Locarno 2003

Human Rights on the Screen
by Constantin Terzis

In Locarno, in a parallel section, Human Rights was the focus of a project organized by the Festival with the support of the Political Section for Human Rights of the Swiss Foreign Ministry. More than 100 films and videos from 46 countries helped to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and dignity, and celebrate the power of the human spirit. The variety of the selection started with Robert`s Mulligan To Kill a Mockingbird, and ended with Amnesty International activist's video shots of discovered graves in post-Saddam Iraq.

Between them, stories of activists and survivors from all over the world, from the massacre of 800.000 Rwandans in 1994 and the guilt of a Canadian UN general (The last just man, by Steven Silver) to the ruins of Kabul, with three shorts, directed by young Afghan filmmakers, under the guidance of Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The ABC of cinema starts again... Kabul Cinema is about a boy who, at the height of the civil war, and with cinema theaters in ashes, continues to believe in the power and magic of the movies. He rescues Charlie Chaplin`s The Kid from the fire, and movies are on the streets again. We are back in the nickelodeon era, but this time on wheels, because bombs are still coming down...

In Generation of hate, of Emmy award winning filmmaker Shelley Saywell, we are inside Iraq just before the outbreak of the last war, and ordinary Iraqis are saying what they feel about it...

The Day My God Died by Andrew Levin

Newcomer Andrew Levin in The Day My God Died, uses his camera to show us the broken lives of sex slaves of Bombay, children from the age of seven... Winona Ryder is the producer and narrator of this documentary, together with Tim Robbins. Kyriakos Katzourakis from Greece, a painter who turned to filmmaking, has a more poetic approach to sex exploitation in his O dromos pros tin Dissi (The Way to the West). He follows Irina (played by actress Katia Gerou), a young Russian girl in Athens, who makes a living as a prostitute. "Foreigner" in the broadest sense, her story comes together with the stories of all the "unwanted", Pakistani and African illegal immigrants, not far away of from the Parthenon...

Haram by Fibi Kraus and Gundrun Torrubia was requested by the Yemeni National Women`s Committee to be shown, primary, to the Yemeni Parliament as a plea to their rights. In Yemeni society women are not allowed even to speak. They are still second class humans...

Anne Makepeace in her documentary Robert Capa in Love and War, portrays the life of the man who changed the heroic image of war with his photos from the Spanish Civil War, turning his camera onto the civilians suffering... one of the great men of journalism, who made the profession respectable... Well-placed interviews - between them, Isabella Rosselini reveals that Robert Capa`s love affair with her mother, Ingrid Bergman, in Hollywood, inspired Hitchcock for Rear Window.

Human Rights Film Festivals are spreading all over the globe. At the moment, at least 13 countries (from Argentina to South Korea and USA) are hosting these festivals during the year. Their cinematic impact in the trends of world cinema is yet to be revealed in the years to come.

Constantin Terzis
© FIPRESCI 2003

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