You can see why. The event–parts of which will screen in up to 30 U.S. cities later in the year–is hardly festive, and despite the organizers’ intention to “showcase the heroic stories of activists and survivors,” any collection of films on human rights is more likely a catalog of human wrongs.
It also has an unfashionable premise: that what is morally edifying for a film’s viewer may practically aid its subject. Aesthetic values are conflated with ethics. One thinks that such a union may be possible or even fruitful, but then one thinks, wearily, of Oliver Stone.
So it feels a bit like homework, but given the troubled international arena, and America’s broadened involvement therein, this homework now has pertinence. A pop quiz may be held by the Defense Department on Iran tomorrow, or possibly Kurdistan. Conceivably, there could be a point to all this.
For some of the featured films no excuse is required. I was riveted to my seat during “Balseros,” a magnificent documentary feature about seven Cubans who risked their lives to paddle to the United States during the raft crisis of 1994. “Ford Transit” follows one of the numerous vans that traverse a roadblocked East Jerusalem and Ramallah. It entertains completely, leaving the sense that the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse have been served up, but not carved. I also loved “I’m Taraneh, 15,” which–to be curt–is about being female, young, knocked up, alone and extremely brave in contemporary Iran.
As only a wretch could be against human rights, when thinking of these works, one understands the journalistic finger wanting to wag, “Don’t look away.”
But people do. I could not watch Rwandan Hutus hacking up their Tutsi countrymen in “The Last Just Man,” the affecting tale of the general for the United Nations forces, Romeo Dallaire (a Canadian), and his failure to prevent genocide in that country. I averted my eyes, too, when a scorched Palestinian boy had his burns treated during the static “Welcome to Hadassah Hospital,” where the perpetrators of Palestinian terror attacks are treated alongside the victims. Squeamishness, I’ve decided, indicates a want not of compassion but callousness, yet it fails to exonerate my yawning fit during the third, or maybe fourth, flashback of an elementary school being bombed during “Jiyan/Life.”
“Jiyan/Life” is a fictional feature set in the Kurdish town of Halabja that was gassed by Saddam Hussein in 1988. Ponderous, sentimental and often unbelievable, “Jiyan/Life” seems to me the film most likely to profit from whatever piety the audience can muster for having sat through it. This may seem impolite, but whacking viewers with blunt cinematic devices is bad manners, too, and after the second blow, the flashback becomes extremely blunt indeed.
My experience in “Jiyan/Life” highlights the risk of instructive cinema that’s shown in the First World, and that is a kind of enriching but paralyzing discomfort: by watching this, I’ve done my duty. And if viewer antagonism may mar a cause, viewer tedium will obliterate one completely. I’ve singled out “Jiyan/Life”–unfairly perhaps–because it was in places very bad, but during the week afterward, scenes from the film kept returning to me, and not those in which I had to hold my nose (the child’s swing waving portentously in the breeze, the dreaded flashbacks).
On the other hand, I’ve retained barely a single moment from “Rana’s Wedding,” a centerpiece of the festival. I’ve probably been as bored at the movies, I just can’t remember when. “Rana’s Wedding,” the tale of a Palestinian girl who must marry by 4 p.m. on a particular day, lacks drama. However, its director, Hany Abu-Hassad, is receiving the Nestor Almendros Prize from festival organizers. Perhaps the award is for industry, since the festival is also featuring his lovely “Ford Transit,” as well. Both films are set before a background of Palestinian suffering, but no matter how much sympathy this evokes, the fact remains that one is mediocre and the other is excellent. Though this statement is honest enough, it is made from the comfort of the critic’s chair, and thus emits a sour, somewhat decadent reek.
The Israeli-Palestinian question was in the headlines shortly after I watched Abu-Hassad’s films; unsurprisingly, it’s a news staple. Many of the countries these movies depict have been cited on yesterday’s front page, and will, no doubt, invigorate tomorrow’s.
Hunched in the darkness before these flickering images of places that most Americans will never go to, I quickly realized that America has already been there in some form–through its economic and foreign policy, for instance. A narrator in “War Takes,” a documentary on what it is to inhabit the upper middle class during the Colombian civil war, tells us that Colombian peasants resorted to growing coca, the basis of cocaine, after America’s involvement in breaking an international coffee contract. Later, Bill Clinton explodes onto the screen in a blaze of lurid stock footage as America implements the misguided Plan Colombia in that country three years ago. Later still, a charitable organization that one of the film’s protagonists helps administer receives $1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
America sends mixed messages, which may explain why it creates mixed impressions. “Poor Bush is doing his best,” utters one passenger in “Ford Transit,” while another insists Arab television should post a warning to those with weak hearts each time the president makes an appearance.
What seems to be as bad as being remembered by America is being ignored by America. “Kissinger screwed up our revolution in 1975,” says the hero in “Jiyan/Life,” referring to former secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s betrayal of Kurds who were revolting against Baghdad that year. In “The Last Just Man,” U.S. reluctance to be involved in Rwanda is linked to the televised images of dead American soldiers being dragged through Somalia (I turned away then, also) and to the veto it exercised, thereby giving the U.N. Security Council a mandate for inaction. Later, the Rwandan failure of the Unites States and the U.N. were flipped and became arguments against the U.N. and for U.S. intervention in Iraq.
As these films show, the world is a fraught, brutish neighborhood. The United States can be, too, only those who live here generally don’t believe that it is. Americans are often vilified abroad for their ignorance of other countries’ affairs, but it’s an international trope of news that one always leads with the local angle. Public life in this country is so vivid and profusely covered that it often mesmerizes foreigners as successfully as it does Americans. And that domestic events supervene can disqualify America’s own when they die overseas. The country is only just realizing that while President Bush ended Operation Iraqi Freedom on May 1, more than 40 U.S. soldiers have since been killed on top of the 138 who perished during declared hostilities. To go back even further, at the time of writing 11 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan since March 22, almost one sixth of the total toll.
If America is visible in these films, so too are the American modes favored by the morning talk shows or heavily formatted news packages like “60 Minutes.” Take the otherwise excellent documentary “Pinochet’s Children,” in which three radicals who fought the Pinochet dictatorship meet (after a long separation) by the sea into which the bodies of many of their comrades were cast. The moment is clearly staged, and the participants look uncomfortable acting their parts.
A more extreme and critical borrowing occurs during “Ford Transit” when Dr. Dre’s song “Big Egos” galvanizes a soundtrack that includes music by spaghetti-Western icon Ennio Morricone. The point is well made. Dre’s “Cal-i-for-ni-A” is as mythical as Morricone’s Wild West when set before images of a people who blow themselves up for–so to speak–a living.
So the Palestinians have more of a grievance than African-Americans? Well, let’s argue about it. But controversy isn’t what makes “Ford Transit” great, its vitality, characters and dramatic moments do that. I started this piece wondering if aesthetic value can be derived from a worthy cause–of course it can, it just sometimes isn’t. I don’t know either if suffering automatically confers moral gravity to a particular group, much less to a film. These things are important enough to be considered without sanctimoniousness.
