The Human Rights Watch Film Festival Explores Social Justice
The compelling documentaries that opened and closed the festival were valuable, coolheaded explorations of America’s racially charged climate. In an atmosphere poisoned by fear, mistrust and inflammatory rhetoric, the films provide calm, reasoned assessments of roiling tensions that are not about to subside. These and other serious documentaries are all the more welcome because they arrive at the start of Hollywood’s silly season, when the pickings are slim for thoughtful films about thorny issues. Many of these selections have been shown in previous festivals, but the agglomeration of so many hard-hitting films speaks for itself.
In its global perspective and commitment to showcasing work about social justice, the festival — presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, with screenings in both locations — is arguably New York’s most important annual film series, even though its commercial impact is minuscule.
At a time when relations between the police and African-Americans around the country seem strained to the breaking point, Marc Silver’s “3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets,” the opening-night selection, and Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” the closing-night movie on June 21, tell interlocking stories. Although more than four decades separate the events they trace, there is a connection between what happened in the 1960s, when cities exploded in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and today’s discord.
Mr. Silver’s film, which also screened at Sundance, and opened theatrically on June 19, explores the 2012 shooting death of Jordan Davis, an unarmed 17-year-old black teenager at a Florida gas station. Mr. Nelson’s film is a history of the Black Panther Party, culminating with the killing of its leader, Fred Hampton, in a Chicago police raid.
Mr. Hampton’s death, ruled a justifiable homicide, capped a relentless campaign initiated by the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover to destroy the Black Panthers, an outgrowth of the ’60s black power movement. In Mr. Hampton, Hoover saw the embodiment of his worst nightmare: a charismatic “messiah” who could catalyze a race war.
The film demystifies an organization that paid a steep price for cultivating an aura of dangerous glamour. Among the surprising facts revealed is that a majority of the Black Panther rank-and-file were women. The organization ran community outreach programs in its home base of Oakland, Calif., one of which served breakfast daily to thousands of poor black schoolchildren.
The Black Panthers conspicuously carried arms for self-defense and struck an ominous military posture. The movie implies that until Hoover carried out his campaign to destroy them, much of their rhetoric was theatrical bravado. In a paranoid culture, bravado is too easily misunderstood. The shooting of Mr. Davis belongs to a lengthening list of black male casualties that includes Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, whose behavior was misread.
At his murder trial, which ended with a deadlocked jury, Mr. Dunn testified that he believed that Mr. Davis had a gun. That he acted as boldly as he did reflected recent stand-your-ground laws that authorize people to defend themselves against a threat or a perceived threat. The operative word is “perceived.” Subsequently retried, Mr. Dunn was convicted of premeditated murder.
Much of the film observes Mr. Dunn’s initial trial. Speaking of perceived perception, one young man muses that the term “thug,” which Mr. Dunn used, has become a code word for an offensive racial epithet.
The festival’s mission is to challenge the status quo, its creative director, John Biaggi, has said, citing, as another example, Joey Boink’s documentary, “Burden of Peace,” a portrait of Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s first female attorney general. Ms. Paz successfully prosecutedthe country’s former dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the Army massacre of nearly 200,000 Mayan Guatemalans in 1982-83, but the verdict was overturned. A scheduled retrial has been postponed indefinitely.
On a different theme, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s “Of Men and War,” which was first shown last year at Cannes, is as anguished a film as I’ve seen about American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder. Life for the dozen male veterans filmed during therapy sessions at the Pathway Home, a residential treatment center in California, is a waking nightmare of uncontrollable anger and fear. Their agony makes you shudder at the realization of the underlying fragility of even the toughest among us.
The festival’s masterpiece, Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence,” is also its darkest. The documentary, originally shown at last year’s New York Film Festival, is a companion piece to the director’s 2013 film, “The Act of Killing,” in which the Indonesian perpetrators of the mass execution of a million supposed Communists in 1965, gleefully re-enacted their crimes.
“The Look of Silence” focuses on Adi, a young optometrist whose older brother was savagely murdered. Fifty years later, the killers are still in power. Adi interviews local bigwigs while giving them eye exams and pressures them to take responsibility for their actions. Their responses range from blasé to mildly threatening. Two of them congratulate themselves for not going crazy after the killings, because they drank their victims’ blood. Ah, humanity.
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The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, dedicated to defending and protecting human rights, has screened in over 20 cities around the world throughout the years. In 2015 the festival screened in Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, D. C. and New York. The New York festival ran through June 21.
"3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets" opened theatrically in New York on June 19th. Watch your local listings for screenings of many of these films over coming months.
[Stephen Holden is a film and music critic for The New York Times. He was a pop music critic and journalist for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and The Ballad of John and Yoko.]