Documentaries put names to the innocent faces of headline horror
The Fourth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival ended on Sunday evening, leaving its 15,500-strong audience with the disquieting feeling that this world is not a pleasant one. The over 90 films screened with few exceptions depicted a world plagued by myriad complex problems that affect each and every one of us either directly or indirectly. When the film credits rolled, the audience was left with the sense that as a society, we are doing way too little to address these problems. The central theme of this year’s festival was «Children of a Harsh Reality.» Eleven films focused on the plight of the world’s children, showing them battling war, famine, disease, abuse, poverty and sheer indifference. Last Friday’s International Herald Tribune front-page report on Afghan parents being forced to sell their children for a sackful of grain gave American director Karen Kramer’s «Children of Shadows» an even more poignant note. In her 12th film, Kramer enters the lives of Haiti’s restaveks – children as young as 3 or 4 years old sold by poverty-stricken rural families to other families in the city as unpaid labor in exchange for promises that they will be fed and put through school. More often than not though, these children remain modern-day slaves and education becomes an unfulfillable desire. Closer to home, Hungarian director Ferenc Moldovanyi presents «Children, Kosovo 2000,» a disturbing analysis of the effects of war on the country’s young rendered with masterful camera work. The same theme runs through Andrei Nekrasov’s «Children’s Stories: Chechnya» as he presents a historical account of modern-day Russian military operations in Chechnya and depicts Chechen children’s drawings of their views of these operations. Eleven-year-old Nisha from India, featured in Duco Tellegen’s film of the same name, is HIV positive and so is her mother, and together they try to overcome the stigma in a society that is mostly ignorant of this disease which is killing millions of people every year worldwide. Memory from Zambia, shown in Sampa Kangwa-Wilkie and Simon Wilkie’s «Imiti Ikula,» is also 11 years old and also HIV positive, but in contrast to Nisha, she has been living on the street since she was 3 years old, battling constant sexual abuse and public scorn. Victims at home Sexual abuse on the streets is only the tip of the iceberg. More often than not abuse is committed in the home by trusted adults, according to Kim Longiotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini in «Runaway» and Vanessa Roth and Alexandra Dickson in «Close to Home.» The first film enters a Teheran women’s hostel that provides shelter, counseling and social rehabilitation education for young abused women. The women’s stories are brutal and heartbreaking, though a glimmer of hope is offered by the efforts of the hostel’s workers who apply themselves to their task with unfaltering dedication. During «Close to Home,» few dry eyes were to be seen in the Olympion movie theater where it was screened as a 9-year-old girl described the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father. On the same film, a successful corporate employee talks about the betrayal she felt when, on telling her mother that her stepfather had been abusing her for 10 years, her mother responded with: «You have ruined my life. I never want to see you again,» and forced her into foster care. Roth and Dickson interweave the accounts of five American people’s accounts – including an ice-hockey star and a young man who contracted AIDS from his abuser – of abuse with statistics from America’s Justice Department and FBI that testify to a huge and growing problem, as well as with footage from support group talks with sexual offenders. «I would try and pick single-mother families and make my way in like a father-figure,» admitted one man. The real gem in «Children of a Harsh Reality,» however, was «Promises» by Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado, a well-deserved Oscar nominee for the Academy Awards later this month. The filmmakers – the man in front of the camera, B.Z., is an American Jew – embark on an odyssey to Israeli and Palestinian territories in Jerusalem on a quest to find the seeds of peace in the future generations. With the assistance of maps and historical and political information, they interview seven children aged between 9-13. One is the son of a rabbi, training to become a rabbi himself, who preaches peace and cooperation but clings to the dogma of his faith to justify Israeli aggression against Palestine. Another is a young Jewish boy living in the occupied territories of the West Bank who quotes his hardline parents and the scriptures to explain why this land is his by right. Then there are the twins, the charming sons of liberal Jews, who wish that they did not live in fear of suicide bombers, who don’t really understand what all the fuss is about since it would be so easy for everyone to live together peacefully. On the other side of the conflict is the daughter of a Hamas-affiliated man who has been imprisoned without trial on suspicion of taking part in terrorist activities. Another young Palestinian boy dreams of becoming a member of Hamas and avenging the death of his best friend by Israeli fire, but when the time comes for him to meet the twins – a meeting organized by the filmmakers who saw the boys’ mutual love for sports as a unifying factor – he prepares for their encounter with all the fervor of a young man going on his first big date. Moving and beautifully done, the success of the film is due to the frank testimonies and accurate information in its balanced portrait of the conflict at its most human. Greek selections With few exceptions, the themes chosen by local filmmakers seemed to indulge in a nostalgia and introspection that was out of place in a festival so geared to intense and very current sociopolitical commentary. Few touched upon issues of social consequence, preferring to focus on themes that meant more to the individuals featured than to society as a whole, and adopting a style that was more reminiscent of reportage than a documentary. The pleasant exceptions were Loukia Rikaki’s «Words of Silence,» in which she focuses on Greece’s deaf community; Stelios Apostolopoulos’s «Bearded Vulture: The High Mountain Hermit,» a film in the Habitat section of the festival that documents the gradual extinction of one of Crete’s most important bird species; Antonis Kioukas’s «Kurdistan: Off the Map,» a disturbing account of the effects of international military operations in the Middle East on the Kurdish population; Giorgos Kolozis’s «Stories from Africa,» based on four women, African refugees of war living in Greece; and Yiannis Lambrou’s «Contact,» a comment on Greeks’ perceptions of the country’s growing migrant population. A large number of the Greek films focused on individuals and their historical or cultural contribution to Greek history. Tassos Psaras pays tribute to the writer Stratis Tsirkas with an account of his political activism. Kioukas, in his second festival entry «Never Miss the Light from your Sight» presents a 10-minute short on poet Christos Bokoros. Dimitris Dimogerondakis and Costas Mahairas shed light on the life and career of the eminent Greek actress Katina Paxinou; Stamatis Tsarouchas follows the footsteps of poet Athanassios Christopoulos, while Apostolos Karakassis pays homage to the contribution of Aris Constantinidis to modern Greek architecture. Two interesting historical accounts in the Greek section were Tony Lykouressis’s «Song of Life,» a film tracing the history of the Jewish community on the island of Zakynthos from the 15th century to the present and focusing on the islanders’ support for them during the German occupation; and «The Death Match» by Andreas Apostolidis about the Ukrainian soccer team Start (formerly Dynamo Kiev) and their opposition to the German occupying forces during the Second World War. The festival as a whole has performed its role well, bringing to the attention of the public and filmmakers that documentary film is a form of expression and a forum for debate that can be both profoundly influential and have a broad creative scope. As a genre, it has fewer practical restrictions than cinema and what the filmmakers this year showed us was that to succeed, a documentary must display passion, perseverance and insight. Awards from the audience and critics The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival does not offer awards such as the Silver and Golden Alexanders of the annual International Film Festival in November. Instead, documentary-makers compete for the Dewar’s-sponsored audience award, accompanied by a 3,000-euro cash prize, and the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) award. The FIPRESCI award was given to «Missing Young Woman» – a Mexican production by Lourdes Portillo on the frequent disappearances of young women in the US-Mexico border city of Ciudad Juarez – for «its energetic approach to a big and unresolved problem and its powerful documentary investigation.» FIPRESCI also gave a special mention to «Guardians of Time» – a film by Greece’s Margarita Manta portraying seven guards at archaeological sites in Greece. The Dewar’s audience award has been given to «Warrior of Light» by Germany’s Monika Treut. The film documents the work of Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, an award-winning artist and human rights activist who gained international recognition for her work with street children in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro.
