Human Rights Watch Film Festival: Free Documentary Series a Midwinter Gift

By Liam Lacey

With its free selection of inspiring and empathy-inducing films from around the world, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival — running February 18 to 22 — is always a welcome mid-winter event, though perhaps more this year than ever.

Wake Up on Mars.

One of the earliest of the cause-based film festivals, the event — which takes place in 20 countries — was founded in the 1980s as an offshoot of the New York-based, Nobel Prize-winning human rights monitoring organization, Human Rights Watch.

The five films in this year’s shortened, online Canadian iteration of the Festival, co-chaired by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier and in partnership with Hot Docs, are all testaments to commitment, both by the filmmakers in typically open-ended multi-year projects, and their subjects, individuals demonstrating resilience under extreme pressure.

Tickets are free but must be reserved through the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema website. Here’s a snapshot of what’s on offer.

A la calle (To the Street). Directed by Maxx Caicedo and Nelson G. Navarrete, 110 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles in English.

The economic crisis in Venezuela due to falling oil prices has lead to hunger, medical shortages, political violence and a refugee catastrophe. The film, shot over five years by Caicedo and Navarrete, focuses on the mismanagement and the progressively autocratic regime of Nicolás Maduro, and his refusal to acknowledge the extent of the problems or accept international aid. Kaleidoscopic in approach, the film follow multiple perspectives, including a young female medical student organizing Green Cross squads to treat protestors hurt in anti-Maduro demonstrations; a young barber feeding his family by trading haircuts for food; and grassroots activist Nelson Leal, who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime.

Another strand of the film follows political figures, including jailed opposition leader Leopold López, inspiring a political movement with video diaries from his cell, and Juan Guaidó, the leader of the National Assembly, who, following the fraudulent 2018 election, declared himself interim president and is recognized as such by 50 countries around the world. While A la calle is clearly on the side of the masses of anti-government demonstrators in the streets, it also shows politicians and crowds that support Maduro — who is seen as the legitimate heir to the socialist leader Hugo Chavez — whose death in 2013 coincided with the current crisis.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

I Am Samuel. Directed by Peter Murimi, 68 minutes, in English, Swahili, and Luyha with subtitles in English.

In May 2019, the Kenyan high court upheld anti-homosexual laws dating back to British rule. And though such laws are rarely enforced, they legitimize discrimination and anti-LBGTQ violence. Kenyan director Murimi’s film, shot over a five-year period, has moments both tender and shocking, and follows the personable young Samuel and his partner Alex as they seek to live together as a couple in Nairobi, at the same time negotiating his relationship with Samuel’s conservative father, a farmer and preacher, and his loving mother.

Máxima.

Máxima. Directed by Claudia Sparrow, 88 minutes, in English and Spanish with English subtitles.

Máxima Acuña, a diminutive, illiterate Peruvian subsistence farmer, has become a Latin American figurehead of local resistance against the ravages of international mining companies. In 1994, she and her husband bought a plot of land in the Peruvian highlands.

Over the past decade, she has fought a long war with a majority American-owned gold company that wants to evict her and create a giant open-pit mine near her home. Sparrow’s seven-years-long documentary, which was the winner of the 2019 Hot Docs audience award, follows Acuña’s war with the company, which has destroyed her home, attacked her family, poisoned the water, and manipulated the legal system. Nevertheless, Acuña has persisted through a series of court cases, winning international recognition, including the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Wake Up on Mars. Directed by Dea Gjinovci, 75 minutes, in Albanian and Swedish with English subtitles.

The subject of director Gjinovci’s film is a mysterious coma-like condition known as “resignation syndrome” that has afflicted hundreds of children of asylum seekers under threat of deportation, primarily in Sweden. Inspired by Rachel Avi’s 2017 New Yorker article, the film focuses on the family of two teenage sisters, Djeneta and Ibadeta Demiri, who spend the film lying on adjacent cots, tended by their parents and other caregivers. They are children of a Roma couple who fled violent persecution in Kosovo and whose asylum status hangs in the balance.

The family struggles to maintain a semblance of normalcy with the communal care provided by Swedish teachers, doctors, and social workers despite the government’s increasingly anti-refugee policies. The title alludes to a semi-fictional subplot about the youngest brother, Furkan, and his fantasy of building a spaceship from used car parts, to travel to Mars. Even more fantastic though, is the film’s postscript, and a real-life happy ending.

Love Child. Directed by Eva Mulvad, 112 minutes, in Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish, and English with English subtitles.

All refugee families are unique, as Mulvad’s six-year-long study of one Iranian refugee family reminds us. The film starts in 2012 with the escape of English teachers Sahand and Leila, along with their toddler son Mani, from their native Iran to Turkey, where they claim political asylum at customs. After taking menial jobs, they soon set up a semblance of a normal life in a suburban Istanbul highrise, while applying to emigrate to the United States.

But there’s a very large catch: Through a series of interviews conducted by Leila with an apparent therapist or social worker, we learn that the couple are not married, and Leila has a husband back in Iran. As well, Sahand was blackmailed into working with the secret police in Iran when he was a student. They would face imprisonment or death if they return, though the United Nations refugee system has no category for their predicament. Meanwhile, they are at the whim of world politics. The Turkish refugee system is overwhelmed by 3.5 million Syrians from that country’s civil war. In 2017, the U.S. government declares its ban on immigrants from Muslim countries. Sahand and Leila are more than examples or statistics. They are a real-life young couple with a child undergoing moments of frustration, bitter quarrels, and joy, in an episodic drama that could be called Scenes from a Refugee Marriage.