Chekhov’s Mistess

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

I don’t get out so much these days so I didn’t make any of the films in this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which only runs for a few more days. I’ve been to several of these and each has been memorable, particularly since the director is often there and at times there are even heated exchanges in the audience during the discussion after. You’ll learn more about the world by going to see a few of these films and participating in the discussion than you will in a year of reading the Times.

However, because I think the festival is not only important, but as Stanely Kauffmann says, “it is once again an affirmation of the importance of film itself for those concerned with the matter.”

Kauffmann writes in The New Republic:

I’ve seen four of the features in the new festival. Omagh, written by Guy Hibbert and Paul Greengrass, directed by Pete Travis, is about the Northern Ireland town of that name where Catholics and Protestants had been living fairly peacefully through the years of the Troubles until a bomb exploded in 1998, killing thirty-one people. The explosion presumably was a move by the Provisional IRA to wreck progress toward peace (a maneuver we recognize from the Middle East). In this re-enacted picture—it’s hard to call it fiction—a group of townsfolk, Catholic and Protestant, press for justice from leaders on both sides (including Gerry Adams, who is played by an actor). The matter is not yet settled: the inquiry still goes on, which, one supposes, is the reason that this competent film was made.


Justiça, by Maria Ramos, is a well-composed documentary about Brazilian law, police procedures, and prison life. Set in Rio de Janeiro—when a prisoner says he lives in a slum district, it is treated just as an address—the film presents injustice worn smooth by years of practice. And it, too, ends with a denunciation, this time of faulty law and of corruption. Midwinter Night’s Dream, directed by Goral Paskalevi´c, who wrote it with Filip David, is a fiction film set in Serbia in the winter of 2004. Lazar, who has been away from home for ten years (we learn why), comes back after his mother is dead to find that the apartment is occupied by a single mother and her impaired young daughter. The film that evolves is somewhat carpentered, but it succeeds in its intent: to show some aftereffects of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Living Rights is a group of documentary shorts by Duco Tellegen, a Dutchman. The first, set in Japan, is about a boy with a disorder related to autism who, after difficulties, is transferred to a special school where he has a chance to work toward normalcy. The next is set in Africa, amid the Masai, and is about a fourteen-year-old girl who runs away so that her father can’t trade her off in marriage for some cows. The third is about a girl and her foster mother who live in the vicinity of Chernobyl, and it reminds us that the accident is over only for those who don’t live there.


This year, after its New York engagement in June, the festival will travel to some forty cities in the United States and Canada, among them Boston, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Toronto. To judge by the four pictures I have seen, those who attend will see high-grade film-making in the service of anger and compassion. The term “human rights” has acquired a certain poignancy these days, but it’s salutary even to feel poignant on the subject.

If you happen to live in or close to one of those cities, you will be rewarded by taking the time out to go.

Read widely, think well, and write often

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 21, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Reading Railroad: Events

• Comments:0
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