Always a vague and suspect ideal for many, the concept of human rights has, since September 11, grown more confused and unpopular. In the face of the monstrous assault on our country and the consequent fear, rage, and outbreaks of patriotism, who cares about such niceties as civil liberties and justice for the oppressed? The plight of immigrants, prisoners, and the victims of tyranny, intolerance, genocide, war, and greed all take a back seat to America’s war against an elusive and lethal foe. Why a film festival about suffering orphans in the Bucharest subway or angry teenage Palestinian girls in refugee camps or jobless Arab youths illegally smuggled into Europe when we’re still digging up bodies from Ground Zero?
One answer, of course, is that the cause of human rights is actually more urgent now than ever, as popular opinion becomes more reactionary and blind to the trouble spots that allow terrorism and other evils to grow. Another is that the movies themselves — 18 films and videos from 12 countries — entertain, enlighten, and enlarge one’s understanding of the human condition.
Take, for example, Loin (2001; Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with a reception afterward), French director André Téchiné’s drama about those smuggled Arabs. That is just one of many elements in a moody, layered tale about a disaffected French truck driver who agrees to make a delivery for drug dealers in order to rejoin his estranged Jewish girlfriend in Tangiers. A Paul Bowles–like American expatriate, a French wanna-be director, a doggedly independent single mother-to-be, and a sad, rebellious Arab teenager are among the other memorable characters who fleetingly connect in Téchiné’s seductive exploration of the limits of freedom, justice, responsibility, and love.
Illegal immigrants of a more fashionable kind figure in Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Baran (2001; Sunday at noon in the Coolidge Corner video room), a lyrical, neo-realistic love story that transcends sentimentality to achieve genuine poignancy and political impact. At a Tehran construction site of Beckett-esque bleakness, a high-strung Iranian youth becomes angry when an illegal Afghan worker usurps his job as cook. But anger gives way to attraction as he begins to observe his rival in a touching relationship that Majidi relates with precise and poetic imagery. The toss of a burka over a face, a footprint filling with water — such details bring shivers of recognition and clarity.
The festival’s only features, Loin and Baran allow viewers the comprehension, consolation, and distance of fiction. The bulk of the programming, however, consists of raw and jarring documentaries, close looks at world tragedies and hellholes most of us would rather forget or ignore.
To watch the adolescent and pre-teen children, most of them girls, stoned from inhaling paint fumes and staggering in the squalor of the Bucharest subway in Edet Belzberg’s Children Underground (2000; Friday at 6 p.m. at the MFA, with the filmmaker present) is to touch on the unmitigated and ubiquitous misery of humanity. But the causes of this misery are presented too — these unwanted children are the legacy of deposed Romanian dictator Ceauçescu’s anti-abortion and -contraception policies. And we get some possible cures in the work of the pitifully underfunded social agencies that by the end of the film brings uncertain smiles to some of the victims.
More victims struggle for relief from unthinkable suffering in Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Living Afterwards: Words of Women (2001; Saturday at noon and 2 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston), which chronicles a year of therapy undergone by women who survived the Serbian atrocities of the Bosnian war, and in Duco Tellegen’s Behind Closed Eyes (2000; Friday at 6 and 8:30 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston), which examines cases in Liberia, Kosovo, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Both films are grim, heartwrenching, and uplifting, especially Tellegen’s documentary, which seeks redemption for the perpetrators as well as for the victims. The opening Liberian segment follows the rehabilitation of an 18-year-old child soldier who at the age of 10 was pressed into fighting in the country’s brutal civil war, and who is guilty of crimes similar to those depicted in the film’s other segments. A monster who may even have eaten human flesh, he is also a victim of the inhuman forces that exploited and overwhelmed him.
Can such forces be confronted or controlled? "The only response to absolute Evil is fraternity" — so, quoting André Malraux, notes one of the subjects of Maia Wechsler’s Sisters in Resistance (2000; Sunday at 4 and 6 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video room, with the filmmaker present). Wechsler is one of four surviving women — including the niece of Charles de Gaulle — who while in their teens and 20s chose to fight back when France capitulated to Hitler. Their efforts on behalf of the Resistance earned them a trip to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. That and a lifetime friendship with one another, and the satisfaction of knowing that they resisted while others collaborated.
Another person willing to grapple with the powers-to-be is the subject of William Greaves’s solid and engrossing profile Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2000; Friday at 6 and 8:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video room). His reputation perhaps overshadowed by the tumult of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, Bunche’s career was nonetheless extraordinary and exemplary. In his youth a radical and academic, he found himself drawn into the establishment during World War II, when he worked for the OSS and the State Department. At the end of the war he took a prominent position in the newly founded United Nations.
Bunche felt he could achieve more as diplomatic insider than as a dissenting outsider. That delicate position led some African-American activists to denounce him as an Uncle Tom and some McCarthyites to investigate him as a Communist. It also won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950; the first black man so honored, he received the award for brokering an armistice between Israel and four Arab nations after the first of many wars in 1948. Working largely behind the scenes, he orchestrated the independence of numerous former colonies. Throughout the Third World, his insights and caveats have proved prescient.
As can be seen in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt (2001; Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner), a look at the vicious circle of poverty, debt, and exploitation that has crippled Jamaica since its supposed independence. Lucid in exposing the culpability and heartlessness of international corporations and the International Monetary Fund in prolonging and profiting by this mess, Black’s otherwise fine documentary grates when it indulges in a self-righteous voiceover taken from Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place.
Bunche’s predictions as to the fate of Palestine are realized in Mai Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001; Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner video room), which follows the correspondence between two teenage girls detained in refugee camps in Lebanon and in the West Bank. Although moving, it is both preachy and clumsy, unlike Justine Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg in Promises (2001; Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner), which screened last November as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival. Here the filmmakers take on a bolder project — chronicling the lives of Jewish and Arab children in Israel and attempting a reconciliation of sorts — with more satisfying, and more disturbing, results.
Not even a Ralph Bunche, however, would seem up to the task of resolving the conflict and contradictions posed by Fabrizio Lazzaretti, Giuseppe Petitto, and Alberto Vendemmiati in Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin (2000; Friday at 8:20 p.m. at the MFA, Saturday at 4 and 7 p.m. at the International Institute of Boston, and Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the MFA). It is a kind of prequel to the US war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a possible preview of what the region may become again if international efforts at restoring peace and stability dwindle into frustration or indifference.
In a sense Jung relates the fundamental, ongoing battle between humanism — represented by gruff, gray-haired Italian physician Gino Strada, steely British nurse Kate Rowlands, and sad, puckish Italian war correspondent Ettore Mo — and those inveterate enemies of humanity: war, fanaticism, power, and ignorance. In 1999, Strada and Rowlands set up a field hospital in territory controlled by the then little-known Northern Alliance to treat casualties of the war against the Taliban — just the latest phase of a conflict that had been raging in Afghanistan for more than 20 years.
Most of the film is spent in primitive operating rooms where Strada and Rowlands wearily treat the procession of ghastly war wounds, mostly performing amputations. The sight of a naked 10-year-old twitching feebly as the doctor probes what remains of his left foot after the detonation of a land mine might be an edifying experience for those who flocked to see such violence simulated in Black Hawk Down. Such scenes also demonstrate that at a certain point iniquity and suffering are no longer an issue of human rights but a matter of right and wrong.
