Human Rights Watch Film Festival New York 2015

Starting with the 1978 establishment of the Helsinki Watch focusing on compliance with the Helsinki accords and human rights violations and the creation of watch committees for the Americas and other regions in the eighties, the human rights watch has emerged as the largest global organization tracking and revealing human rights violations.  Its work is distinguished  by  fact  based  non-partisan rigorous research, effective media use  and has involved  collaboration in setting up the International Criminal Court,  identifying neglected human rights topics and investigating human rights abuses in closed society  such as Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch was instrumental  in passing of the 2008 treaty   outlawing  cluster  munitions   for which it shared  the 1997 Nobel Price.  Applying up to date electronic research methods with on-the-ground fact finding Human Rights Watch has been able to inform public opinion and publicize crucial issues faced by our societies. They include ethnic cleansing, minority and women rights, legal challenges of counter terrorism actions, and political oppression, to name but a few.

Among its most important tools in reaching a larger public is the annual Human Rights Watch Film festival held this year in its 26th edition from June 11-26.   Co-presented with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center it featured 16 documentaries and special programs such as a seminar on international crisis. Three major themes defined the program: Art Versus Oppression, Change makers, and Justice and Peace. According to Human Rights Watch the films “celebrate the power of individuals and communities to effect change”. Like other established film festival Human Rights Watch is actively involved in film making because it sponsors investigative documentary films in specific problem areas. Its crisis seminar featured The Unravelling by Marcus Bleasdale. This 2015 production provided the first coverage of the evolving humanitarian crisis in the Central African Republic and received the Robert Capa Gold Medal by the Associated Press. Such film sponsorship is accompanied by the effective pre- or post-festival placement in political settings and media campaigns naming and shaming the offenders. Suffice to say the event is considered to be among the best film festivals New York offers, though as noted by Stephen Holder in the New York Times its “commercial impact is miniscule”,   

Shown at the 2014 New York Film Festival The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/UK, 2014) follows his acclaimed 2013 film The Act of Killing which investigated and reenacted with some of the perpetrators the 1965 murder of alleged communists and others in Indonesia when more than a million individuals were executed. None of the killers and politicians supporting the massacres was ever brought to justice. In The Look of Silence a family of survivors finds out how their son, Ramli, was murdered.   The brother of the victim, Adi, an itinerant eye doctor tracks down the killer and tries to break the code of silence. The killers show no remorse and offer matter of fact detailed descriptions of the killing. They take the film maker to the spot next to Snake River where they killed Ramli and also claimed to have participated in the murder of more than 10,000 other victims. No excuses are articulated but the rationalization is offered that the murder was necessary to maintain order. Reenacting the killing and castration of his brother, one culprit recalls being proud to walk into a restaurant with a severed head. Surrounded by this persistence of silence about the mass killing, the families of victims still live in fear of reprisals and of new murders. Many of those responsible for the killings now have positions in all levels of government as if nothing has happened.

OF MEN AND WAR, Laurent Becue-Renard, 2014 France/Switzerland

In this compelling documentary Becue-Renard provides a human face to the suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As distinct from other superb productions on that problematic issue like HBO’s War Torn we learn through numerous statements by soldiers beset by the condition what happened to them during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how they have tried to survive the aftermath. There is no footage from the war. Comments by a therapist running group sessions with the soldiers and affected family members who try to keep them grounded are kept to a minimum. Recollections from killing the enemy and civilians, witnessing close up the death of close friends and fellow soldiers, even of murder, permits us to better understand. But these experiences are frozen in the soldiers’ memories.  For the viewer it is difficult to grasp how overcoming the horror is possible. Many soldiers considered killing themselves and a many combatants suffering from PTSD actually did so during the conflict and afterwards.  The camera recorded for nine months their interactions and the documentary becomes a record of the transformatory power of the war experience, an experience shared by less than 1 percent of the population, and not readily accessible to most.  Their actions had a lasting impact on the moral fiber of these war torn soldiers and their sense of self has become precarious.

The Wanted 18, Amer Shomali, Paul Cowan, Canada/Palestine/France

Reflection is not only prompted by dark presentations of human rights violation. The audience gets insights into the mindsets of Palestinian villagers and the occupying military powers of Israel through this award winning documentary. Its seemingly absurd story is provided through interviews, reenactments, archival footage, and the stoop motion animation used to present 18 talking cows. During the first intifada the villagers of Beit Sahour decide to acquire the cows to become self-sufficient and gain a modicum of control over their fate, thus engage in an act of civil disobedience. The Israeli response is fast.  Self-governance, even if it is just restricted to the milk supply, is declared a security risk, aggravated by the villagers’ refusal to pay taxes. For a week the Israeli army tries to catch and kill the cows hidden by the villagers. Eventually the villagers give up their struggle feeling their civil-disobedience struggle betrayed by the Oslo accord signed by Jasser Arafat.

Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman, USA/Mexico, 2015

This documentary offers intriguing portraits of self-defense movements on both sides of the Mexican border. The activists   claim to be abandoned, by their governments and have no expectation that there will be an improvement of the conditions they are facing. On Mexican side the  autodefensas take arms against the violent  Knights Templars drug cartel, On the American side  in the Cocaine  Valley border strip at the Arizona Border  Recon,  a para military  group is  led by a former  U.S. Veteran  and is supported by local farmers. Its mission is to defend the American land and the border region against an invasion of Mexican drug traffickers and immigrants. Both groups have no faith in their governments; the Mexican vigilantes   believe that government agencies including the police and the military are corrupted by the pervasive power of the cartels. Some known Templars apparently form part of the civilian defense force used against the vigilantes. Members of the US vigilante group note as do their Mexican counter part a complete breakdown of the law and order and the failure of the institutions that are supposed to protect the citizens. For the American vigilantes the government is naïve and incompetent not willing to face the threat of Mexican cartels. Both groups define their own justice which may be as brutal as what they are fighting.

3 ½ Minutes, Ten bullets, Marc Silver, US, 2015

As recent events in the United States have demonstrated racial issues pervade the criminal justice and political system with latent or overt race attitudes influence actions and decisions. In Marc Silver’s documentary such miscarriage of justice is elucidated.  In the parking lot of a gas station a white middle-aged man fires into the d car of four unarmed black teenagers objecting to the loud playing of rap music, killing a 17 year old boy.   He argues in the first trial that after a verbal exchange he was threatened by one teenager who held a weapon in his hand and invokes self-defense under Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law. He is acquitted.  During the second trial testimony by his female companion who was sitting next to him in the car revealed that he had lied in court and he was convicted of murder. The readiness to engage in violent action cannot be disconnected from his perception that black men are criminals constituting an ever president threat.

Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, US, 2015 provides a superbly researched and structured documentation of the Black Panther party from the late sixties on. In an extraordinary combination of archival material, witness accounts by supporters as well as opponents and testimonies of the founders of the party its rise and perceived threat to the existing political system is demonstrated. .The violent methods of the police and governmental agencies to contain and exterminate the movement are illustrated including the trials of Bobby Seal and other prime members of the movement. Contrary to public perception the party was oriented to the community providing child care, health and food services not otherwise available. Women constituted the majority of kits rank and file. Though a revolutionary ethos was embraced by the movement with the stress on radical change and self-empowerment, and armed members patrolled the streets to monitor the police, actual violence by members of the party against the established powers was rather limited. To the contrary’ for Edgar Hoover the Black Panther party constituted the greatest threat to the security of the United States and he initiated through the FBI’s cointelpro initiatives many legal and illegal actions, to curtail the power of the party and to destroy it. They included surveillance, police harassment, infiltration of the party, and assassinations to name but a few.

In its 2015 edition the Human Rights Watch Film Festival provided again persuasive documentations of global human rights violations. The reaction to the violation is shown conveying the important message that individuals and communities can take action.

Claus Mueller

filmexchange@gmail.com