Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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
YUGOSLAV COMMUNISTS APE NAZI METHODS IN THE GREAT WATER The breakup of Yugoslavia was a tragedy, especially because of the ethnic cleansing that took place. Accordingly, some recall with nostalgia the way in which the various ethnic groups lived together in harmony under Marshall Iosip Broz Tito. The Great Water (Golemata voda), a Macedonian film
A PRIEST LEAVES DACHAU TO MEET FAUST IN THE NINTH DAY Among the many horrific accounts of the Nazi era, Constantine Costa-Garvas’s Amen (2003) raised serious questions about the silence of the Vatican. The Ninth Day (Der neunte tag), directed by Volker Schlöbdorff, provides a partial answer to that silence. When the film begins, Abbé
MACHUCA PORTRAYS THE CLASS STRUGGLE THAT BROUGHT ABOUT & UNSEATED ALLENDE IN CHILE In 1973, after the reelection of Richard Nixon, the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende was replaced by a military coup led by General Agusto Pinochet. Machuca, directed by Andrés Wood, attempts to recreate events before, during, and after the coup from