Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO IS PAVED BY BOUNTY HUNTERS, MENDACITY, & TORTURE Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross, The Road to Guantánamo dramatizes the American roundup of alleged terrorists in Afghanistan in order to identify members of Al Qaeda, ship more than 750 of them to Guantánamo for questioning, and subject them to torture, […]
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SOPHIE SCHOLL CELEBRATES UNDERGROUND ANTI-NAZI GERMAN MARTYRS Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a docudrama of the last five days of a member of White Rose, a German underground organization of college students who distributed leaflets with anti-Nazi information and propaganda. The film begins on February 18, 1943. Sophie Magdalena Scholl (played by Julia Jentsch),
THE FIRST COLLEGE BASKETBALL LINEUP ENTIRELY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS STARS IN GLORY ROAD Glory Road, directed by James Gartner, is well timed both for the holiday recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr., and the beginning of college basketball season. The movie is based on the 1979 book (by Robert A. Heinlein) and true story of a
IN CACHÉ, FRANCE’S RACISM EMERGES FROM THE CLOSET INTO THE STREET Caché, directed by Michael Haneke, is a French mystery suspense film in which fifty-year-old Georges Laurent (played by Daniel Auteuil) and his spouse Anne (played by Juliette Binoche) receive unsolicited surveillance videotapes of their Paris townhouse. The contents are unremarkable, but tapes keep piling
NORTH COUNTRY PORTRAYS THE ROSA PARKS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT North Country, directed by Niki Caro, begins with titles that inform filmviewers that 1975 was the year when the first woman was hired in the coal mines of the Mesabi Iron Range, Minnesota, and that by 1989 the ratio of men to women was 30:1. The
INNOCENT VOICES INDICTS THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS Titles at the beginning of Innocent Voices (Voces inocentes), directed by Luis Mandoki, inform filmviewers of the civil war in El Salvador from 1980-1992 that began when peasants under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front organized opposition to the dispossession of their lands. Titles
The War Within, directed by Joseph Costelo, attempts to explain the psychology of Moslem suicide bombers after 9/11. When the film begins, a Pakistani engineering student, Hassan (played by Ayad Akhtar), is abducted by the CIA on a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris. He is drugged and flown to Pakistan, where he is
A GIANT PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY KILLS AFRICANS & WHISTLEBLOWERS The novels of John Le Carré have established a reputation as superb spy novels involving government agents. The film The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles, is based on another Le Carré novel, but the subject is espionage of dirty industrial secrets. The first fifteen minutes of
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THE GREAT RAID DEPICTS JAPAN’S VIOLATIONS OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION On January 30, 1945, the largest rescue in American history occurred in the Philippines, where some 511 Americans were rescued by the 6th Ranger Battalion from a Japanese prisoner of war camp at Cabanatuan. The Great Raid, directed by John Dahl, provides a dramatization of
FEMALE CIRCUMCISION RUINS MORE LIVES IN GOD’S SANDBOX Although Moolaadé last year featured Senegalese women protesting female circumcision in the 1990s, God’s Sandbox (Tahara) brings the practice into a Romeo-and-Juliet story involving an Israeli woman and a Bedouin man in the 1960s. Directed by Doron Eran, the movie begins in the present, with a sixtysomething