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The 1998 Human Rights Watch
International Film Festival was organized
by Bruni Burres and Heather Harding of Human Rights Watch and Marian Masone of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Special thanks to Kathleen Murphy and Isa Cucinotta, Film
Society, and to Jonathan Fanton, Chair, and Kenneth Roth, Executive
Director, Human Rights Watch. The Festival Planning Committee
includes Michele Alexander, John Anderson, Cynthia Brown, Elaine Charnov, Marina Kaufman, Marianne Law and Rachel Weintraub. Thanks are due Kahn and Jacobs, Inc., Time Out New York, Gigante Vaz, Ana Ayesta, Dmitry Torgovitsky, Heidi Reinberg, Wellington Love and Robin Vachal of The New Festival and Mahen Bonetti and Don Webster of the African Film Festival.
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is the only international film festival in the world exclusively devoted to human rights. Now in its ninth year, the Festival was created to enhance public awareness of human rights issues and specific abuses of human rights at home and abroad--drawing on the power of film to communicate across borders, both physical and ideological.
Human Rights Watch promotes respect for human rights by rigorously and systematically monitoring abuses committed by governments in more than 70 countries. Human Rights Watch defends freedom of thought and expression, due process of law, and equal protection of the law; and stands with victims and activists to bring offenders to justice, to prevent discrimination, to uphold political freedom and to protect people from inhumane conduct in wartime, challenging governments and those holding power to end abusive practices and to respect international human rights law. Human Rights Watch enlists the public and the international community to support the cause of human rights for all.
The films in the Festival reflect many points of view, not necessarily those of Human Rights Watch. This schedule is subject to change without notice.
US Premiere:
FOUR WOMEN OF EGYPT
Tahani Rasched, Canada, 1997, 90m; video
Teacher, writer, activist, politician--four extraordinary women testify about their long friendship and the tumultuous historical events they have lived through in their native land. We are privileged to listen in on their lively, articulate conversations as this handsome quartet reminisce and argue about their childhood, women's struggle for the right to vote, religion, their time in prison together, their stubborn admiration for Nasser, living abroad, the assassination of a husband, their children. Amina, Safynaz, Shahenda and Wedad may have very different utopian visions--as Christian, Muslims, atheist--but they are bonded in the joy they take in each other's company and in the feast of life.
Friday, June 12, 4 pm
Wednesday, June 17, 8:30 pm
Sunday, June 21, 4:45 pm
(discussion with
filmmaker to follow)
NY Premiere:
DEATH SENTENCE
Prakash Jha, India, 1997, 119m; 35mm
This dramatic Indian epic--Rambo for women's rights-- opens with the pursuit and brutal murder of a mother and her young daughter, accused respectively of witchcraft and adultery. In reality, these women are casualties of a corrupt patriarchal socio-economic system, sustained by landlords, politicians, bureaucrats, priests. When Ketki, a teacher's daughter, marries Vinay, a landlord's son, she is outraged by her husband's weakness and the venality of all of the "pillars" of this community. Bit by bit, she grows into a kind of glorious avenging goddess, heroic in her efforts to save herself and her "sisters."
with
US Premiere:
WE ARE NOT YOUR MONKEYS
Anand Patwardhan, India, 1996, 5m; video
A lively Indian "call to arms," sung and drummed to an attentive audience of villagers seated in a circle on the ground. The song traces the mythological origins of the "untouchables," exploited folk at the very bottom of India's brutal caste system--explaining how the god Rama turned Hanuman into a monkey and then created a monkey army--"untouchables"--in order to preserve racial purity. Now, the singer promises, the tables will be turned: "We will make you human."
Friday, June 12, 6:15 pm;
Monday, June 15,
9:15 pm;
Tuesday, June 16, 2 pm
NY Premiere:
BLIND FAITH
Ernest Dickerson, U.S., 1997, 118m; 35mm
BLIND FAITH shows the progressive disintegration of a loving, middle-class Black family after a bright, upstanding son is accused of murdering an Irish boy. Ernest Dickerson, onetime cinematographer for Spike Lee, John Sayles, and Jonathan Demme, simultaneously explores society's bigotry and African-American familial faultlines--both of which doom the young Black man. The cast is superb: Charles S. Dutton is rock-hard as father and cop aiming to get as close to "white respectability" as possible; Courtney B. Vance jumps off the screen in his passionate legal defense of his brother's son. Dickerson encourages us to view this 1950s "case" through the filters of our own assumptions about race and social injustice, then pulls the rug out from under our complacency, revealing yet another lethal layer of prejudice.
Friday, June 12, 9 pm
(Co-presented by The New Festival)
NY Premiere:
BOY HERO 001
Pekka Lehto and Beatrix A. Wood
England / Russia, 1997, 55m; video
During Stalin's reign, 12-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a legendary hero for betraying his family and reporting his farmer-father to the secret police as an "enemy of the state." His act became a symbol for undermining family ties in favor of Stalin's monolithic state-machine, and his name appeared on parks, streets, and schools. Pavlik's heroic reputation--like so much else--has come in for its share of revisionist analysis since perestroika: in BOY HERO 001, we travel back to Pavlik's isolated village to talk to those who recall both myth and wretched reality.
with
US Premiere:
AN ORDINARY PRESIDENT
Yuri Khashchevatsky, Germany / Belarus,
1996, 56m; video
Winner 1998 Nestor Almendros Prize
This daring satire documents the dictatorship President Alexander Lukaschenka--an admirer of Hitler--has imposed on his country. Charting the despot's rise to power in White Russia, PRESIDENT shows how Lukaschenka began by promising to root out all governmental corruption--then used his knowledge of that corruption to become president. Erstwhile friends and colleagues--now opponents--tell their stories with often ironic intensity. Indeed, the whole film is mined with black humor, an acid medium in which to expose the shape of totalitarianism. (Khashchevatsky was severely beaten after this program aired on French Television late last year.)
Saturday, June 13, 3 pm
(discussion to follow with Khashchevatsky);
Sunday, June 14, 5:30 pm
(reception for Almendros Award-winning
Khashchevatsky to follow);
Monday, June 15, 4:20 pm
NY Premiere:
OFF SEASON
Mirjam Quinte and Pepe Danquart, Germany,
1997, 125m; 35mm
Winner of the 1997 Berlin Int'l Film Festival Peace Prize
Mostar in the summer of 1994: The famous old bridge over the River Neretva has been destroyed, and the city is divided, with Croatians living in the west and Muslims in the eastern section. German politician Hans Koschnick has been appointed by the European Union as administrator of Mostar, charged with bringing back water, electricity, bridges to the city; and with making Mostar a place where people never ask who is Serbian, Croatian or Muslim. This searing documentary shows the myriad individual and organized attempts to rebuild the ruined city and the symbolic bridge. Michael Hammon's outstanding, high-contrast black-and-white photography creates a powerful report about the difficulties of reconstruction.
Saturday, June 13, 6 pm
(discussion with
filmmakers to follow)
Sunday, June 14, 8:15 pm
(discussion with
filmmakers to follow)
Monday, June 15, 2 pm
NY Premiere:
THE MAN IN HER LIFE
Carlos Siguion-Reyna, Philippines, 1997, 96m; 35mm
Co-presented by
The New Festival
Selya is a beautiful young teacher in love with Bobby, an arrogant, promiscuous traveling salesman. After what seems to be Bobby's permanent disappearing act, Selya agrees to marry Ramon, a handsome, wealthy school principal. The newlyweds' happiness seems doomed when Selya discovers that her new husband is a homosexual. When Bobby wheedles himself back into her life, Selya--lonely and hurt--falls into an affair. Selya bears a son, and Ramon warmly embraces fatherhood, but Bobby turns belatedly possessive, trying to claim both mother and child. At first, MAN was censored, until a re-cut version was finally allowed theatrical release in the Philippines.
Saturday, June 13, 9 pm
US Premiere:
REZISTANS
Katharine Kean, U.S. / Haiti, 1997; 156m
This detailed history of political events in Haiti from around 1985 to the present follows the rise of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide after Duvalier's exile, through the military coup that sent Aristide, Haiti's first elected president, into exile, up to the moment when the USA brought him back to his homeland and his presidency--with strings attached. Aristide's most striking supporter is Antoine Izmery, a wealthy, articulate businessman who helped to shape the future of Haiti. The force of Izmery's personality is such that when we "witness" his assassination, the horror is overwhelming. REZISTANS is dedicated to his memory.
Sunday, June 14, 2 pm;
Tuesday, June 16, 6 pm
(discussion with filmmaker follows each screening)
NY Premiere:
BEYOND BARBED WIRE
Terri deBono and Steve Rosen
U.S., 1997, 88m; 35mm
An exhilarating documentary celebrating the extraordinary human sacrifice and courage of Japanese-American soldiers who served in the U.S. Army's 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regiment--units that absorbed the highest casualties and became the most decorated during WWII. While they fought in Europe and worked in military intelligence in the Pacific, their families lived behind barbed wire in American internment camps. Elderly veterans break their long silence with moving tales of heroism and prejudice, while their children weep with pride at their parents' gallant battles--at home and overseas.
with
NY Premiere:
VISAS AND VIRTUE
Chris Tashima, U.S., 1997, 26m; 35mm
A true story about astonishing courage, VISAS AND VIRTUE won this year's Oscar for best short film. When Japanese Consul General Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara, stationed in Lithuania in 1940, finds his consulate besieged by refugee Jews in need of transit visas to escape the Nazi horror, he writes some 2,000--even after he's ordered to Berlin in disgrace. Sugihara and his wife make a remarkable spiritual connection with a young Jewish couple who have just lost their only son--and a symbolic gift of life is exchanged in the midst of holocaust.
Monday, June 15, 6:30 pm
(discussion with filmmakers to follow)
Saturday, June 20, 6:15 pm
(discussion with filmmakers to follow)
Monday, June 22, 2 pm
NY Premiere:
GERRIE AND LOUISE
Sturla Gunnarsson, Canada, 1997, 75m; 16mm
The true story of politically star-crossed lovers: Gerrie, a colonel in the South African Defense Force, complicit in the torture and murder of anti-apartheid activists, and Louise, one of South Africa's top investigative journalists who specialized in exposés about government hit squads and the men who ran them...men like Gerrie. Realizing that apartheid was doomed, Gerrie betrayed army and family by speaking out against military operations against the ANC. Using Louise as his confessor and as a way to get revenge,. Gerrie in turn gave the journalist a great story. In this devastating document of love and politics, this couple's improbable relationship parallels the legacy of apartheid and its aftermath--taking truth and forgiveness to the deepest level.
Tuesday, June 16, 4:20 pm
Sunday, June 21, 9:15 pm
Monday, June 22, 6:15 pm
NY Premiere:
A LETTER WITHOUT WORDS
Lisa Lewenz, Germany / U.S., 1997, 62m; 16mm
When filmmaker Lisa Lewenz unearths a trove of her grandmother Ella's old home movies in an attic, she recovers a moving record of several generations of her affluent Jewish-German family, as well as a time capsule of life in Germany from 1912 through the 1940s. Working in rare color film, Ella captured halcyon times in a homeland that gradually becomes unfamiliar under the shadow of Nazi hatred. At first, Ella's camera eye possesses a privileged POV, but slowly, as swastikas appear and friends like Albert Einstein and Rabbi Leo Baeck vanish, it turns unanchored and alienated. As Lisa matches her grandmother's landscapes and skylines to existing images--melding past and present reality--the two women speak to each other through the years.
with
US Premiere:
A QUIET LAUGH
Jane Rogoyska, Poland/U.K., 1997, 10m; 35mm
Nearly every shot in this strange and beautiful film--about a society in which books are forbidden--is surrealistically slanted, as though the world has become fundamentally destabilized. Hant'a spends his days compacting books, but salvages the best for a demented priest who is searching for the secret of flight.
Tuesday, June 16, 9:30 pm
Wednesday, June 17, 6:15 pm
Thursday, June 18, 2 pm
(discussion with filmmaker follows each screening)
NY Premiere:
VERTICAL LOVE
Arturo Sotto Diaz, Cuba / France, 1997, 100m; 35mm
A comic love story growing out of the housing shortage in Havana. Supervised by one of many grey-suited bureaucrats in shades, Estela evicts people from ramshackle, makeshift "homes." Ernesto works in a hospital, collecting blood from pretty young donors. When Estela makes a half-hearted suicide attempt, Ernesto makes a clumsy pass at her. Their hilarious attempts to find a place to make love climax in a stuck elevator. Many misadventures later, Estela and Ernesto find happiness, and Radio Havana carries reports of elevators getting stuck all over the city--each emitting the strange odor of flowers and sweat!
Wednesday, June 17, 2 pm
Friday, June 19, 4 pm
Saturday, June 20, 9:15 pm
US Premiere:
ETERNAL MEMORY
David Pultz, Canada, 1997, 81m, 16mm
During the 1930s and 1940s, "social surgery on a monumental scale" was practiced in the USSR by the Stalinist regime: 20 million died in labor camps, of famine, or in wholesale executions. ETERNAL MEMORY movingly recounts Ukrainian losses: "the flowers of our nation." Described by officials and historians as a "dysfunctional dynamic that got out of hand," the Great Terror relied on widespread
denunciations and confessions elicited through torture. This tragic period is memorialized in the ritual exhumation and reburial of innumerable mass graves, by the riveting testimony of survivors, and Meryl Streep's poignant narration. No one responsible for these atrocities was ever indicted.
with
NY Premiere:
I DON'T KNOW WHERE, WHEN, OR HOW...
Zelemir Guardiol, Yugoslavia, 1995; 8m
Portraits of the hopeless elderly in the former Yugoslavia. Often in closeup, the camera moves like a gentle hand over landscapes of worn, weary flesh.
Wednesday, June 17, 4 pm
Friday, June 19, 2 pm
Tuesday, June 23, 6:15 pm
(discussion with filmmaker to follow)
THE MURMURING
Byun Young Joo, Korea, 1995, 98m; 16mm
When filmmaker Byun Young Joo was shooting A Woman-Being in Asia, she met a young prostitute working to pay for her mother's medical problems, stemming from her experiences as a "comfort woman" during WWII. Shanghaied in their teens into brothels to service Japanese soldiers, Korean comfort women were brutalized and mutilated, physically and emotionally. After the war, many of these women died of disease, suicided, or often didn't make it home because of their shame. MURMURING offers many of these courageous survivors their first chance to tell the world their stories.
Thursday, June 18, 4 pm
Saturday, June 20, 4 pm
(discussion with filmmaker to follow)
Sunday, June 21, 6:45 pm
NY Premiere:
SACRIFICE
Ellen Bruno, U.S., 1998, 50m; 16mm
Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, SACRIFICE takes on the issue of child slavery and prostitution, focusing on young Burmese girls sold by their families into Thailand brothels. As four young women recount their horrific experiences, they draw dignity around them like a beautiful, fraying shawl. Despite having been systematically degraded, their virginity sold many times over, their dreams dead-ended, these women bravely witness to the barbaric abuse of their sex.
with
IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE
NY Premiere:
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani, Netherlands, 1997, 67m; 35mm
Youth, virginity, and submission are highly prized in Moroccan society; deviation from this gold standard of gender cannot be tolerated. Director Ouazzani interweaves the stories of her relations with her father, her mother's thwarted marriage and suicide, her grandmother's unhappy union, and the elaborate, joyous preparations for a traditional wedding. The dominant pattern in the resulting tapestry details women's worth and worthlessness in this society. Working through her own memories, as well as those of the women who created her, Ouazzani finds a way back to her beloved father's house.
Thursday, June 18,
6:30 pm
Friday, June 19,
8:45 pm
Sunday, June 21, 2 pm
(discussion with filmmaker follows each screening)
PAULINA
Vicky Funari and Jennifer Maytorena Taylor
U.S. / Mexico / Canada, 1997, 88m; 16mm
PAULINA works as a maid in a Mexico City home, while proudly raising her daughter to be a new, freer citizen of the future. In search of the history that made this remarkable woman, we travel back to the rural village where family and community once treated her as chattel available for rape or a commodity to trade for land. As each self-interested "historian" tells his or her version of Paulina's childhood--accompanied by various dramatic versions of what happened--the result is a Rashomon-like exposé of the systemic violation of a woman's rights as a human being. In this true story, we come to see the origins of a heroine--and can only wonder at her strength and determination to be her own person.
with
NY Premiere:
REPETITION COMPULSION
Ellie Lee, U.S., 1997, 6m; 35mm
In this uncompromising animation, dark charcoal lines and shadings project a world in which one is always imprisoned, always afraid. Pulsing with terror and violence, the drawings tell the story of an abused girl-child who grows up to be an abused adult, whose only support comes from an equally damaged homeless man. The voices of actual women and the sound of terrified breathing punctuate this powerful short film.
Thursday, June 18, 9:30 pm
Friday, June 19, 6:15 pm; Saturday, June 20, 2 pm
(discussion with filmmaker follows each screening)
NY Premiere:
MARIAN
Petr Václav, Czech Republic, 1996, 109m; 35mm
With a brutally realistic eye, using a non-rofessional cast, director Petr Václav documents each step in the state's creation of a criminal from the raw material of a Romany child. Snatched from his family, rubber-stamped as retarded due to "hereditary defects inherent in his race," Marian can't speak Czech, doesn't even know how to keep himself clean. Growing up in various institutions, he misses or throws away every chance at salvation or love. Václav never pulls punches in this elegy for a ruthlessly isolated soul, but he manages to mine a strange, powerful beauty out of Marian's wasted life.
with
US Premiere:
2 1/2 WEEKS IN PARADISE
Evgeny Solomin, Russia, 1997, 10m; 35mm
In 1992, war in Tajikistan turned an ancient gypsy tribe (the Liuli) into refugees fleeing from massacre. PARADISE documents their brief stay in a prosperous Siberian town, where the men sit around steaming pots and talk the day away, and children beg in the streets under their mothers' watchful eyes. At the conclusion of this poignant poem--in shades of black and white--about dispossession, the rootless Liuli move on, no longer welcome in this brief urban sanctuary.
Monday June 22, 8:30 pm;
Wednesday, June 24, 2 pm
Thursday, June 25, 4 pm
NY Premiere:
CROSSROADS
Hillie Molenaar and Joop Van Wijk
The Netherlands, 1997, 60m; 35mm
In 1994, at an intersection of roads from Uganda to Tanzania and from Kenya via Rwanda to Zaire, some half a million refugees from Tutsi-Hutu violence streamed in to create boom town called Benaco. The newcomers--whose roles in the Rwandan genocide are unknown--mean big business and a wave of petty crime. A single white wedding dress, rented out to refugee brides, becomes an emblem of innocence and hope that is long gone from the drawn faces of Rwandan orphans. CROSSROADS paints a remarkable portrait of humanity uprooted, but still striving for some semblance of home against the stark background of genocide.
with
THE DRAUGHTSMAN CLASH
Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda France/Gabon, 1996, 40m 35mm
This wicked little political satire could easily apply to any number of dictators, but points toward a certain Mobutu Sese Seko. The President-For-Life of some unidentified African nation orders an ordinary citizen, a champion checkers player, to his palace. After much ganja, food and drink, the champ begins enthusiastically to hurl traditional insults at his presidential opponent, and wins every game. His reward--and his ultimate fate--are not unexpected in this black-and-white and very funny send-up of living absurdly under tyranny.
Monday, June 22, 4:15 pm;
Tuesday, June 23, 2 pm
Wednesday, June 24, 6:15 pm
A Co-presentation with the African Film Festival
COMING OUT
Heiner Carow, former East Germany,
1989, 113 min; 35 mm
Hailed as the first and last East German film about gays, COMING OUT premiered on the very day the Berlin Wall came down. As a boy, Phillip Klahrmann felt homosexual affections stirring, but he's consciously chosen to live within the "norm." In his first teaching job, he meets shy Tanja, who falls hard for him, and soon the genuinely loving couple is sharing a flat. But Phillip can't repress his passionate desire for a young man he meets in a concert queue. His crisis of identity wounds everyone he loves, threatens his work as a teacher, and plunges him into an unhappy homosexual milieu. COMING OUT maps Phillip's painful search for his truest self through the very places and people that director Heiner Carow touched in his own rites of passage.
Tuesday, June 23, 4 pm
Wednesday, June 24, 9 pm
Thursday, June 25, 2 and 9 pm
(Co-presented with the New Festival)
Co-presented with the Margaret Mead Film Festival
INSIDE BEDFORD STUYVESANT(compilation)
Charles Hobson, executive producer
U.S.
1968, 55m, video
On April 4, 1968--the day of Martin Luther King's assassination---it was announced that the first African-American television series would air on WNEW-TV. The show's explicit aim was to counter stereotyped representations of the Brooklyn community of Bedford Stuyvesant, and Black communities everywhere. In a time of turmoil--over the Vietnam conflict, the Civil Rights struggle, and inner city rage--these half-hour programs mainstreamed positive Black role models such as Harry Belafonte, Max Roach, and Bed-Stuy teachers. Produced, written, and hosted by Blacks, Inside Bedford Stuyvesant led the way for an upsurge of African-American programming around the country.
with
NY Premiere:
MELVIN VAN PEEBLES' CLASSIFIED X
Melvin Van Peebles and Mark Daniels
U.S./France, 1997, 52m; 35 mm
Writer, director, producer and musician, Melvin Van Peebles shot--in 1971--the groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, an American indie before there were indies. Sweetback featured a Black hero who exploded the cinematic stereotype of African-Americans as sweet saints or groveling slaves. Van Peebles samples the kind of American film
making--rife with innumerable falsifications of Black character--that forged his own fight-back aesthetic. From Stepin'Fetchit to the New Negro and No Negro Eras, Van Peebles sees only "treachery...X-rated movie-making messin' with the Black man's mind."
Tuesday, June 23,
8:45 pm
Wednesday, June 24, 4:10 pm
Thursday, June 25,
6:15 pm
The following films will screen continuously on the Walter Reade Theater Gallery monitor throughout the Festival along with short previews of the festival program.
BOMB SQUAD
Ben Hillman 1998 6m:
A brilliantly animated musical about the race for the atomic bomb.
PARANOIA
Robert Edwards 1996 23m:
In an age when cynicism is endemic and the media, governnment and advertising continually bombard us with information, where is the line between healthy skepticism and lunacy?
WHY ARE WE SILENT?
Robin Garthwait 1997 1m:
Major motion picture and recording celebrities come together in a unique Public Service Announcement in support of Tibet.
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