Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Homeward bind
Prisons and asylum from the Human Rights Watch
BY PETER KEOUGH

It’s one of the world’s oldest stories. Torn from home by war and other disasters, the wanderer struggles to return. Ten years it took Odysseus; for many in the films of this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, the return has taken much longer. For some, there will be no homecoming, only the hope of asylum or a new life in another country. Others will have no home at all, no rights, no state, no future. Refugees and prisoners, the despised and forgotten, they are given voice and dignity here.

Who cares about North Korean spies caught in the South and locked up for decades? Fanatic supporters of a lunatic regime, they aren’t prime candidates for our sympathy. South Korean documentary filmmaker Kim Dong-won had a chance to meet some of these incorrigibles in 1992, when they were released to live in his home town. As he records in his two-and-a-half-hour Repatriation (January 30 at 2:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre), he was struck by their ordinariness and their humanity, a far cry from the demonized image of villainy created by propaganda and pop culture. One of the men, Cho Chang-son, he liked especially. Captured in 1962, Cho had endured 30 years of abuse in jail while refusing to be "converted" — i.e., to renounce Communism and embrace South Korean capitalism.

Why had Cho and others maintained their faith in a discredited ideology despite incarceration (one of the "unconverted" set the Guinness record for longest prison sentence) and torture? Another question Kim might have asked is why his country was so adamant in getting the prisoners to "convert." The film is a diary and a meditation (Kim has a weakness for voiceovers) recording his relationship with Cho and the others over a 10-year period. During that time, a crusade to gain them repatriation to the North suffers ups and downs as the two regimes jockey for advantage and undergo their own internal changes. But the faith of the "unconverted" remains steadfast. That, perhaps, is their secret: not ideology but identity, a dogged insistence on individual dignity and unconditional resistance to its being taken away

In Sabiha Sumar’s incisive Silent Waters (2003; January 28 at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts), the theme of repatriation takes a darker twist. In a sleepy village in Pakistan in 1979, the widow Ayesha refuses to draw water from the local well. As black-and-white flashbacks show us, it was the site back in the Partition of 1947 where the Sikhs in the village slaughtered their wives and daughters rather than let the Muslims "abduct" them. Otherwise, Ayesha has adapted well to her community, taking pride in her son Saleem, a happy-go-lucky youth with a flute who’s in love with a local girl. But fundamentalist agitators working for the ultra-nationalist government seduce Saleem and other youths into their movement, directing their hate and intolerance at the Sikh pilgrimage soon to arrive in town. Sumar’s film combines subtly executed melodrama with rueful insight into the repetitions of history (a coda set in 2002 confirms the persistence of folly), the contradictions of family and community loyalties, and the insidious tactics of al-Qaeda-like organizations.

Few regions have endured the whims of politics and history as much as the Middle East. So Lebanese director Randa Chahal Sabbag’s The Kite (2003; January 28 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts) takes a whimsical approach to undermining the artificial boundaries that history and politics have imposed. Sixteen-year-old Lamia lives in a Lebanese village divided by the Israeli occupation. Watch towers, guards, and land mines separate the village’s people, and they communicate by shouting through bullhorns. As way of reuniting the family, Lamia is promised in marriage to her cousin on the other side of the border. She, however, has fallen in love with a young Israeli soldier who himself is a Druze Muslim and newly nationalized Israeli citizen. Chahal Sabbag negotiates this labyrinth of loyalties and boundaries with a kite-like impressionism, drifting about iconic images (barbed wire, and, of course, kites) to an irresistible soundtrack but with insufficient regard for dramatic clarity.

While some corners of the world suffer from too many of national identities, others have none at all. Europe has become a holding cell of displaced persons without passports or homelands, and Jon Nealon’s documentary Goodbye Hungaria (2003; January 29 at 1 and 3 p.m., with Nealon present, and February 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) is a look at one of them, a former Soviet barracks in a Hungarian backwater housing hundreds of mostly Third World refugees. The camp has its own Florence Nightingale, though: Charu, a young woman from York, Pennsylvania, who has taken these lost souls as her personal project. Until, that is, Abed, a bright young Palestinian refugee, wins her heart. This is a tough but feel-good film with a bittersweet ending. Shot pre–September 11, it finds one of the subjects fulfilling his dream by taking in the view from the observation platform of the World Trade Center.

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
Back to the Movies table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group