Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
DUKHTAR IS ABOUT ANOTHER MUSLIM GIRL TRAPPED BY TRADITION Among recent films focusing on how “women’s lib” is needed in some Islamic countries, The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008) is perhaps the most tragic. Last year’s Difret was more hopeful, reporting how arranged marriage kidnappings and rapes were recently banned in Ethiopia, but that is […]
SUFFRAGETTE FEATURES EVENTS IN LONDON DURING 1912 In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Women launched a movement. Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, takes place in London during 1912, when the movement’s leader Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) urges suffragettes to engage in civil disobedience, though titles indicate that the
DOMESTIC PARTNER BENEFITS ARE HELD UP IN FREEHELD New Jersey voted for domestic partnerships in 2005 but left a loophole for survivor benefits in government union contracts. Freeheld, directed by Peter Sollett, focuses primarily on a true story involving Laurel Hester (played by Julianne Moore) and Stacee Andre (Ellen Page). Not long after Stacee
LABYRINTH OF LIES REVEALS INCONVENIENT TRUTHS The last Nuremberg Trial ended in 1946, convicting 133 persons (not 15, as a title in the film pretends). Courts of various countries soon convicted other war criminals, including two in German courts who had been found not guilty at Nuremberg. When the postwar occupation of Germany ended
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON ENDS WITH A GAY PUZZLE After the Watts Riots of 1965, some African Americans in Los Angeles thought that a solution to the tyranny of the Los Angeles Police Department over African Americans was to move to a small town and gain majority control. One such town was Compton, not far from
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THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT QUESTIONS WHO WERE THE SUBJECTS In 1961, Yale Psychology Professor Stanley Milgram sought to determine whether Adolf Eichmann’s claim that he was merely following orders was credible. He then began an experiment in which subjects for less than an hour were paid to punish someone in another room with electric shocks
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NOBLE GOES FROM IRELAND TO VIETNAM AND HITS THE JACKPOT A biopic of Christina Nobel (played by Deirdre O’Kane), the film Nobel features an Irishwoman from her life as a toddler in 1955 to her arrival in Vietnam during 1989 and beyond in a quest to save children from much of the same destitution that
WOMAN IN GOLD CELEBRATES A VICTORY OVER WAR CRIMES Article 46 of the Second Hague Convention of 1899, which requires military occupation authorities to respect private property, was not honored by the Nazis. Instead, they looted some 100,000 works of art, many of which were never returned to the owners after war. Some ended up
TIMBUKTU DEMONSTRATES WHY JIHAD MASKS FOR COLONIZATION Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, but filmed in nearby Oualata, also dating back to the 12th century, Timbuktu begins by showing the peaceful lives of citizens of rural Mali—cattle farming, fishing, and an open market amid sand dunes and ruins of ancient structures. Arabic-speakers with weapons have arrived in
AN EXTRAORDINARY ATHLETE SURVIVES AS A POW OF JAPAN IN UNBROKEN Louis Zamperini (played by Jack O’Connell) learns how to endure, first as a boy picked on for being Italian, then as a runner who wins in the 1938 Olympics, next as a life raft survivor of an airplane crash in the middle of the