Human Rights film festival takes on the world
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | November 7, 2007
OPENING RIDE: The Devil Came on Horseback. |
| Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival | Oct 11-18 | most screenings at SPACE Gallery, 7 pm and 3 pm the following day | see Film Listings on p 43 for specific showtimes | Opening film free, $6, $4 students/seniors thereafter |
SPACE Gallery’s annual Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival, now in its sixth year, is the rare local film event as essential to movie buffs as it is to concerned citizens. The festival’s broad scope — the seven films screened this year consider a diverse spread of domestic and international humanitarian issues, including genocide and the USA PATRIOT Act — is a fine snapshot of the world’s political climate.The festival is an opportunity to examine the climate of leftist thought. The onus on the filmmakers is threefold: they need to educate viewers, explain their points, and portray their perspectives so their propaganda can have the intended impact: to incite action.
On each of these terms, Cocalero is the strongest film at the festival. Alejandro Landes’s documentary follows the successful 2006 presidential campaign of Evo Morales, the socialist leader of Bolivia considered a hero by his fellow indigenous farmers and a threat to the country’s prosperity by business owners and urbanites. Landes challenges the typical American perspective of the Latin American coca trade (that it exists to serve cocaine dealers), highlights the party’s broad education campaign (members know more about land and water privatization than most Americans), and subtly tells us that even a well-intentioned leader must be corrupt and deceptive to achieve his goals (the party punishes members who don’t attend meetings, and misleads and provokes the press).
Marco Williams’s Banished, about turn-of-the-century American ethnic cleansing and modern attempts at justice, bumbles a chance to make us care about an overlooked issue. Williams visits three southern and Midwestern towns where cleansing happened — generally, blacks were forced out of town on short notice under threat of violence and their land deeds were stolen. He follows families seeking recognition (through apologies, land, or money) from the towns that expunged them. Williams does well showing the consequences of these radical shifts in demography, but his discussion of reparations is lacking. Through voice-over narrative and appearances on camera, Williams laments that the families aren’t getting the justice they deserve, but skirts the issues (passage of time, subdivision of land) that make reparations such a thorny legal issue. His subjects seem more in touch with those nuances than he is.
It was easy to expect similar hand-wringing from Katy Chevigny’s Election Day, filmed at dozens of polling places across America on the day of George W. Bush’s re-election, but the movie blessedly spends little time bemoaning what might have been. Instead, it focuses on the drive to get marginalized voters (ex-convicts, Native Americans) to the polls and observes poor staffing and confusing voter-registration policies that may be tools of voter intimidation.
Related:
99 percent, Caricature vs. character, Casting ballots, More 
- 99 percent
All next week, the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival will be playing at SPACE Gallery in Portland. The films explain and explore social-justice problems around the globe, with the idea of attracting attention from people who could act to fix them.
- Caricature vs. character
Michael Chandler’s documentary, Knee Deep is less a whodunit than a who-wouldn’t-have-done-it.
- Casting ballots
Some believe democracy can save the world. Others wonder whether it can even work in America.
- Kernel-industrial complex
Aaron Woolf’s documentary King Corn, which opens the weekend of conversations about local farming and sustainable consumption, is a sound prototype for the new wave of populist eco-docs.
- Time for a clean sweep?
In early 2007, Rhonda Dawson, a thoughtful, candid, 45-year-old African-American guard at the Maine State Prison in Warren, quit her job after four years because, she says, of racist taunting from her fellow correctional officers.
- Off the hook
There’s always someone on your list that’s the hardest to buy for, not because they have everything and need zippo — or because they have nothing and need anything — but because you really can’t accept spending your hard-earned dough to get them something.
- Killing the deity
In God is Dead ’s title story, God is searching — for unapparent reasons — for a boy named Thomas Mawien.
- Opening soon: One Longfellow Square
Longfellow’s statue is looking in the right direction, keeping his eyes on the former Center for Cultural Exchange.
- Tax break heaven
As the economy sours, state taxes are bringing in less than expected.
- It affects urbanites, too
Ninety-eight cents a meal ain’t much.
- Letters to the Portland Editor, February 24, 2006
Lance Tapley is my hero; he has the guts to reveal the stories of the abuse and oppression of the poor, disabled and elderly once again.
- Less
Topics:
Features
, Elections and Voting, Politics, U.S. Politics, More
, Elections and Voting, Politics, U.S. Politics, Entertainment, George W. Bush, Movies, Political Policy, Crime, War Crimes, Genocide, Less
