Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Placid Gang In-ho (played by Yoo Gong) reports for a position as art instructor at a school for the deaf in Gwangju Province, Korea, and soon discovers that the children are being sexually molested and viciously punished by an instructor and the twins running the school. After reporting what he sees to human rights activist […]
5 DAYS OF WAR IS JUST TOO LONG Beginning with a quote from Hiram Johnson that truth is the first casualty of any war and a frame revealing that 500 war correspondents have died during the last decade, 5 Days of War reports on the five-day war in Georgia during mid-2008, which received little attention
THE HELP PORTRAYS MISSISSIPPI IN 1963 What if Black women in Jackson, Mississippi, could have told about their lives in 1963? Caucasian novelist Kathryn Stockett tries to do so—after being rejected by sixty literary agents–in The Help (2009), which has now been brought to the screen by director Tate Taylor. Just about the only occupation
JOHN SAYLES SCORES ANOTHER HOME RUN WITH AMIGO Feature films are often more effective than documentaries because they humanize issues, depicting interpersonal relationships that symbolize policy problems. From 1899-1902 the United States conquered the Philippines by suppressing the independent Philippine Republic in a war with perhaps 1.5 million casualties. In Amigo, Political Film Society awardwinner
IMMUNITY IS IMPUNITY IN THE WHISTLEBLOWER Lincoln, Nebraska, police officer Kathy Bolkovac (played by Rachel Weisz) decides to take a lucrative offer as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia (though filmed in Romania) during 1999 and is soon appalled at how women are treated in the country, where nearly half the men have been killed in
THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE REVEALS INNERMOST SECRETS OF SADDAM HUSSEIN’S BAGHDAD Some rulers are so nervous about their security that they hire doubles. Saddam Hussein was one, as revealed in The Devil’s Double, directed by Lee Tamahori. But the film is not about Saddam. Instead, the focus in the embellished biopic is a screenplay adaptation of
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City of Life and Death, may be too graphic for the fainthearted in exposing Japanese atrocities committed in China’s capital Nanjing during 1937. As in the film John Rabe (2010), the focal point of the film is the sanctuary provided by the German John Rabe (played by John Paisley) for foreigners, Chinese women and children,
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