Part III Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, New York

Transcription

1 Part III Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, New York

2 Introduction The New York Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) in 1988 was the first human rights film festival anywhere in the world. The bringing of cinema and human rights together in the context of a film festival for the first time heralded a new discursive landscape, that is, a new way of encountering and speaking about films related to activism. Cinema and human rights may well have been linked in various ways and places prior to this time, but this was the first instance in which a film festival was used for this purpose. The inclusion of films within a film festival, to represent human rights issues, brought together two discourses, or languages, routines, and practices that had developed separately until then. Their coming together heralded an area of activism that had not occurred previously, one that would grow considerably over the next 26 years. As Helsinki Watch, newly renamed Human Rights Watch in 1988, set out to host the first human rights film festival in the world, the histories of the respective discourses collided and began to shape a new language and ways of engaging with films for activism. The location of the first festival, New York, cannot escape notice. This city hosts the headquarters of the UN, the most significant human rights institution. The United States is also where human rights have had one of the longest institutional histories (see chapter 1), and where the most globally influential cinema is located. This festival is, therefore, positioned within a unique and highly significant set of relationships to both human rights and to cinema, but also to film festival history as these were originally established to stall the rapid spread of Hollywood. This then places HRWIFF in New York 1 at the crossroads of an interesting set of discursive dimensions. Its origins in 1988 also cannot avoid notice, as they are directly connected to this festival in more ways than simply an era when major global events took place. I give presence to some of that history in the following chapters, but especially the history of HRW as the organization at whose behest and under whose aegis the festival originated. As the cultural arm of HRW, it certainly supported that organization in its fight on a new battleground, which was heralded as being waged in the cultural landscape. It is the longestrunning film festival of its kind, 2 with its origins in New York, although 125

3 126 Human Rights Film Festivals subsidiary film festivals now also take place in over 15 cities throughout the United States and Canada, London and Amsterdam, Nairobi and Beirut. Although it is a festival with a quite small number of permanent staff, three at the time of writing, and with insignificant volunteer staff assistance, it is backed by a large human rights organization, HRW, which was established in the mid-1970s. Its lengthy history and significant professional and institutional support have produced a highly organized festival that, since 1995, is held each year in the prestigious Lincoln Center in Manhattan, New York, which hosts major international music and other cultural events. I have used the concepts of absence/presence for this particular festival, as opposed to the thematic breakdown into sections used for Buenos Aires. This is primarily because there was little evidence in the available archival material that the festival had been divided thematically (except in a remnant website from 1997, when the festival had been divided into chapters ), and so in order to capture some patterning I decided on this alternative framework. But also due to the festival s expected alignment with its parent organization, I wanted to capture to what degree it did. That is, HRW follows a very clear pattern of looking out, and it only began to have a North America focus from I wanted to understand what the festival made present or absent in that expected orientation. What I found was almost a direct reversal of the HRW pattern and that while the larger proportion of films is about/ from outside North America, there is a significant presence given to the United States. This was surprising, given the history within which the festival was enmeshed, and so I then turned to the types of films used to portray the presences, and only one absence: Latin America. The extent to which the festival focuses on, or uses, its own national film industry was also a point of interest, as this aligns more closely to film festival discourse. In each festival, the mix between films from/ about elsewhere and from/about its place of exhibition is different. In the New York festival, the internationalization impulse is significant during the time period I have been able to cover, because many of the films portray issues outside of North America. This may not have always been the case, as archival material from the remnant website of mentioned above showed a significant number of films from/about the United States, most of them quite critical of its own government, as well as celebratory of its activists. If this has been a pattern from 1988, then it suggests a similar pattern to the Buenos Aires festival, where the focus on internal issues and the use of domestic independent political cinemas led to a more outwardly focusing gaze with time. It may also

4 Part III: Introduction 127 point to the significance of festival discourse in its emphasis on national cinemas. In this section, I would have liked to outline the festival as it has developed since its inception, but archival programming information could only be found since 2001, aside from the one instance in which films were screened in , as mentioned. At the time I began searching, in 2011, I managed to find programming information online from 2001, which has now disappeared. The official HRWIFF website now only has programming since Some information on the festival appears in HRW s Annual Reports, regularly included in the reports since 1994, but this is general and quite scant. I have used what little is given in the reports to supplement the more substantial film programming material provided by the festival website, although I have done so in order to provide historical information that is not available elsewhere. Given that the festival does not appear to have been subdivided thematically for the period on which I have had to focus primarily or at least as evidenced in the archival material available 3 for analytical purposes, I will separate the programming according to the content of the films as they refer to a geographical region, that is, not necessarily according to where the films were produced, but the country/region that the film is about. I have taken this approach for two reasons: it mirrors the way that HRW, the festival s parent organization, organizes its own work, and it enables me to consider the direction in which the festival is looking, at least since As mentioned, I have done this through a process of analysis through the concept of absence/presence, looking at the relative number of films at the festival from/about a particular region. I classified the regions in the same way as HRW, that is, mostly by continent, but sometimes as a particular section of a continent, such as the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Some of these regions have a greater presence in the festival s programming than others, and I will take into account all of the major presences as I found them, namely, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. I will only analyze one of the festival s absences Latin America although there were others I noted, namely, Africa, Asia, and Western Europe. These are all relative absences, as all of these regions, except Western Europe, have received increasing attention more recently. For example, in one year, 2001, there were no films about/from Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the festival took place before September 11, so this cannot be the reason for the gap), and in 2002, there is one film about Indonesia, two from/about Latin America, and none from/about Africa. I decided to focus only on Latin America for a number of reasons. The first

5 128 Human Rights Film Festivals had to do with the fact that the other film festival I studied was from that region, thus enabling a form of comparison, even if this book has not set out to be a comparative study. Another concerns the proximity of the region, and how logical it seemed that audiences would show interest in a region so close to them; hence, the lack seemed oddly out of place. Another has to do with the number of Latinos in the United States in general, which is growing exponentially, and their uncertain position in the United States because a great number of them are illegals. As a seriously affected population and with diminished power politically in the United States, it also became important to find out what might have led to this (relative) lack of interest in the immigrants region of origin. This was also a curiosity for me, given that my explanation for the ongoing focus on the Middle East has been the large Jewish population in New York; many of the films have centered on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Furthermore, what little Latin American content there is tends to focus on the continuing legal work of bringing dictatorships of the past to account. This approach, however, reduces the complexity of the region to a past that, while significant, does not take into consideration the full range of issues being faced there or their productive treatment domestically. Mexico is the only Latin American country that receives the more complex attention. Latin America has substantial and recently re-flourishing national cinemas, some of which have been acknowledged by the HRWIFF, for example, in a retrospective of Fernando (Pino) Solanas work in 1993, as reported in HRW s Annual Report (HRW 2014a). Many of the films from those cinemas have represented the region in more complex and diverse ways. Therefore, it is puzzling that not more films from those cinemas were included in the festival. The 1997 remnant website, as I now call it, however, sheds important light on this (relative) lack. The story may not be as simple as the neglect of the region, but perhaps has more to do with the fact that films in a HRFF tend to be about violations of human rights (see more in chapter 10). HRW is the host organization for the festival, and the screenings claim to reflect that work, although this does not strictly occur in practice. HRW s mandate is to watch human rights violations throughout the globe, and to this end they have divided their work into monitoring various parts of the world, primarily Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. HRWIFF follows different patterns. This suggests that the festival itself trails HRW s work to some degree, but may also be influenced by other factors outside the parent organization s work, including local audiences interests, film availability, or festival staff s own leanings. The latter can be seen in action

6 Part III: Introduction 129 in the inclusion of the films of Costa-Gavras. In an interview with past festival organizer and programmer Marina Kaufman, I was given to understand that she and others had considered Costa-Gavras films as representing something significant for the festival. His film Missing (1982) opened the first festival in 1988, and many of his films have been screened at the festival over the years. In 2007, furthermore, he was made a member of the Paris Committee, a subsidiary branch of HRW, when it opened there. Because of his apparent (founding) status at the festival, I include a short analysis of some of his films screened at the festival, particularly Missing and Mon Colonel, as they both refer to Latin America in different ways. In the chapter in which I cover the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, I will also include a discussion of two filmmakers, Costa-Gavras and Pamela Yates. As their films have been used to represent Latin America to some degree, their presence relates to the question about the relative lack of films from Latin American filmmakers. The absence/presence interplay may be a manifestation of the humanitarian gaze discussed in chapter 2, which permits some to look and some to be looked at in particular ways, what Jane Gaines calls looking relations (1986). But it is more complex than that as well, as an absence may not point to a disinterest, or a presence to a surveillance of that place. While Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia appear and disappear from view at the festival, Western Europe and the United States absence/presence occurs for quite different reasons. The difference will become apparent when I begin to discuss the sorts of films that are screened for the regions I cover, and the relationship to geopolitical power that this represents. What is important to note in the absence/presence patterns is not so much whether, and how many, films about these regions are present the numbers simply point to an interest in that area but also the type of films the festival uses to characterize that region s relationship to human rights. The direction of the gaze is, after all, not only permission to look at someone/something (without necessarily the commensurate right to return the gaze), but a way of organizing what and how that looking can take place. Human rights discourse requests an internationalizing gaze, outwardly seeking, while film festival discourse, in part at least, pursues the conservation of local structures of production and/or exhibition. That is, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2, human rights discourse positions those working within its purview toward an internationalizing focus, while film festival discourse, in part, demands attention to national cinemas. These two impulses act in different measure within each place, and this rests

7 130 Human Rights Film Festivals on a number of factors, mostly having to do with each place s particular relationship to and history of each of the discourses. In the United States, home to HRW and its predecessor, Helsinki Watch, human rights have had the longest institutionalized history. The American Revolution predates the French Revolution, both of which produced substantial documents outlining citizens rights. The Bill of Rights, ratified in December 1789, included fundamental additions and modifications to the U.S. Constitution, with legal ramifications beyond the more aspirational tone of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, also produced in In this sense, the United States has owned human rights for a considerable time; human rights enabled the forging of a new nation independent of its colonial past. This (essentially Lockean) construction of human rights must, to a large degree, be equated with freedom, as it provided the moral and legal justification for the colonies breaking away from Britain, and both freedom and human rights have become significant, intertwined, founding national narratives. Human rights, therefore, may in themselves be a statement of national pride and a significant discourse in the United States, which reduces the nationalizing requirement of festival discourse to use national cinemas. Film festivals, therefore, in this context, become merely the conduit for expanding on a nationalist agenda through the internationalizing impulse of human rights. The pro-national cinema agenda of film festival discourse is, in this way, unnecessary here because it is already subsumed within a discursive regime that is intrinsically theirs. This produces a gaze that turns outward because human rights are already marked as natural to them, while others activities prove that they do not yet own human rights. In what follows, I have divided the chapters into Context and Festival, the same as for Part II, although here, as mentioned, I have organized them through the concepts of Absence and Presence. The programming has been my primary means for identifying these patterns, and this is then located within a much broader ideological field and geopolitical relations, in which human rights have been deeply imbricated. For this reason, much of the first Context chapter will be taken up with describing the politics of an earlier time, when HRW was Helsinki Watch, as this helps explain the insistent focus on Eastern Europe that has been maintained by the festival. It is a focus that cannot be explained otherwise and that also reconnects the festival to an ideological war that has never disappeared, although it has changed: that between East and West, and socialism versus liberalism. That history is significant, as the festival emerged at the apex of what Francis Fukuyama

8 Part III: Introduction 131 called the end of history, and that time has had as much of an influence on the festival as it had on the origins of HRW as Helsinki Watch in This took place at the festival not as a way of reinforcing the triumphalism of Western liberalism that is apparent in Fukuyama s claim, but in some ways of acting as a corrective for that pronouncement. The Human Rights Watch International Festival is, indeed, a complex festival event that has straddled some significant histories and discourses, and what I am about to discuss is but a small element of its story.