a chronological and coherent story of the genesis and progress of protests around the world to the response to the global financial crisis. Using footage from almost 100 filmmakers, lead directors Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites coordinated two other directors, five co-directors, additional shooters and media wranglers with almost a dozen editors. Keys to how absorbing this film is about a mass phenomenon are the interviews with individuals (and clips from the Guy Fawkes-masked “Anonymous”) who helped generate the idea of using (quasi) public spaces to publicize how the profits of private individuals (effectively promoted as the 1%) were countering the public interest, and the Direct Action Working Group that creatively and collectively kept the demonstrations going in downtown Manhattan for two months (yeah, it seemed like it went on longer).

Plus a sampling of the organizers they inspired to “occupy” central locales in over 92 cities across 82 countries and more than 600 communities in the United States. The Oakland participants, where the most violence resulted, are particularly insightful on how local social and economic issues, conditions, and police tactics affected the outcomes, especially by law enforcement that resulted in hundreds of arrests as local governments shared tips on suppression strategies. While journalists wryly admit they didn’t really understand what was happening (unmentioned here is that the BBC still mischaracterizes the movement as “anti-capitalist”), lawyers and academics provide ominous context for the impact of these citizen actions and the precedents of government over-reactions that provides perspective to keep all our eyes wide open as it all still unfolds.

So when rich people want to help poor people that should be a good thing, right? Not in Haiti, as vividly shown in renowned Haitian-born director Raoul Peck’s illuminating and instructive Fatal Assistance, the Festival Centerpiece presentation by Human Rights Watch’s past Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Going beyond the apocalyptic damage and death of TV’s disaster tourism since the devastating earthquake January 12, 2010, Peck over two years follows frustrated Haitians trying to help themselves and the conflicting, confusing, very condescending, and ultimately incompetent efforts of international aid organizations, ostensibly coordinated by committees of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former President Clinton, interviewed as they try to re-make the country, amidst elections, hurricanes, and lots of bureaucracy. Besides the build-up of this damning evidence, culled from 400 hours of footage, two sorrowfully poetic first-person narrations reveal the hearts of the matter – one is from an (anonymous) woman aid worker’s e-mails home, representing the well-meaning young, and a few experienced, foreign workers who came with enthusiasm and packed up discouraged, and a male voice reading from Peck’s own, impassioned journals demanding Haitian empowerment.

Deepsouth also blames decades of poverty exacerbated by bureaucratic bumbling as the root cause of problems, here the growing scourge of HIV/AIDS in rural United States. The startling opening map moves through time to correlate the locus of slavery in the 19th century with rising HIV infections into the 21st century. Director Lisa Biagiotti travels over thousands of beautifully filmed byways of the Delta to follow people who are trying to reach out from the geographical, social, and religious isolation (sensitively portrayed) to provide education, friendship, substitute family, and lobbying (pedantically portrayed) for a convincing plea that this isn’t just the stereotyped urban crisis.