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Below are the films screening throughout the weekend. Please see the schedule for times. Iraq in Fragments
Oscar nominated for 2007 and Triple award-winner at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (Documentary Directing, Cinematography and Editing Awards), Iraq in Fragments is more than a singularly accomplished documentary film - it is an astonishing work of art. Culled from 300 hours of footage taken over a two-year period, and presented without scripted voice-over, the film is at once expansive and intimate, harrowing and transcendent. Seattle native Filmmaker James Longley's (Gaza Strip) documentary feature shadows ordinary Iraqi citizens in three crucial yet fractured regions - Baghdad; the Shiite south; the Kurdish north - as they struggle through a chaotic present and face a distant, uncertain future. In old Baghdad, buildings burn, U.S. tanks patrol, and an 11-year-old mechanic scurries amid the rubble to please his intimidating boss as neighborhood men angrily indict the Americans. Then, guided by a young leader in Moqtada Sadr's Shiite revolutionary movement, the film proceeds south, where political arguments ricochet across cafés and meeting halls, and young Shiite men take to the streets to enforce religious laws and stage an anti-U.S. uprising. In the northern Kurdish countryside, where smoke from brick ovens billows in the sky, a farmer, grateful to America for removing Saddam, ruminates on the future of his family and people while his teenage son tirelessly tends sheep and dreams of becoming a doctor. These indelible portraits, painted with strikingly beautiful vérité immediacy and poetic visual juxtapositions, humanize the conflict and illuminate the textures and tensions of a country wrenched by occupation and pulled in disparate directions by religion and ethnicity. *Winner of the 2006 HRWIFF Nestor Almendros Prize.
Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate an industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we continue to buy our lattes and cappuccinos in their millions, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is on a one-man mission to save his coffee cooperative’s 75,000 struggling farmers from bankruptcy. As they strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans available to the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price. Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the more powerful sides of the international trading system come into focus. New York coffee traders, auction houses and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the enormity of Tadesse’s task to find a long-term solution for his farmers. *Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2006, Seattle International Film Festival, 2006.
How far would you go to stop a war? On August 22, 1971, twenty-eight men and women in Camden, New Jersey, carried out a powerful act of civil disobedience against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The group was part of a nonviolent antiwar movement popularly known as the “Catholic Left.” One of the most dramatic tactics utilized by this movement was breaking into draft board offices to remove and destroy government records that identified young men available for military service. The activists claimed that their actions were meant to show their belief that killing—even in war—was morally indefensible. And by conducting their raids mostly in inner cities, they hoped to call attention to war’s damaging effect on some of America’s most vulnerable populations. The documentary tells of the activists’ covert preparations, government intrigue, a government raid and arrest of the protesters, and an ensuing legal battle which the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called “one of the great trials of the twentieth century.” Thirty-five years later, key participants openly discuss their motives, their fears, and the tremendous personal costs of their actions. It is a story of resistance, friendship, and betrayal played out against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in recent American history. Winner of both the Jury Prize and Audience Award for Best Documentary, Philadelphia Film Festival 2006.
The Pehuenche-Mapuche people live above the Bíobío River, in Ralco valley, Chile. For over four centuries they have fought off all invaders who tried to enter the valley, from the Incas to the Spanish conquistadors. In 2004, amongst the scenic beauty of the Chilean Andes, Spain's largest hydroelectric company, Endesa, constructed the world’s third largest dam. This dam flooded the Ralco valley and forced the “exchange” of whole villages to much higher ground. Despite protections for indigenous people enshrined in the Chilean constitution, the government has shown little inclination to enforce their rights against the wealthy Spanish multinational. Protestors—including activists, journalists, and lawyers—have found themselves arrested under Pinochet’s anti-terrorist laws, facing anonymous witnesses whose identities are concealed from even the court.
In 1975-79, almost two million Cambodians lost their lives to murder and famine when the Khmer Rouge forced the urban population into the countryside to fulfill their ideal of an agrarian utopia. The notorious detention center code-named 'S21' was the schoolhouse-turned prison where 17,000 men, women and children were tortured and killed, their "crimes" meticulously documented to justify their execution. In this award-winning documentary and astonishing historical document, survivor Vann Nath confronts his captors, some of whom were as young as 12 years old when they committed their atrocities. Part of the Human Rights Watch Selects Collection at First Run Features.
Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars tells the remarkable and ultimately life-affirming story of a group of six Sierra Leonean musicians who come together to form a band while living as refugees in the Republic of Guinea. Forced from their homes in Sierra Leone, the members of the band represent the thousands of stories that exist amongst the survivors of the Sierra Leonean civil war. Following the group over the course of three years, we see the band travel amongst Guinean refugee camps and back to war-ravaged Freetown as part of the UNHCR’s “go-and-see” program. Through the uplifting music and emotional stories of these six characters, we begin to understand the brutal realities of a war so often dismissed by the mass media and are witness to the ability of individuals to sustain hope and create art in a landscape dominated by rage and loss.
In 2004, thirteen thousand Somali Bantu refugees realized their dream of coming to America. They are now living in fifty cities across the country, becoming the largest African group from a single community to settle in the United States at one time. Rain in a Dry Land chronicles two years in the lives of two extended Somali Bantu families as they leave behind a 200-year legacy of oppression in Africa to face new challenges in a strange new land. The film begins in January 2004, at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where our featured families are stunned by what they learn about America in their “Cultural Orientation” class. From this beginning, filmmaker Anne Makepeace brilliantly succeeds in capturing every step of this remarkable journey, from their very different new homes – Springfield, Massachusetts versus Atlanta, Georgia – through their encounters with racism, poverty, failures of the school system, and severe culture shock. Both of these war-torn families do find ways to survive in America, and to create a safe haven. Presented in association with American Documentary | P.O.V., premiering on PBS in 2007 (check local listings).
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