Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
JANITORS FIGHT FOR WAGES AND RESPECT IN AFFLUENT LOS ANGELES Forty million persons have no medical insurance in the richest country in the world, the United States. Among the uninsured are recent immigrants, who often work at wages below the minimum allowed by law while immigration quotas are not relaxed to allow badly needed unskilled […]
TURKEY’S REPRESSION OF THE KURDS LAUNCHES A JOURNEY THROUGH HELL The title of the film Journey to the Sun (Günese Yoculuk) describes a trek by a young Turkish man, Mehmet (played by Newroz Baz), with the body of his Kurdish friend Berzan (played by Nazmi Quirix) from the European side of Istanbul to Zorduc, a
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As a comic book, X-Men has the distinction of being very political. Directed by Bryan Singer, the film X-Men begins in the Warsaw ghetto of 1944, with an incident in which Magneto as a child (played by Brett Morris) overpowers Nazi police but otherwise is unable to stop the Holocaust. The tagline of the movie, “Join the evolution,” informs
CASTRO’S HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD EXPOSED IN BEFORE NIGHT FALLS Before Night Falls gives filmviewers a unique opportunity to get an inside look at Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Director Julian Schnabel (nominated by the Political Film Society in 1996 for directing Basquiat), exposes the contradictions of the Castro regime in a bio-pic about acclaimed
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THE CONTENDER REPLAYS THE CLINTON TAPES When President Clinton was asked whether he had an extramarital affair, was the question itself proper? This is the conundrum subliminally posed in The Contender, written and directed by Rod Lurie, who has improved greatly from the misspelled and misfired Deterence (2000) by cloning the classic Advise and Consent
REMEMBER THE TITANS WARNS THE SUPREME COURT NOT TO RESEGREGATE AMERICA Although the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional in 1954, some 500 of the 1,500 school districts in the United States had done nothing to integrate enrollment by 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled that immediate integration was required. In 1971, Alexandria,
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PARIS SHORTCHANGES CHILDREN TO “SAVE” THE FRENCH ECONOMY During the 1990s, French unemployment hit 10 percent. The province of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (the same province featured in the recently released Humanité) had an unemployment rate of 33 percent, but government agencies turned a deaf ear to the social consequences, according to the fact-based story in Ça commence
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A CHEERLEADER BECOMES A LESBIAN WITH THE UNWITTING HELP OF HER PARENTS In But I’m a Cheerleader, Jamie Babbit (both director and storywriter) takes us on a journey to “True Directions,” a rehabilitation camp for “homosexual” children whose parents want them changed into “heterosexuals.” Entitled Make Me Over at some cinemas, we see the odyssey
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SUNSHINE NOMINATED FOR AWARDS ON DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS “Politics has made a mess of our lives.” These words sum up the three-hour-long saga Sunshine, a film about five generations of a Jewish family in Hungary named Sonnenschein (German for “sunshine”) over the past one hundred or so years that has some parallels with Alex
ERIN BROCKOVICH IS NOMINATED FOR TWO AWARDS Before Erin Brockovich begins, a title tells us that the film is based on a true story. The movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by transparently feminist Susannah Grant, focuses on numbers, though the tagline is “She brought a small town to its feet and a huge