This touring program of films drawn from the New York and London versions of the Human Rights Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, May 9 through 15. Screenings will be at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $7, $5 for members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
AUGUST
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Avi Mograbi’s 2002 video flirts with self-indulgence while using black humor to portray Israel in a state of schizophrenic collapse on the eve of the current intifada. Combining footage of his home life with documentary footage from the streets (where citizens and police challenge his right to film), Mograbi elucidates his hatred for the “scorching” month of August (and then, posing as his wife with a pink towel around his head, expresses “her” love for it). He subsequently shows us Jewish children who call for “stinking Arabs” to be burned out of their homes, and actresses auditioning for the role of the wife of Baruch Goldstein (perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre of 29 Muslims) by reenacting her televised demand for the return of her husband’s pistol. Opening and closing with scenes of national leaders, Mograbi depicts Israeli politics as a theater of the absurd. In Hebrew with subtitles. 72 min. (FC) (9:00)
Justifiable Homicide
More an ethnographic collage than a news documentary, this 2001 feature by Leonard Retel Helmrich looks at Indonesia before and after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. Helmrich follows a housewife in noisy, polluted Jakarta as she bickers with her two grown sons, goes to the countryside to harvest rice, and returns in time for the antigovernment demonstrations. Along the way he cuts back and forth in time and place, stringing together verite and staged scenes and using Eisensteinian montage (in one sequence, a shot of schoolkids fervently singing the national anthem segues into angry protesters singing the same song). Touches like these communicate Indonesia’s political transformation in what is otherwise a jumble of gorgeous sights and sounds. In Javanese and Bahasa with subtitles. 92 min. (TS) (6:45)
Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy inject an element of TV drama into their 2002 documentary on the San Francisco public defender’s office with a chronological tease: their chronicle of a major criminal trial begins moments before the verdict is to be rendered, then a title–“Two months earlier”–takes us back to the beginning. They’ve chosen some compelling cases, such as the contract killing of a hairdresser, but the overheated title misrepresents the cases’ outcomes: seemingly innocent parties are acquitted and guilty ones convicted. Most fascinating are the emotional bonds that form between lawyers and their hapless clients, and the personal lives of the lawyers, one of whom is a haunted insomniac who shares his doubts and misgivings in a video diary kept at the producers’ request. 119 min. (FC) (2:30)
MONDAY, MAY 12
