Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
ANOTHER HOLOCAUST HERO IN BAU: ARTIST AT WAR In 1943, Joseph Bau (played by Emile Hirsch), a cartoon artist, was living in Kraków, Poland, trapped in a ghetto, forging passport documents to free his colleagues and friends. Eventually, he and his family go to the Płaszów concentration camp under the command of Franz Gruen (Yan […]
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A TRAITOR AND A SPY FEATURES TRUTH AND COURAGE In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) is convicted of treason in France and sentenced to live out his life on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. When the verdict is read before a large assembly of the army, his medals are stripped from
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SHOSHANA DESCRIBES A TURNING POINT IN ISRAEL’S DEVELOPMENT For several minutes, titles explain the historical background of the founding of the state of Israel. Much of the film is about life during the 1930s in Tel Aviv, a city carved out by Jewish refugees, featuring lavish restaurants and entertainment soirees, as major events unravel under
MEETING WITH POL POT UNVEILS THE KILLING FIELDS The devastation of Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia was kept a secret until refugees emerged, as portrayed in 1984 film The Killing Fields. In the recently released Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot), three French journalists are admitted in 1978 to provide public relations for
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IN THE FIRE OF WAR ILLUMINATES A CRITICAL PERIOD OF MĀORI HISTORY Ka Whawhai Tonu, translated as “Struggle Without End,” has been released with the English title In the Fire of War. Dialog is almost entirely filmed in the Māori language, though with English subtitles. The film depicts how British were determined to control New
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A BILL BECOMES A LAWIN LILLY The first major piece of legislation under the Obama presidency was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed on January 29, 2009. Lilly explains who the bill was named after and how her situation—a woman receiving less pay than men for the same work—catapulted into a major amendment to
WORDS OF WAR FEATURES A MURDERED JOURNALIST At the end of Words of War, photographs appear on the screen identifying some of at least 1,500 journalists who have been murdered since the year 2000, often in headlines, others quietly. The film, directed by James Strong, focuses on one of those, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya (played
THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE IS ABOUT A REVELATION THAT WORKED In 1984, the film The Killing Fields informed filmviewers of a tragedy as millions of Cambodian lives were at risk during the Khmer Rouge takeover a decade earlier (1975-1979). Where was a similar graphic display of what the Nazis did to Jews during World War
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NO OTHER LAND PHOTOGRAPHS ONGOING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS A docudrama, No Other Land films Israelis as they forcibly take over land in the West Bank occupied by Palestinians for centuries. Filming starts in 2019 by showing how 1,000 Palestinians live in standard housing within Masafer Yatta, a group of 20 Palestinian villages in the mountainous
I AM GITMO TELLS THE TRUTH ABOUTTHE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S WAR CRIMES As a title at the end of the film attests, 86 percent of those at Guantánamo should not have been there. What happened is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had thousands of leaflets dropped in Afghanistan after 9/11, encouraging Afghans to rat on their rivals,