The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival Is A Manifesto For Change

The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival is — amongst the ranks of Australia’s smaller, ‘boutique’ film fests — the most interesting, best programmed, and culturally resonant. In its eight years, the HRAFF has slowly grown in scope and size, continuing to find fascinating films — especially documentaries — that look at the world around us with open eyes. Its 2015 edition opens this coming week in Melbourne, before a handful of its films screen nationally.

1971

A rollicking doc in which a hosted of venerable, retired dissidents recount the half-century ago night when they broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole every file, uncovering a vast network of citizen surveillance, subterfuge, and plans for entrapment; J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘watchmen’ being exposed — when the files are leaked to the press — as morality police out to suppress any subversive element that would dare challenge conservative rule. Johanna Hamilton’s documentary suffers a little from its talking-heads/dramatic-reenactments brief, but its story is stirring, and the contemporary resonance plenty profound.

AI WEI WEI: THE FAKE CASE

Functioning as companion-piece to Alison Klayman’s acclaimed 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Andreas Johnsen’s film essentially just keeps the cameras rolling, picking up from where its predecessor left off. Where Klayman’s film was a more traditional portrait of the Artist as Rebel — and, then, global phenomenon — Johnsen seeks to explore Ai’s new reality; where he’s either imprisoned by Chinese authorities or held hostage in his own home. Watched wherever he goes — by his assistants, his own phalanx of cameras, the phones of star-struck citizens, and the state police who tail him — Ai’s ever-photographed existence is deeply symbolic of millennial life in the digital surveillance-state.

THE BEEKEEPER

A Kurdish refugee living in the Swiss Alps, Ibrahim Gezer just wants to tend to his bees, but the government wants him to work. Setting his simple dream against the cruel realities of the immigrant experience — of a life lived stateless, having fled from a homeland teetering on the brink of oblivion — Mano Khalil’s documentary is a tender, sweet piece of cinematic humanism.

BEGINNING WITH THE END

Like any well-mounted weepie, David B. Marshall’s documentary shamelessly pulls your heartstrings with lingering close-ups, swelling string music, and real tears. It’s a portrait of a group of upstate New York high-schoolers taking a ‘Hospice’ class; most, seemingly, to pad their résumés for college. What they come face-to-face with, however, is mortality, shared humanity, and genuine perspective on time, life, and the world. Cinematically speaking, it’s hardly a masterwork, but its sentiments run deep.

DON’T THINK I’VE FORGOTTEN: CAMBODIA’S LOST ROCK & ROLL

As one of their first rules of business, totalitarian regimes always come for the artists. So, when the Khmer Rouge ascended into power in Cambodia by way of military coup, their first step was quashing any local purveyors of rock’n’roll. Music fans have long known about the groovy glories of Khmer rock, but John Pirozzi’s modestly-mounted documentary discovers the real people behind these ‘rare records’: hears their horrifying testimonies, salutes their persistent spirit, and airs their righteous jams.

EVAPORATING BORDERS

Iva Radivojevic’s dry, droll, essay-movie-ish documentary looks askance at on-the-ground contemporary life in Cypress, a Mediterranean way-station for refugees on route to the EU. The director herself landed in Cypress as a 12-year-old Serb fleeing the Balkan wars, and she returns, years later, to make sense of her own past, to look at the lives of a host of refugees, and to chronicle the rise of anti-Arab Greek-Cypriot nationalism on an Island forever fought-over and divided.

FELIX

Cut-price kids-movie from South Africa in which a lovable township scamp lands at a toffee private boy’s school, where he navigates bullies, rugby, and a script filled entirely with caricatures. What ensues is less hilarity, more mugging hijinks, terribly-mimed tin-whistle playing, and a big school concert in which everyone ends up cheering.

THE GROUND BENEATH THEIR FEET

Nausheen Dadabhoy’s documentary looks at a handful of women who suffered debilitating spinal injuries in the Pakistani earthquake of 2005. In a country that thinks little of the rights of both women and the disabled, the film’s subjects scrap for their independence in the face of cruel, unforgiving fate.

THE HUMANITARIANS

A wry, unvarnished, quietly-agitating portrait of two disabled German men, who find society generally unwilling to furnish their throbbing sexual desires. In response, one, happy-go-lucky and armed with an activist spirit, turns to sex workers and gay clubs; the other, stifled and repressed, takes to acts of teenage rebellion, and, direly, genuinely creepy stalking.

IVORY TOWER

Andrew Rossi’s documentary looks at the US College Industrial Complex, where education is a high-price extravaganza that immediately yokes its participants into a lifetime of debt. Long sold as a veritable meal-ticket, a stay in university now seems like a bad investment. Ivory Tower catalogues a broken system, looks at alternative education ideas from both shysters and idealists, and, eventually, finds its strongest narrative when it hitches a ride with Cooper Union students protesting the rising costs of education.

I WILL NOT BE SILENCED

HRAFF’s Opening Night choice flies in the face of your usual frothy-comedy-followed-by-complimentary-champagne approach to festival programming. Instead, it’s a bracing, brutal portrait of Australian aid worker Charlotte Campbell Stephen; who, after being gang-raped at gunpoint, spends seven years attempting to push her case through the uncooperative Kenyan court system. Local filmmaker Judy Rymer chronicles the burdens of undertaking such a Sisyphean ordeal; at the emotional energy needed to sustain such a constantly-thwarted fight for justice. But, her picture also pulls back from the individual narrative. As Stephen becomes a public campaigner and political agitator in cultural and legal reform regarding rapes in Kenya, I Will Not Be Silenced serves as a universal rallying cry against the long-held acceptance of sexual violence.

JUST EAT IT: A FOOD WASTE STORY

Though it’s delivered with the cheery, anodyne, widely-accessible air of cutesy American documentaries, Grant Baldwin’s film attempts to Supersize Me the realm of food waste. He and his wife set out to survive solely on reclaimed refuse for six months, and what results is a colourful, crowdpleasing, over-explaining picture of the horrors of hyper-capitalist abundance, and the unbelievably plenty waiting in the dumpster out back of your local grocer.

LOS HONGOS

HRAFF’s few narrative movies usually pale in comparison to their documentaries, but Oscar Ruiz Navia’s tender, playful portrait of Colombian skaters and street artists is great. It’s a classic coming-of-age tale, in which a pair of handsome pals idle through life, alternately defeated and inspired by the state of the world; out to kill times, kiss girls, and cause trouble. It boasts a bangin’ Afro-Colombian soundtrack and plenty of eye-catching stencil work, but the style is hardly empty; Navia positioning street-art as a form of resistance, equating it with the same dissident spirit of their elders’ traditional folk-arts and political lobby groups.

MARMATO

Marmato is billed as a simple film of David vs Goliath, in which a high-altitude township of traditional Colombian gold-miners mobilise when a Canadian mining conglomerate buys the mountain out from under them, ready to raze the whole peak in search of the $20bil worth of gold assumed lurking underneath. But the realities, conflicts, and politics of the situation are never so black-and-white; Mark Grieco’s documentary less interested in oppositional morality than looking at those humans caught in the capitalist crossfire.

MINERS SHOT DOWN

Rehad Desai summons the appropriate steely outrage in this profound piece of cine-journalism, which explores the 2012 massacre of striking South African mineworkers. Desai sees the tragedy as horrifying symbol of these globalised, late-capitalist times: third-world bloodshed lubricating the money-making gears of multi-national machinery.

OF MEN AND WAR

In its opening reel, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men And War — a portrait of returned soldiers staying in a New York veteran’s home specialising in PTSD — feels like its going to be a long 140 minutes; a harrowing stay in the company of raging, testosterone-addled men bristling with fuck-the-world machismo. But, as time passes — both in the film and on screen— it settles into a place of acceptance, for both subjects and viewers; the state of these ruined, discarded men a commentary on America as eternal military nation, effectively serving as an antidote to the repellent, racist fantasia of American Sniper.

PERVERT PARK

‘An Adult Community’, the sign posted outside of the residential trailer-park Florida Justice Transitions says, simply. It’s a community of registered sex offenders, most arriving fresh out of prison, many settling in and never leaving. Frida and Lasse Barkfors’ astonishing documentary sits, calmly, with them, without judgment. Dwelling amongst the residents of this Pervert Park, it humanises these most despised members of society. Here, the subjects find rehabilitation in a country whose prisons offer little; the film becoming an unflinching portrait of cycles of abuse, in which the magnetic power of the camera — the lens as modern-day confessional — draws these oft-damaged figures into moments of catharsis. The crimes of the inhabitants range from essentially non-existent (victims of internet-sex-sting entrapment) to utterly sickening, but Pervert Park seeks not to judge the individuals, but the system; the for-profit prisons that need people to fill them, and care little with where they go once spat out the other side. Its most trenchant, political gesture comes on close, when the film’s ‘cast’ is shown via their headshots from a freely-available ‘Sexual Predator Tracker’ mobile app, touching on social-media’s tendency towards mobilising mobs and vigilante justice.

A QUIET INQUISITION

Alessandra Zeka and Holen Sabrina Kahn’s documentary is a powerful polemic painted as personal portrait. It chronicles the working life of Nicaraguan OBGYN Carla Cerrato, one of the few local gynaecologists who’ll openly treat those with troublesome pregnancies. In a country where it’s illegal to terminate any pregnancy — even those that endanger the mother’s life — A Quiet Inquisition lives up to its title; watching the daily struggles of a doctor walking a tightrope of morality and legality; a feminist figure humbly working in defiance of her country’s Christian patriarchy.

SLUMS: CITIES OF TOMORROW

The ‘urban-planning documentary’ is its own genre; a place where utopian dreams of better cities can play out free from the horrifying realities of real estate developers. Jean-Nicolas Orhon’s film offers a smart-spin on this oft-bourgie cinematic niche, out to rebuke the first-world pejorative loaded into the world ‘slum’. Here, as one talking-head eloquently puts it, “slums are not the problem, but the solution”; a coping mechanism for when bureaucracy fails to keep up with spiralling populations. These non-permanent, ad-hoc communities are posited as a glimpse of what’s to come; flexible urban living for the teeming masses in an overpopulated planet.

SUMÉ: THE SOUND OF A REVOLUTION

Greenlandic ’70s rockers Sumé are barely known outside their homeland, where their music was inseparable from the era’s independence movement. Yet, their story feels instantly-familiar within minutes; Inuk Silis Høegh’s film hitting every standard rockumentary beat, yet another entry in an oft-uninspired genre.

THULETUVALU

Matthais von Gunten’s simple film juxtaposes traditional ways of life in two remote island nations: looking at the seal-hunters of Thule, off the coast of Greenland, and the fisherman of Tuvalu, a speck in the far-flung Pacific. There’s innate visual contrast in the snowy former and tropical latter, but von Gunten stresses their similarities to underscore his trenchant point: both islands sit at the climate change frontlines, due to be swallowed whole by rising sea levels.

TOMORROW WE DISAPPEAR

This American-made documentary begins as a simple, warm-hearted look at Kathpulti Colony, a rag-tag residential area that’s hosted India’s traditional magicians and puppeteers — and their families — for half a century, forming a vibrant community beloved by locals and tourists alike. But, when the government announces plans to develop the land into New Delhi’s first-ever high-rise, the film suddenly becomes a discussion piece — filled with internecine arguments; family squabbles caught on camera — on whether you can fight progress.

VIVE LA FRANCE

Footage of far-flung Pacific atolls being nuked to kingdom come is, usually, used only for cinematic kitsch; a symbol of the distant past, cutely archaic notions on Atomic Age progress and Cold War terror. This intimate, small-scale documentary dares look at the fallout from such visual Fallout; at those who live in the French Polynesian islands still tainted by contamination a half-century on.

WE COME AS FRIENDS

HRAFF’s true standout is Hubert Sauper’s astonishing film about the partitioning of South Sudan, a decade-in-the-making follow-up to his modern documentary classic Darwin’s Nightmare. As always, Sauer tackles era-defining subjects with an inspired mock-innocence; walking into a foreign landscape as pseudo-clueless outsider, eyes wide open. Here, in a Herzogian device, he narrates the film as if alien landed on Earth, piloting a light aircraft — that he built himself — that touches down in remote communities and oil fields, blithely blowing into situations in which many would fear to tread. Sauper’s staged naïveté betrays his smart eye for the absurdity of tragedy, the realities of life on the ground in a new frontier of neo-colonialist globalism. His casual conversations with those on either side of the North/South divide — locals, politicians, American ambassadors and missionaries, itinerate Chinese oil-workers — are at once deeply troubling and drolly ironic. As with its Oscar-nominated predecessor, We Come As Friends is a provocative piece of art that teases out the complexity, contradictions, and horrors of the modern world in an artful, thoughtful way.