Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
HATRED REIGNS IN CAMP X-RAY There are two ways of reviewing Camp X-Ray, a dramatic film directed by Peter Sattler on behalf of a production company in Karachi. One is to watch Private First Class Cole (played by Kristen Stewart) as she is assigned to the maximum security prison at Guantánamo, learns the routine, but […]
PREJUDICES ARE OVERCOME IN PRIDE During London’s gay pride parade of June 30, 1984, miners were on strike throughout Britain, harassed by the police and given the cold shoulder by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mark Ashton (played by Ben Schnetzer) provokes his fellow gays to support the miners financially, as both gays and miners suffer
BLOOD RUNS IN COLDWATER Titles at the end of the fictional Coldwater inform that there is no federal law regulating camps for delinquents, and state law enforcement is lax. When the film begins, macho Brad Lunders (played by B. J. Boudousqué) is arrested and taken to Coldwater, a camp in Colorado (actually filmed in the
SIDDHARTH LINKS CHILD LABOR WITH HUMAN TRAFFICKING Bollywood idealizes the high life of India. Not so Siddharth, directed by Richie Mehta. The film is a slice of life of the underclass in India. The story is about Mehendra Saini (played by Rajesh Tailang), who sends his 12-year-old son Siddharth from Delhi to work for a
DEVIL’S KNOT EXPOSES JUDICIAL BIAS IN CONVICTING THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE The documentaries Paradise Lost (1996) and West of Memphis (2012) now compete with Devil’s Knot, a feature film about the plight of the three teenagers convicted of murdering three pre-teens in 1993 in a town across the river from Memphis. The film begins with
WALKING WITH THE ENEMY IS A BIOPIC OF A HUNGARIAN JEWISH HERO The fame of Pinchas Rosenbaum (played by Jonas Armstrong) can now be shared with those who did not realize the heroism of someone who did everything he could to save the lives of Hungarian Jews in 1944 after Eichmann (Charles Hubbell) came into
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THE RAILWAY MAN IS A BIOPIC OF SOMEONE WHO DERAILS HIMSELF With talk of “war crimes” from Rachel Maddow in anticipation of publication of the report on “enhanced interrogations,” there is talk that the phony torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) will be cut. But there will be no such call in The Railway
BIOPIC CESAR CHAVEZ TRIUMPHS THROUGH NONVIOLENCE When Cesar Chavez (played by Michael Peña) was 11, he was an exploited grape picker in Delano, California, but he left for Los Angeles to learn about community organizing. When he returned, he had a vision of how to liberate farm workers, as portrayed in Cesar Chavez, directed by
OMAR EXPOSES LIFE ON THE WEST BANK AS NEVER BEFORE Under Israeli occupation, life in the West Bank is graphically displayed as in Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad. In his late teens, muscular Omar (played by Adam Bakri) has a girlfriend, Nadja (Leem Lubany), who is passionate about him; using knotted ropes, he has to
THE MONUMENTS MEN PRESENTS AN EPIC TRUE STORY Despite Article 56 of the Hague Convention of 1899, which bans seizure of cultural property, Adolf Hitler planned to transfer art from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands to a museum in Germany. He believed that he could deprive those countries of cultural pride and thus any identity