Seeing is to Understanding
Arna’s Children / De kinderen van Arna
Juliano Mer Khamis, Danniel Danniel / Israel, Netherlands, Palestine / 2003 / 84 min.
From an early age, Palestinian children at the refugee camp in Jenin learn to throw rocks and sing hateful songs about Israelis. An energetic Israeli woman named Arna, who in the 1950s married a Palestinian man, decided to build a theatre in the middle of Jenin, a city constantly ripped apart by conflict. The reason for the project was to present to the local children the idea that they could vent their frustration, anger, and sadness from the continuous loss of loved ones in ways other than throwing Molotov cocktails. The occupation and lingering conflict, however, completely destroy her efforts. Not long after Arna’s death another brutal conflict in the town occurred. After five years, her son Juliano decides to return to Jenin to find out what happened to the young boys who regularly participated in the theatre. With camera in hand, Juliano follows their attacks on Israeli tanks and realizes that, just like the building that housed the theatre, his mother’s project is in ruins. Two of the boys die during clashes with Israeli soldiers and another dies as a suicide bomber.
Contact: Pieter Van Huystee film, email: matthijs@pvhfilm.nl , www.pvhfilm.nl
Laogai
Jo Angerer, Rico Carisch / Germany, China, USA / 1993 / 50 min.
The equivalent of the Soviet gulag is today’s Chinese laogai. “The basic aim and methods are similar: support the revolution, win the class struggle, torture, executions, and slave labour. One difference is however very basic. “Not even in the gulag or in the Nazi concentration camps was such an emphasis placed on brainwashing,” says the author of the documentary, Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident living in the
Contact : WDR/Laogai, email: joachim.angerer@wdr.de
Checkpoint / Machssomim
Yoav Shamir / Israel / 2003 / 80 min.
Over three million Palestinians live in the
Contact: Amythos Films, Eden Productions, email: nasto@netvision.net.il
Communist Charity
Harry Wu /
Even if China in the last few years has been trying to give the impression of a gradual improvement of its human rights record, in terms of the number of executions the country has no rival. In 2002, over 2,500 people were executed. In this investigative documentary, Chinese activist Harry Wu reveals the shocking connection between the execution of prisoners and organ transplants. Raw footage of public executions are set against the testimonies of doctors and others involved, in which we learn among other things that during one heart transplant operation a prisoner was brought to the hospital garage, 100 meters from the operating room, where he was shot in the head.
Contact: The Laogai Research Foundation, email: laogai@laogai.org , www.laogai.org
To Live Is Better than to Die / Hao Si Bu Ru Lai Huo Zhe
Chen Weijun / China / 2003 / 60 min.
In the 1990s, around 100,000 subsistence farmers in central China were offered a rare possibility to earn some extra income. Through a state-organized program, they could sell their blood for money. However, due to the poor conditions of the state hospital, over half of those giving blood were infected with the HIV virus. In the beginning of 2001, director Chen Weijun went to the village of Wenlou, which had come to the world‘s attention because of the number of its infected citizens. In a cinéma vérité style he captures the tragic fate of a family with three small children, in which only the eldest sister was able to escape the deadly disease. Raw scenes of daily suffering and slow death are not only a shocking testimony of the hopeless fate of the young peasant family but also a heartbreaking message of the immense power of a family‘s love.
Contact: TV2/Denmark, email: invi@tv2.dk
The Peacekeepers and the Women / Die Helfer und die Frauen
Karin Jurschick / Germany / 2003 / 80 min.
The international intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo ended several years of war in the former Yugoslavia. Peace is ensured by the presence of SFOR and KFOR peacekeepers. One of the most lucrative areas of the newly revived post-war economy has quickly become the trafficking of women, who come from Ukraine, Romania, and mainly from Moldova. “They promised me I would work as a waitress in Germany. I was lied to and instead of a restaurant in Germany, I found myself in a night club in Bosnia,” confides one of the women who was violently forced into prostitution. Her clients are often members of the international peace force, who make almost 150 euros a day, half the monthly salary of a Bosnian professor. This investigative documentary delves into this extremely delicate problem and exposes a great deal about the profitable trade in women. From testimonies of the peacekeepers, the owners of night clubs, as well as from the individual women, it becomes clear that the presence of the international force in Bosnia and Kosovo is an important factor in the growth of prostitution.
Contact: Karin Jurschick Filmproduction, email: Jurschick@aol.com
Germany and the Secret Genocide
J. Michael Hagopian / USA / 2003 / 57 min.
One of the darkest chapters of modern Turkish history is no doubt the planned and well organized massacre of over one and a half million Armenians. This first and still relatively unknown genocide of the 20th century was, according to the testimonies and statements in this documentary, not only a result of the nationalistic fever that emerged from the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire. Germany also played a large role. On the threshold of the First World War it signed a bilateral treaty with Turkey and was hoping to exploit the mineral wealth of the Middle East. To help these efforts, over a million Armenians were resettled into the arid desert of Mesopotamia, where they were forced under extreme conditions to build a railroad that was to connect Berlin and Baghdad. For over three decades director Michael Hagopian gathered together the stories of the survivors. By compiling unique archival material, testimonies of eyewitnesses, and arguments made by historians, he is able to highlight the large role that Germany played in this “secret Genocide.” Some of the German soldiers, engineers and diplomats that facilitated these massacres later became members and even high ranking officials of the Nazi party. The events in the inhospitable areas of Anatolia and Mesopotamia were to be a prelude to what would follow at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Warsaw Ghetto.
Contact: Armenian Film Foundation, email: jmhagopian@aol.com , www.armenianfilmfoundation.com
Lest We Forget
Jason DaSilva / USA / 2003 / 57 min.
After September 11th the situation for many Muslims living in the United States radically changed. The police interrogated many without giving a reason. Some were sent to prison, others received death threats from their neighbours. None of them participated in the terrorist attacks in the slightest way and all of them condemned it. However, over 1,500 people were imprisoned, with their only “offence” being their belonging to the Muslim community. Thousands of Americans of Japanese origin met a similar fate after the attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII. Using archival materials and eyewitness accounts, the filmmakers bring this often overlooked fact to light and show that, just like in 1941, 60 years later entirely innocent individuals again became victims of the harsh mistrust of the authorities and the general public.
Contact: In Face Films, email: infacefilms@yahoo.com , www.infacefilms.com
A Normal Life
Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi / USA, Great Britain / 2003 / 65 min.
In June 1999, when NATO soldiers were deployed in Pristine, the capital of Kosovo, thousands of refugees were able to return to their homes after years of being away. Among these were a group of seven young friends, who discovered all around them despairing remains of the bombed-out city. The initial euphoria from the end of the war was quickly replaced by fears for their own future. Beni and Tina became acclaimed journalists, their friend Ylber went to study in the US, followed a few years later by the attractive Linda. Rrusta, a singer in a hip-hop band, converted to Islam, Driton trains dogs and smokes pot, and Kaltrina runs a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts. In a series of mini-portraits interspersed with television footage of the bloody conflict in the Balkans, we follow their post-war dilemma of how to live in a society marked by the trauma of war. Can young people in this atmosphere find space for a dignified life, or is it better to leave?
Contact: Jane Balfour Servies, email: info@jbslondon.fsnet.co.uk
Rwanda, A Cry of Deafening Silence / Rwanda, un cri d`un silence, inouï
Anne Lainé / France / 2003 / 52 min.
In 1994, over 800,000 people were brutally murdered in less than 100 days. Ten years after the genocide, Rwandan society is still haunted by the devastating trauma. Due to the systematic rape of women and young girls, there has been an outbreak of AIDS and a rise in the number of unwanted children. Almost each week there are funerals for victims who have been exhumed from mass graves. Psychiatric clinics are full of traumatized people, and the entire country still feels the presence of the suffering that they have all undergone. French director Anne Laine, who dealt with the theme of the Rwandan genocide in her film Gacaca, reveals in this sensitively filmed documentary the traumatic stories of women who survived the massacre. Together with doctors and psychiatrists, the women contemplate how Rwandan society can return to some sense of normalcy after the genocide.
Contact: Palindromes, email: jokapler@magic.fr
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine / S-21: La machine de mort khmere rouge Rithy Panh
France / 2002 / 101 min.
On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge took complete control of the government in Cambodia and began a genocide that was to take the lives of over two million people. 10,000 of these victims died in the most feared of all concentration camps, number 21, in the Phnom Penh suburb Tuol Sleng. “They did not kill me because the head of the camp liked my pictures,” says one of the seven survivors participating in the documentary, which with the help of a brush and some paint is able to bring his shattering memories to life. His realistic paintings, combined with photographs and the recorded “confessions” of the tortured prisoners contrast sharply with the opinions of the former guards and torturers. These men do not show even the slightest signs of remorse for their actions, which they are able to coldly reconstruct while obstinately repeating that they only mindlessly carried out the orders of their superiors. Their cynical attitude towards the atrocities that they committed against men, women and children show how difficult it is for Cambodia to come to terms with its horrifying past.
Contact: INA, email: mgautard@ina.fr
Abduction / Otmica
Ivan Markov / Serbia and Montenegro / 2002 / 46 min.
When the small Serbian town of Sjeverin, on the border with Bosnia, woke up on the morning of October 22nd, 1992, there were no signs indicating that this would be the day when the first war crimes of the ongoing Balkan war would take place. A bus taking local residents to work was stopped by a Serbian paramilitary group, who without giving a reason, took 16 ethnic Muslims hostage and dragged them off to an unknown location. Director Ivan Markov reconstructs the events of the crime in great detail, allowing the relatives of the victims and the only survivor of the kidnapping to tell their stories. The film faithfully evokes the inhuman cruelty that from the beginning of the war gripped the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Despite the fact that those responsible were well known, to this day no one has been convicted.
Contact: TV B92, email: ksenija@b92.net , www.b92.net
Aung San Suu Kyi: The Prisoner of Rangoon
Claude Schauli / Canada, Switzerland / 2003 / 42 min.
Shortly before she was imprisoned once again, well-known Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi gave an interview to a Canadian reporter. This forms the core of this documentary film of this brave woman, who for 15 years has led the fight for democracy in her home country. Despite her stubborn opposition to the military junta, Suu Kyi has urged her supporters to use non-violent civil disobedience as their only weapon. For these ideas, taken from Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., she was awarded the Nobel peace prize. The film is, however, more than just an extraordinary interview with a brave politician. Footage taken with hidden cameras reveals how the Burmese military junta have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people into forced labour, forcefully conscripted young boys into the army, and how parts of the country have been devastated by civil war.
Contact: Mundovision Ltd., email: mundo@interlog.com
Reminiscences / Desde la memoria
Christina von Greve / Spain, Germany / 2003 / 7 min.
“I saw dogs running through the streets with pieces of human flesh. As long as I live, I will never get that picture out of my head.” In the memories of the survivors, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the following Franco dictatorship are still very real. The creators of this experimental film combine the testimonies of people who lived through these events with slow-motion black and white archival footage and colour pictures from the streets of contemporary Spain. The resulting collage, underscored by peaceful background music, is an emotionally effective reflection on a time when Spain lived through one of the most difficult periods in its history.
Contact: Christina von Greve, email: cvgreve@khm.de
Zimbabwe, Countdown / Zimbabwe, de la libération au chaos
Michael Raeburn / France, Zimbabwe, Great Britain / 2003 / 56 min.
Film director, writer, and “white Rhodesian” Michael Raeburn started out decades ago as a supporter of the current president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Because of his support for the liberation movement and his film criticizing the conditions during the colonial period, he was forced into exile. Now with disillusionment he is forced to realize that the “liberator” Mugabe has become a dictator. In a very personal film that at the same time maps out the history of modern Zimbabwe, Raeburn links together archival materials with footage of the current situation. This dynamically edited documentary shows dramatic pictures of Mugabe’s sanctioned violence against white farmers and members of the opposition carried out by mobs of semi-literate and manipulated villagers. Combined with fascinating perspectives of the intellectual elite, the film is an indictment against the corrupt and degenerate Mugabe regime. After finishing the filming, Michael Raeburn was forced into exile for a second time.
Contact: Kontakt: Arte France, email: m-zack@artefrance.fr , www.artepro.com
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