Nothing casts a sharper focus on the human cost of terrorism than an examination of its impact on a single family. In Pete Travis' film Omagh, the Gallaghers, who live in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh, are devastated when a car bomb explodes in August 1998 in the center of town, killing more than two dozen people, including their son, Aiden.
The docudrama, which was to open the 16th annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater in New York yesterday, is so skillfully assembled and powerfully acted that fiction merges with reality.
Responsibility for the bombing was claimed by dissident Irish Republican Army members, who call themselves the Real IRA.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
They were determined to disrupt the peace process that began four months earlier with the signing of the Good Friday peace accords.
Weeks after the bombing, Aiden's father, Michael (Gerard McSorley), a mild-mannered auto mechanic, becomes chairman of a support group for the victims' families.
he presses for an investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators, he is awakened to the painful realities of police incompetence, foot-dragging, coverups and poor communication between investigative agencies. The resemblance between these events and the revelations of the mistakes and confusion surrounding 9/11 is inescapable.
Omagh exemplifies a principle guiding the selection of films in the festival, which is showing 26 movies from 20 countries through June 13. Most of these films view the struggles of ordinary people waging uphill battles against social, political and economic forces beyond their control from a ground-level perspective. The individual counts.
David Redmon's punchy documentary critique of globalization, Mardi Gras: Made in China, looks at the conditions in a factory in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, where young workers, mostly women, are paid US$1.20 a day to work 14- to 20-hour shifts in enforced silence making the beads showered onto revelers in New Orleans in exchange for baring their breasts at Mardi Gras.
The Chinese factory owner, who sees himself as a good guy and model manager, boasts of the punishments he exacts in wages from the workers toiling in sweatshop conditions when they don't meet their quotas. In a nifty turnabout, the filmmaker asks the revelers if they know where the beads come from. They don't, of course, and even when told, few seem to care. When he also shows the Chinese workers pictures of how the beads are used, they giggle in embarrassment.
The 15-year-old subject of the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox is a brave, smart, independent high-school-age crusader for sex education in Lubbock, Texas, a city that has one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers in the country. Because the local high schools teach abstinence as the only safe sex, Shelby's efforts are tolerated only to a point by the city's conservative, Christian political establishment.
The movie is a pungent civics lesson on what can and cannot be accomplished by one plucky, idealistic girl.
Margaret Loescher's Pulled From the Rubble, filmed and narrated by its creator, is an intimate, inspiring portrait of courage and resilience. On Aug. 19, 2003, her father, Gil Loescher, an expert on refugee issues, was attending a meeting at the UN headquarters in Baghdad when a truck packed with explosives destroyed the building and killed everyone at the meeting but him. The movie is his daughter's journal of his recovery after losing both legs above the knee and much of his right hand. He subsequently learned to walk with prosthetic legs; he has said that the explosion was the beginning, not the end, of his life.
That spirit, challenged but undefeated, goes to the essence of the Human Rights Watch Festival. At a moment in film history when documentaries and docudramas have shown signs of moving closer to the forefront of international cinema, this invaluable festival is helping show the way.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
On May 2, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), at a meeting in support of Taipei city councilors at party headquarters, compared President William Lai (賴清德) to Hitler. Chu claimed that unlike any other democracy worldwide in history, no other leader was rooting out opposing parties like Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). That his statements are wildly inaccurate was not the point. It was a rallying cry, not a history lesson. This was intentional to provoke the international diplomatic community into a response, which was promptly provided. Both the German and Israeli offices issued statements on Facebook
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
RSS