Human Rights
Volume 24 Number 3 Summer 1997
Bringing Abuses to LightThe Human Rights Watch International Film Festival focuses the public eye on human rights abuses
By Jeremy LehrerThe man in the film is talking about freedom, about one country's struggle for democracy. Archival footage links the relatively nondescript talking head with words on the Democracy Wall, with a younger man at a 1979 mock trial that led to a jail sentence of 15 years for passing so-called military secrets to foreign journalists.
Freed in September 1993, this man had not learned his lesson despite years of isolation, hard labor, and the deleterious effects of physiological neglect. In April 1994, free for only 7 months, his government determined that he was once again acting unlawfully to subvert its authority and sent him to jail for a second term of 14 years.
The man is Wei Jingsheng, the country is China, and the jaws of a capricious law have sequestered him from the outside world. But his message and the example of his courage escaped in the form of this rare footage.
The visceral power of film is undeniable, and perhaps Wei Jingsheng will one day be able to watch the short documentary on his life in the comfort of a free and a truly democratic China. With that goal in mind, advocacy organizations around the world will continue to champion his cause and the cause of other individuals or groups who suffer oppression, abuse, or genocide because of their identity or beliefs.
One of these advocacy organizations is Human Rights Watch, a non-profit begun in 1978 that campaigns for human rights issues on many different fronts. As part of its advocacy strategy, Human Rights Watch utilizes its own reports and press coverage to mobilize shame and diplomatic and economic pressure to end human rights abuses and promote the rule of law.
A unique element of the Human Rights Watch advocacy strategy is the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, an annual event that premieres in New York in June and presents a series of films on a variety of human rights issues. The Festival began in 1988 as a celebration of Human Rights Watch's 10th anniversary, and the 1997 Festival features 20 films that are now shown in conjunction with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Following the New York premiere, a smaller Festival program is shown in both Los Angeles and London, and a selection of films from the Festival entitled The Global Showcase tours around the world as part of Human Rights Watch's ongoing efforts to promote awareness and action.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch and a former prosecutor and private litigator, describes the Festival as an integral part of Human Rights Watch's work and reflects on the role film plays in inspiring individuals to action.
"There is an immediacy to film that allows the viewer to more readily identify with the victim and thus makes it more likely that someone sitting in the movie theater will be moved to action on behalf of the victims. And that is ultimately our purpose," he says. "One of the difficulties we always face is how to translate the relative passivity of the written word into popular action. We try to do that through vivid case studies and the like. But there's a level of abstraction in the written word that film helps to surmount by showing you the person in the flesh on the screen, and that immediacy is tremendously powerful in our effort to build a public constituency on behalf of human rights."
The "rule of law" is a catchphrase in the halls of human rights advocacy, but as Roth observes, the rule of law is only one thread of a complex fabric determining the interplay of government action and individual rights. "You still need to ask what is the content of the law and what substantively does it represent. So you could have a system that abides scrupulously by the law but systematically violates rights, and you haven't gotten very far," he says. "Nazi Germany was run quite legally but in a way that you would hardly say respected human rights."
Nazi Germany is not only an example of the gross distortion of the law but is also one of the earliest instances of the powerful if unsettling combination of film and human rights. While Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a chilling record of Nazi propaganda, the Nazis also filmed concentration camp scenes as part of their documentation of the attempted extermination of the Jewish race and other "impure" elements. And the images recorded by servicemen on the liberation of the concentration camps awakened the world perhaps more than any other means to the spellbinding horror of the Final Solution. Some of these films were later shown at the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the Nazi genocide, and, as long as they are preserved, the films will be a lasting record of the Nazi atrocities.
Bruni Burres is the director of the Festival, and along with Heather Harding, the Festival's associate director, she is responsible for selecting the films that will show each year. While it's difficult to select only 20 films out of the hundreds that are submitted, one central tenet of Burres' programming philosophy is to "always challenge what people think is human rights." In addition to this criteria and in order to ensure the accuracy of information and portrayals included in Festival films, potential candidates are screened by a Human Rights Watch advocate who is familiar with the film's subject and can confirm or refute the film's accuracy. As Burres observes, the films "don't have to follow our mandate, they don't have to say exactly what [Human Rights Watch] says, but they do have to be factually truthful."
This year's Festival includes both documentary and fictional films on human rights issues. It Ain't Love is a documentary about an improv theater group of teens and twentysomethings who explore issues of domestic violence in relationships. For Burres, the film fits the scope of human rights but might challenge a more narrow view of the issue. "People would say, 'Oh, well that's not human rights,' but sure, domestic violence definitely is. In the U.S., it definitely is, but people don't think of it," she says. Burres adds that the scope and character of the Festival are designed to get people to "question [their] immediate association with what human rights are and often to try to bring them back home so it's not always about something happening in another country. And definitely they have to be the best artistic films that we can find that year, too."
The New York Times devoted an entire article to the subject of film's role in affecting change on a legal or societal level and concluded that the issue remains mired in ambiguity. But there are quite a few definitive examples of the way that film and law have intertwined. First and foremost, as in the case of the Nazi genocide, film and video are used as tools to document rights abuses and hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. For Human Rights Watch, these films and videos can be used both legally as evidence and extra-legally in an attempt to organize support for a cause. The short film about Wei Jingsheng, for instance, was to be used at a rally in support of the Chinese dissident.
While rights abuses and the distortions of "law" have been recorded on film, film also plays a role in freedom of expression and in the ensuing attempt of oppressive regimes to stifle that freedom. In countries such as Iran and China, censor boards must approve a film's content before the film can be made. One reaction to this oppression has been to mask political messages in seemingly benign storylines, and Burres notes that under Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, filmmakers developed elaborate codes and extended parables to conceal subversive political messages. While a film from this era might appear to be "a nice musical, a nice love story," it was actually "a political statement about that country." Some of the earlier versions of film-as-parable were made in France under the Nazi-installed Vichy government.
And while film and political theorists will continue to ponder the subtext of films emerging from China and Hong Kong, another response to oppression has been to simply make films without permission. In these situations, filming becomes an outright act of "subversion," as in China, where Harry Wu videotaped conditions in Chinese labor camps and later smuggled the tapes out of the country. China was none too thrilled with Wu, and his activities and continuing advocacy efforts led to his detention by the Chinese government in 1995. Wu, by that time an American citizen, was eventually freed, but imprisoned dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan are not so lucky.
The litany of instances in which governments attempt to intimidate individuals or organizations will continue to grow. In May of this year, citing as one reason the funding of a documentary film, the Belarus government fined the Soros Foundation $3 million in what the Foundation described as a concerted effort to stifle the voice of non-governmental organizations in the country under the guise of legal action. And China consistently issues threats about the production of films about Tibet or the Dalai Lama, one of which is now being directed by Martin Scorsese. To protect and promote "the human rights of filmmakers around the world," Human Rights Watch established a coalition of filmmakers entitled Filmwatch, and beyond this, Burres cites a number of precedents in which film has played a role in affecting the law.
The first example she mentions is the documentary film Calling the Ghosts, which played at the 1996 festival and is the story of two Bosnian women childhood friends and legal professionals who fight to "put rape into the international lexicon of war crimes" following their own rape and torture in a concentration camp during the Serb-fueled war of aggression in the former Yugoslavia. After the film showed at the New York festival, the two filmmakers and the two women who were the subject of the film toured the country and later testified at Congress about war crimes against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The film showed on Showtime as part of a documentary series, and 60 Minutes did a piece on the two women featured in the film and the man who was accused of their rape. Their campaign was ultimately successful, and Burres recalls that it was "right at the launch of the film that the first men were being accused of rape as a war crime at The Hague."
The second example Burres mentions concerns the film Flame, which plays at the 1997 Festival and is a fictional account of Zimbabwe's war for independence. The film is based closely on actual events, and in one scene, a female character is raped by her male comrade-in-arms. As Burres describes it, the initial response to the rape scene in Zimbabwe was negative, with many claiming, "'This would never happen, no one would rape someone else in the movement.'" Many of the men who fought in the war are now in positions in the government, and Burres explains that the film may have been the spark that unleashed a firestorm. "For the first time ever in their country men who are now in government are being charged with rape," she says and adds, "There really might be a case where these people are being charged because this film has now come out, and it's publicly being admitted now in the consciousness. The amnesty of a country maybe will be changed because of this film."
Around the world, societies and legal structures are struggling with the tension between justice and amnesty in relation to past crimes. Burres says that her exposure to some of the filmmakers has taught her a great deal about forgiveness and the sometimes conflicting attitudes about how to achieve a peaceful society.
"I think a lot of people in the human rights world who work in it, who haven't been directly affected by [social upheaval], have a much harder time because they feel that justice has to come first. And I think sometimes if you talk to some people who actually lived through it, there's so much a desire for normality, or a return to some kind of normality that some people will give up justice if there can be a kind of moving on."
On the situation of human rights monitors or advocates in these sometimes ambiguous situations, Burres comments, "I think the role of someone who works in human rights is to seek justice, because their role is to help justice be made. If someone else decides not to take that, that's their decision."
While the question of justice may haunt a free society, the question of injustice brought to light on the big screen is a simple one. As long as there is injustice, filmmakers will undoubtedly bring the eye of the outside world to the often frightening palette of human rights abuses, and these images will continue to inspire outrage in both lawyers and non-lawyers. As Kenneth Roth observes, "When you're dealing with issues of execution or torture or political imprisonment, you don't need to be a lawyer to know that those things are wrong." As for film's power to establish legal and social change, Wei Jingsheng and others like him believe in it enough to risk and sometimes sacrifice their "freedom."Perhaps for Wei, the silver screen of the cinema was another variation of China's Democracy Wall, and he believed that the cumulative weight inspired by its words and images would one day open the jaws that swallowed him.
You can visit the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival on the web at http://www.hrw.org/iff
Jeremy Lehrer is a writer in New York.
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