Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
IN MY COUNTRY DEPICTS APARTHEID OBSCENITIES BEFORE & AFTER MANDELA BECOMES PRESIDENT When an unjust regime falls, how can a new government provide justice? Whereas the French and Russian revolutions killed off the royal family, the film In My Country attempts to explain the South African approach–through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Directed by John […]
The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, is a plea for the right of a person to end one’s own life, with a subtext about the hypocrisy of Catholicism’s opposition to suicide yet support for the death penalty. The Spanish film, which also could be translated “Adrift,” is based on the true story
CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD INACTION EXPOSED IN HOTEL RWANDA In 1994, Paul Rusesabagina saved the lives of 1,200 persons in his role as manager of Sabena Airline’s four-star Hotel Milles Collines in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Hotel Rwanda, directed by Terry George, tells that story. As the movie explains through the dialog of various actors,
MOOLAADÉ CUTS THROUGH THE TABOO OF FEMALE CIRCUMCISION Moolaadé, directed by Ousmane Sembène, is a truly remarkable film from Sénégal that focuses on the injustice of female genital circumcision (FGC). When the film begins, the annual FGC ritual is underway in a remote Burkina Faso village that has a beautiful mosque and a sculpture of
VERA DRAKE REVEALS WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF ABORTIONS ARE BANNED In 1861, Britain made abortions illegal. On November 17, 1950, middle-aged Vera Drake is arrested for performing an illegal abortion, and she is sentenced to thirty months in prison after a trial during the following January. The film Vera Drake, directed by Mike Leigh, tells
The Yes Men, directed by Dan Ollman, Sara Price, and Chris Smith, is an autodocumentary in the same genre as Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989). Indeed, Moore appears on the screen twice with his usual eloquence. However, the real inspiration appears to have come from Candid Camera’s Alan Funt, as the two principals, Andy
Why would an apolitical medical student from an affluent family in Buenos Aires become a revolutionary? The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de Motorcicleta), directed by Walter Salles, not only explains why but also reminds filmviewers that the same injustices, which affected him so profoundly, still exist. With one semester to go in order to complete medical
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TWO BROTHERS DEMONSTRATES THE NEED TO RESPECT ANIMAL RIGHTS Only 5,000 tigers remain in the wild today, compared with approximately 100,000 a century ago, according to titles at the end of Two Brothers, directed by Political Film Society awardwinner Jean-Jacques Annaud. The film is in effect dedicated to what titles call the “king of the
IMAGINING ARGENTINA DEPICTS THE HORRORS OF THE “DIRTY WAR” In Operation Condor, which involved eight Latin American countries from the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of political dissidents and leftists were rounded up by the police and never heard from again. Military and police practiced torture techniques that were learned while they were students at
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CARANDIRU EXPOSES A SENSELESS PRISON MASSACRE IN BRASIL On October 2, 1992, some 111 inmates of the House of Detention at Carandiru, São Paulo, were brutally gunned down by a riot squad called in to break up a fight between rival gangs. The film Carandiru, directed by Hector Babenco, recreates those events with voiceovers by