1997 human rights watch international film festival June 6-19, 1997 photo: a scene from PETAL

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH and The Film Society of Lincoln Center present the 1997 Human Rights Watch INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL The 1997 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival was organized by Bruni Burres and Heather Harding of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and Marian Masone of the Film Society. Special thanks to Kathleen Murphy and Isa Cucinotta, Film Society, and to Robert L. Bernstein, Chair, and Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch. The Festival Planning Committee includes Cynthia Brown, Elaine Charnov, Marina Kaufman, Marianne Law, and Rachel Weintraub. Thanks are due John Anderson, Kahn and Jacobs, Inc., Red Square Design, Kristi Schultz, Kim Hendrickson, Darryl Collins, Jenny Barchfield, Julia Cheiffetz, Diana Torres, Ben Rosen, and Elizabeth Richmond. The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is the only international film festival in the world exclusively devoted to human rights. Now in its eighth year, the Festival was created to enhance public awareness of human rights issues and specific abuses of human rights at home and abroad--drawing on the power of film to communicate across borders, both physical and ideological. Human Rights Watch promotes respect for human rights by rigorously and systematically monitoring abuses committed by governments in more than 70 countries. HRW defends freedom of thought and expression, due process of law, and equal protection of the law.. We stand with victims and activists to bring offenders to justice, to prevent discrimination, to uphold political freedom and to protect people from inhumane conduct in wartime. We challenge governments and those holding power to end abusive practices and to respect international human rights law. We enlist the public and the international community to support the cause of human rights for all. What kinds of films are showcased in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival? Are they movies that a responsible citizen of the world would view as conscientious duty? In witnessing for human rights in the here and now, do the best of these films also testify for other, enduring expressions of what it means to be human? In writing about HRW's 1997 program, I've tried to convey the kind of ethical punch they pack-- rare in these days of solipsistic movie-making. The issues tackled in these films are never distant or abstract. They probe experience on the human level, authentically personalizing epic social events. Framing past and ongoing abuses of human rights not just here but abroad, and they emerge from the USA, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, India and many other homelands. The moral sense that pervades every one of the films included in the 1997 program is as bracing as fresh air. But there's multifaceted pleasure in watching these works, as so many of their authors have found a way to marry passionate truth to aesthetic aspiration. This year's series comes in provocative "chapters" that focus on humankind's fundamental hunger for identity--a sense of self that can never be "disappeared," that should always be free to reach out for equality, connection, knowledge, life itself: Big Brother in America and Abroad; Home as Found and Lost; A Woman's Tale; Reading, Writing, and Politics; and Blood Simple: Brothers at Peace and War. The New York premiere, on June 6, of the apocalyptic documentary WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT begins a Festival of 23 remarkable films, each of which is a unique celebration of human rights. Moving through these chapters, you will "read" marvelous dreams and terrible nightmares. They transport you into lives, places, and problems in a way newspaper headlines never can. But perhaps most lastingly, you will take away an unforgettable gallery of faces, a gallery that celebrates humanity in all of our varied colors, ages, sexuality and idiosyncratic faiths. The 1997 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is a wake-up call, a revelation of exhilarating diversity--making us understand why there is a human rights movement and why it is so important. -- Kathleen Murphy * The films in the Festival reflect many points of view, not necessarily those of Human Rights Watch. This schedule is subject to change without notice. * Throughout the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival schedule, check screening dates for asterisks (*) indicating that the director of the film or films and/or a Human Rights Watch specialist will be present for QandA; or that a panel discussion is scheduled. * Look for UNDER THE SKIN GAME, UNNECESSARY SUFFERING, and ITSEMBATSEMBA: RWANDA ONE GENOCIDE LATER, films screening continuously on the WRT gallery monitor. Note: the following films are subtitled in English: BARI ZOGAN; THE BETRAYED; BUDDHA BLESS AMERICA; FIFTEEN CHILDREN; PAPER HEADS; PETAL; RICARDO, MIRIAM AND FIDEL; A SONG FOR BEKO; THE SQUARE CIRCLE; AND STORIES OF HONOR AND SHAME. BYE-BYE BABUSHKA is subtitled with a very small amount of spoken English. Of the films screening on the gallery monitor, UNDER THE SKIN GAME; UNNECESSARY SUFFERING; and ITSEMBATSEMBA: RWANDA ONE YEAR LATER are all subtitled in English. calendar program notes and times

a scene from AN ACT OF CONSCIENCE a scene from WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

BIG BROTHER IN AMERICA andamp; ABROAD AN ACT OF CONSCIENCE Robbie Leppzer, USA, 1997; 90 minutes In Colrain, Massachusetts, tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner--lifelong pacifists who refuse to fund war--work to keep their home, first seized by the IRS, then occupied by a young couple who buy it for a song at government auction. CONSCIENCE counts up the cost of civil disobedience, for the new owners of the house, and for the resisting couple and their close-knit community--as its support stretches into months and even jailtime. Never losing sight of the complex elements of this "war" at home, the film is full of memorable folk--Father Daniel Berrigan, forbearing police, Pete Seeger, a Buddhist monk, a not-unsympathetic IRS bureaucrat, an elderly gardener, and a passionate old woman--all of whom have parts to play in this modernday Thoreauvian stand-off. (Narrated by Martin Sheen.) Friday, June 6: 2 pm *Monday, June 9: 6:15 pm *Tuesday, June 10: 8:45 pm PAPER HEADS Dusan Hanak, Slovakia, 1995; 96 minutes An ironical, savagely realistic, sometimes comic chronicle of the absurdities and atrocities practiced by a totalitarian regime, specifically Czechoslovakian communism between WWII and 1989's revolution. Slovak filmmaker Dusan Hanak, whose work was banned by the government, interweaves actual shattering accounts by ordinary victims, astonishing archival footage, and appearances of huge papier-maché masks, the paper heads that project caricatured expressions of officialdom's inhumanity and hypocrisy. PAPER HEADS is a necessary and powerful exorcism--for its director, for the many Czechs whose lives were "possessed" by totalitarian monsters, and for witnesses all over the world. Friday, June 6: 4 pm Sunday, June 8: 8:15 pm Wednesday, June 11: 6:30 pm WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT William Gazecki, USA, 1996; 135 minutes As this remarkable film piles up damning evidence against US government agencies and officials involved in the Waco fiasco, even those most wary and weary of conspiracy paranoia will be mesmerized by the way this tragedy unfolded. WACO slowly draws us toward to its final conflagration, cutting from Congressional hearings to on-the-scene footage of the siege, from David Koresh preaching, to analysis by a Harvard religious scholar, from interviews with a local sheriff and Dick Reavis, author of Ashes of Waco, to recorded conversations between FBI negotiators and Branch Davidians, from eerie, overhead infrared-radar images of the sect's compound under attack by tanks to the terribly damaged body of an eight-year-old child. It's unlikely the ultimate truth will ever be known about this media-driven "war" of--depending on your POV--the godless against the chosen, of a vengeful ATF and FBI against armed, child-abusing fanatics, of women and children against an army. What this shattering documentary confirms beyond any doubt is that the shameful events of April 19, 1993, need never have happened. * Friday, June 6: 6 pm * Sunday, June 8: 2 pm DEVILS DON'T DREAM! Andreas Hoessli, Switzerland, 1996; 90 minutes Who was Jacobo Arbenz Guzman? What happened to the handsome, wildly popular reformer who was president of Guatemala until 1954? Excised from history books and erased from the memories of all but his equally reform-minded wife, a few old political friends and enemies, and some of the peasants who benefited from his redistribution of land, Guzman's character is reconstructed by Swiss director Andreas Hoessli. The dreamer who emerges in this fascinating portrait is an idealist who, after overthrowing a US-backed dictator, became a serious impediment to the neocolonialist plans of Uncle Sam, the United Fruit Company, and the CIA. DEVILS ranges from moving personal detail--why and how Guzman's father killed himself--through matter-of-fact testimony from an aging CIA provocateur who brought down the dream, to chilling political masquerade--Nixon and Guzman's "puppet" replacement at a press conference, mouthing phony platitudes about the evils of the former president's communism. Friday, June 6: 9:15 pm Saturday, June 7: 6:30 pm Monday, June 9: 2 pm BARIZOGON Fumiki Watanabe, Japan ; 1996, 114 minutes When 26-year-old Nao takes on crooked campaigning and a cover-up at the unsafe nuclear plant where everyone in Okuma works, he disturbs the established order of things--locally and all the way up to the highest levels in the Japanese government. The young bullies who teach Nao a lesson go too far; it requires the concerted efforts of police, mayor, coroner, and girlfriend to rearrange reality so that newspaper headlines can read: "Man freezes to death in cesspool." In this Japanese Silkwood, investigative director Fumiki Watanabe dramatizes the life and "accidental" death in 1989 of the whistle-blowing Nao, then enters his own film and to badger those involved in the case into giving up the truth--"You use the camera like a weapon!" complains one suspect as he scuttles for cover. A strong indictment of economic corruption and its ever-spreading stain. Saturday, June 7: 2 pm Sunday, June 8: 6 pm Tuesday, June 10: 2 pm HOME AS FOUND and LOST RICARDO, MIRIAM AND FIDEL Christian Frei, Switzerland, 1996; 90 minutes Christian Frei merges painful generational dynamics with the inevitable decay of revolution, to mark the intersection of Castro's faded dream and a daughter's parting from hero-father and homeland. Back in 1956, young Ricardo went off to the Sierra Maestra to found Radio Rebelde, on which Ché Guevara's radical, new truths were broadcast to Cuba. The little cowgirl who gazes up at her guerrilla dad in an old snapshot idolized the rebel who fought for his country's freedom. Now the adult Miriam, a teacher ostracized for breaking with the party line, listens to Radio Martí out of Miami, a station that speaks against the regime her father fought for. When Miriam decides to seek a better life in the USA, Ricardo is forced to take stock of the revolution he helped to bring to Cuba. Saturday, June 7 and Tuesday, June 10: 4:15 pm Wednesday, June 11: 8:30 pm A SONG FOR BEKO Nizamettin Aric, Germany, 1994/95; 100 minutes Long a singer and actor, Nizamettin Aric makes his directorial debut and also stars in A SONG FOR BEKO, one of the first films in Kurdish (he also scripted this eloquent film and composed and played its musical score). Aric himself was imprisoned for speaking the Kurdish language in public; exiled from Turkey, he now lives in Germany, where he was granted political asylum in 1984. Beko begins his long pilgrimage--in search of his brother--in Kurdirsh areas of Turkey, where he escapes arrest. Fleeing into Syria, this modernday Odysseus then makes his way into the serenely beautiful highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan. Here, in a nomadic community caring for refugee children, Beko finds himself and a homeland. But inevitably this peace is broken and the young Kurd is driven on to Germany--where he learns the terrible fate of his brother and cares for a blinded child of the "world nomads." "To be a refugee is a Kurdish fate," says Aric. "The more the people of the world know about us, the more we can hope. That is why I made this film." *Saturday, June 7: 9 pm Monday, June 9: 4 pm *Tuesday, June 10: 6:15 pm IT AIN'T LOVE Susan Todd and Andrew Young, USA, 1997; 58 minutes Most Americans don't realize that domestic violence afflicts teen as well as adult relationships. IT AIN'T LOVE introduces us to the young, spirited members of FACES, a gutsy improv theater company that combines acting and therapy. Known for "telling it like it is," the company has three months to create a show about abusive relationships, and FACES' 15- to 24-year-olds start by boldly exploring their own love lives. Intense reenactments bring to life dramatically the violence they've experienced and inflicted. The new show they ultimately put together is a triumph--and a tribute to the honesty and courage of this inspiring group of young adults. A striking and alternative look into the intense world of teens and violence, focusing on the importance of dialogue and communication. Shown with a short film to be announced. Monday, June 9: 8:30 pm Wednesday, June 11: 4:15 pm Saturday, June 14: 8:30 pm BUDDHA BLESS AMERICA Nien-jen Wu, Taiwan, 1996; 111 minutes In the late 1960s, the colorful inhabitants of a little farming village in South Taiwan include Brains, a schoolteacher fired for political incorrectness; his younger brother, who preserves in a jar the fingers he lost in a factory accident and a rickety old lady who knows no fear if her cabbage field or her husband's grave are threatened. When a military contingent of "mythic" Americans arrive for war games, a veritable flood of hilarious cultural and linguistic misunderstandings is loosed on both sides. BUDDHA is full of wonderful moments and images--the tiny grandmother herding a flock of gigantic tanks out of her field, Brains' lost "face" restored as he brings home what he thinks are two A-bombs "for my woman," and a burial service for fingers: "Thank you for many years of service...maybe you'll grow new fingers for me, if I feed and water you." BUDDHA's wise and gentle humor never denies darker truths about the chasms between radically different cultures. Wednesday, June 11: 2 pm Thursday, June 12: 9:30 pm Monday, June 16: 2 pm A WOMAN'S TALE THE SQUARE CIRCLE / DAAYRAA Amol Palekar, India, 1996; 103 minutes City-bred and -educated Amol Palekar was first a painter, then an actor in the Marathi regional theater and in film, and ultimately director of his own, groundbreaking movies, in collaboration with his actress-writer wife. In THE SQUARE CIRCLE, a man trained to perform as a woman in musical drama becomes obsolete, replaced by the real thing. The handsome, wandering transvestite joins up with an innocent countrygirl on the run from some louts pursuing her for brothel work. After a brutal rape, the young woman disguises herself as a boy. In this unusual road movie, Palekar keeps a sharp eye on the beautiful, expressive landscapes of rural India. And his cross-dressing odd couple encounters all manner of colorful characters and adventures, each providing tragicomic insight into the knotty matters of sexual passion and gender stereotyping. This parody of Hindi musicals is only superficially outré; at heart it's full of tolerant wisdom about the nature of man, woman, lust and love. Thursday, June12: 2 pm *Friday, June 13: 6:30 pm Monday, June 16: 9:15 pm Thursday, June 19: 4:30 pm STORIES OF HONOR AND SHAME Antonia Caccia, Palestine, 1996; 56 minutes "A beautifully crafted work...wonderfully shot, and edited to a rhythm that perfectly matches the subject matter." -- Mike Hodges In this heartbreaking and enraging documentary, director Antonia Caccia invites Muslim women in the Gaza Strip to tell the stories of their curtailed lives. With unflinching frankness, they speak of abductions into marriage at 12 years of age, of dreams of education and career smashed by annual pregnancy, of weaning daughters early so as to conceive a coveted boychild, of acid thrown in the faces of women who go out unveiled, of a husband shared by several wives, one of them a "feminist." Despite the cultural bias against their being seen or having any significant impact, the women in STORIES are seared into the mind's eye, unforgettable in their dignity and force of character--against all odds.

a scene from A SONG FOR BEKO a scene from BLACKS AND JEWS

STORIES OF HONOR AND SHAME with BYE-BYE BABUSHKA Rebecca Feig, USA, 1996; 90 minutes Director Rebecca Feig introduces us to a filmful of wonderfully weathered faces, "babushkas" born in the wake of the Russian Revolution that transformed their motherland and now living past the death of Communism. Feig's camera cherishes all of these survivors--the 90-year-old collective farmworker Baba Marina, as stolid as a horse, as placid as a saint; white-haired Baba Tanya, still passionately devoted to Lenin and the party; Larissa, a history professor who paid for political protest with a four-year sentence in Siberia; a bent old soul selling newspapers on the street, another proudly showing off a larder of food hidden beneath her bed. Though each has her own take on history, these Russian grandmothers--a generation on the way to extinction--all find honor in the enduring work of their hands and minds. *Thursday, June 12: 4 pm *Monday, June 16: 6:15 pm Thursday, June 19: 2 pm FLAME Ingrid Sinclair, Zimbabwe, 1996; 90 minutes FLAME is the dramatic saga of two friends who grow into young womanhood in a village in rural Rhodesia. Florence dreams of college while her pal primps and hopes for a happy marriage. When the war for independence comes, the newly named Liberty and Flame fight alongside other "daughters of Zimbabwe ...strong like lions." After the revolution, one-time warrior Flame finds herself back in the country, married to a drunk and demoted to women's work. In a painful reunion, she and Liberty, now a successful citygirl, share the straight scoop on postwar realities--and these brave, beautiful African women move back into the enduring shelter of their friendship. A strong take on modern womanhood that never loses sight of the complexities of liberation--political and personal. *Thursday, June 12: 7 pm (Woman's Day panel discussion) Friday, June 13: 4 pm *Saturday, June 14: 6 pm A PETAL Jang Sun Woo, Korea, 1996; 100 minutes In 1980, in the South Korean town of Kwangju, soldiers fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing hundreds even as the national anthem played on a loudspeaker. Director Jang Sun Woo powerfully personalizes this ugly chapter in South Korea's political history, creating necessary catharsis for his countrymen and at the same time composing an achingly beautiful lament for a lost child. Orphaned in the Kwangju massacre, her sanity lost in a mass grave, Jang Sun Woo's ghost of a girl wanders toward Seoul in search of a long-dead elder brother she dreams of--in striking animated sequences--as a rescuing knight on a white horse. The mad child's plight so speaks to the lumpish, unthinking laborer who has taken her in as a sexual utility that she resurrects his conscience and his humanity.The blighted innocence of this "petal" is also South Korea's, or any other nation that brutalizes its children. Friday, June 13: 9 pm Sunday, June 15: 8:15 pm Tuesday, June 17: 6:15 pm READING, WRITING and POLITICS FEAR AND LEARNING AT HOOVER ELEMENTARY Laura Angelica Simón USA ; 1996 90 minutes FEAR AND LEARNING measures the impact of California's Proposition 187, which denies public education and health care to illegal aliens. An immigrant success story herself thanks to access to the American school system, FEAR interweaves the testimony of two teachers--one Mexican-American (director Simón), the other an Anglo; interviews with kids and adults who live in Pico Union, Los Angeles' "Ellis Island"; and the story of Mayra, a self-possessed, ambitious nine-year-old from El Salvador to personalize the ways Prop 187 has divided school and community. This documentary confirms that it's kids who suffer most as adults fight through these complex, polarizing issues. with NEW SCHOOL ORDER Gini Reticker, USA, 1997; 57 minutes "The future of the country is decided in the principal's office, not the Oval Office. I'd rather elect 1,000 school board members than the president of the United States." -- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition This strong, disturbing documentary exposes the complex dynamics, fiscal and philosophical, that drive a Pennsylvania community into supporting an extremely conservative school board. Lansdale's North Penn High School becomes a battleground for the minds of future citizens--who rightfully complain they don't even have a voice in the redesign of their education. No second school to relieve increasingly crowded classrooms, no sex ed or special ed, down with situational ethics and religious neutrality--as this new regime takes hold, the idealistic principal retires, soon followed by another grief-stricken 22-year veteran, and families begin relocating to more liberal locations. Director Gini Reticker has envisioned a contemporary horror movie, in which the hearts and minds of America's youth are threatened by ordinary next-door neighbors. Friday, June 13: 2 pm * Sunday, June 15: 5:30 pm Monday, June 16: 4 pm BLOOD SIMPLE: BROTHERS AT PEACE and WAR CHRONICLE OF A GENOCIDE FORETOLD Daniandegrave;le Lacourse and Yvan Patry, Canada, 1996; 164 minutes In April 1994, nearly a million Rwandan men, women, and children were slaughtered like animals, mostly Tutsis massacred by Hutus in an act of genocide that might have been prevented. In three parts, CHRONICLE shows the roots of ethnic war in this troubled country where "blood flowed like a river"; how and why the international community, including the United Nations, turned a blind eye on the plight of Rwandan victims; and the revenge Tutsi extremists, now in power, wreak on their Hutu enemies. Through interviews with survivors, UN peacekeepers, Human Rights Watch activists and others, the film paints a vast, moving mural of outrage and horror; never underestimating the enduring power of human hatred, this CHRONICLE still leaves room for justice, even reconciliation. *Saturday, June 14: 2 pm *Sunday, June 15: 2 pm Wednesday, June 18: 2 pm BLACKS AND JEWS Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman, and Bari Scott, USA, 1996; 85 minutes This deeply felt exploration of relations between old allies and new adversaries challenges complacency on all sides, re-examining convictions long-cherished by Jews and Blacks. Built around five riveting stories of rage, courage and hope, BLACKS AND JEWS makes us see race reality through multiple, radically different lenses: the media blows up pictures of a Hasidic Jew beaten to the ground by angry Crown Heights Blacks, but never reports on how his life was saved by a Caribbean man of color; when Black kids on a school fieldtrip laugh it up at Schindler's List, everyone--from school-body president to Spielberg, from media pundits to vote-hungry politicians--piles on with contradictory apologias; periodically, in a performance of "Crossing the Broken Bridge," a Jewish actress and a black actor wrestle passionately over hard historical/emotional truths.... An uncompromising look at a conflict in which, as peacekeepers, agitators or conscientious objectors, we are all enlisted. Tuesday, June 17: 2 pm * Wednesday, June 18: 8:30 pm * Thursday, June 19: 6:30 pm (panel discussion) THE BETRAYED Clive Gordon, UK, 1995; 78 minutes In December 1994, 3,500 untrained Russian conscripts were ordered to take the Chechen town of Grozny. What happened to these mothers' sons is the brutal mystery BETRAYED exposes. "Should I try to find his grave...dig it up to see if it's my son?" grieves a Russian woman, one of a contingent of mothers who have traveled to Chechnya in hopes of an exchange of prisoners. Caught between their country's cover-up and Chechen resistance, they wait patiently as the film reconstructs the history of a 300-year conflict, unreeling images of moonscape destruction and mass graves, documenting the bureaucratic and military off-loading of responsibility, and demonstrating how this futile war--with 40,000 casualties--has bred Judases on every front. with 15 CHILDREN Maria Oliveira and Marta Nehring, Brazil, 1996; 18 minutes Fifteen individuals tell how it was to be the children of dissidents killed, imprisoned or "disappeared" by a Brazilian military dictatorship. The camera becomes a kind of confessional as these survivors time-trip back to childhood: pretending not to recognize a father encountered in public; realizing that the stranger calling from the barred window is your mother; having a school pal burst out, "My father didn't kill your father"; and trying to deal with a "non-material" death: "How can there be an ending if there's no corpse, only a passport picture?" The directors themselves participate in this brave testimonial by men and women who refuse to allow parents and past to disappear--thereby casting a vote that history will not repeat itself. Tuesday, June 17: 4 pm Wednesday, June 18: 6 pm Thursday, June 19: 9 pm