Campus film festival brings human rights issues home

by Joyce Adams, 1L
Guest Writer
April 7, 2009

Over the past three weeks, Georgetown Law’s chapter of Amnesty International hosted the 2009 Human Rights Film Festival. The festival wrapped up last week after showing seven films, all aimed at raising students’ awareness of human rights issues around the world.

Amnesty President Jan Olowski commented on why the chapter organized the festival: “People don’t understand the degree of depravity in this world. We know in the abstract that Darfuris are being slaughtered and the Congo is suffering a civil war. But we can’t truly understand what these things mean until we see charred Darfuri villages littered with bodies or until we listen to a Congolese woman describe being beaten and raped in front of her children.”

“If you could imagine these atrocities happening to your mother, your siblings, your children, or yourself, then you’d lose sleep over the fact that this is routine in much of the world. The primary purpose of the Amnesty Film Festival is to reach your imagination and inspire a visceral reaction so that in the future you sympathize with politicians and NGO’s that strive to combat these injustices,” Olowski said.

The Amnesty International film festival kicked off with director Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, the 2008 Oscar-winning documentary that examines abuse in U.S. detention under the Bush administration. The film told the story of a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilowar who was killed in U.S. custody in Bagram Air Force Base to highlight the injustices that occurred.

While the movie debuted to critical acclaim all over the world, its U.S. distributor refused to show it until after the presidential election.

Next was The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, in which director Lisa Jackson travels to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern Kivu Province to meet with just a few of the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been raped in the region’s decade-long civil war. Along the way she also interviews people who are working to help these women rebuild their lives and Congolese soldiers who believe that rape is a necessary ingredient for the “medicine” that keeps them safe.

Trouble the Water served as a reminder that human rights are a concern at home, not just abroad. The documentary was nominated for an Oscar this year and uses footage shot by two residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. The film follows the couple for two years and, as it describes itself, “documents a journey of remarkable people surviving not only failed levees, bungling bureaucrats, and armed soldiers, but also their own past.” The film also features music by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, who shot the original footage.

The fourth film was La Sierra, which documents a year in the lives of three teenagers who live in one of Colombia’s barrios and who have been drawn into a proxy civil war between the government and paramilitary groups. Screening organizer and 3L Kay Rousslang said: “People were surprised at how young the gang members were, and one person contemplated that perhaps the children were nothing but pawns used by the far more powerful and well-equipped paramilitary groups.”

Director Tarek Maassarani, an ’05 graduate of the Law Center, was on hand to introduce and answer questions about his film Sour Milk and Honey. Tarek had the idea for the film during his 1L summer, when he traveled to Palestine to work for a women’s rights NGO.

Filming organizer Helen Pennock explains: “He just talked to people, all kinds of people all over Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, about the conflict and about peace. He spent his next two summers doing more filming and then compiled his footage into this documentary, showing a range of surprising perspectives on the conflict.”

Ladies First was a second film about the rights of women in Africa’s Great Lakes Region, depicting the dramatic shifts in legal and social status that Rwandan women achieved in the years since the Genocide. For example, married women can now own property and women hold a majority of the seats in Parliament. People from both on and off campus attended, including some who had worked with women in Rwanda themselves.

Crossing was the sole non-documentary in this year’s line up. Based on the stories of North Korean refugees/defectors, it has been called the “Schindler’s List for North Korea” by the Wall Street Journal. Chuck Downs, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), and Mr. Kwang Jin Kim, a recent defector from North Korea, provided some context for the film and answered questions about North Korea after the screening.

For those who missed the festival, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Greatest Silence, and Trouble the Water are available in the main campus library. Ladies First is available, in its entirety, on the PBS website.