My Log 446 Oct 23 2014: Two excellent films from opposite sides of the Separation Wall, reveal the twisted nature of Palestinian society under the probing of their Israeli conquerers

The brutal, convoluted, only partially human life that has been imposed on Palestinians by the Israeli

occupation of their homeland has been graphically illustrated in the two films, one Palestinian, one Israeli, which were nominated earlier this year for the best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. I caught up with them this week, grace a Netflix.

The better of the two is Omar, directed, conceived and written by Hany Abu-Assad, an experienced Palestinian filmmaker, who has told of how he conceived the idea of the film in one night, wrote it in the following four days, and over a year managed to put together the two million dollars he needed for filming, 95 per cent of it from Palestinian investors.

On the surface this is a heart-breaking love story, but at a deeper level it is a story of the intrigues, lies, dissimulations and treacheries that have become the warp and woof of Palestinian life.  As is obvious to anyone who has watched from afar the agonizing and virtually ceaseless attacks on Palestinians, the Israelis have an incredible network of informers among their adversaries: otherwise how would they know which cars to attack, which houses, which cafes, when they make their many targeted assassinations?  One of the most chilling of the many horrendous sequences shown on TV during the recent onslaught on Gaza came when we were shown the exact spot at which multiple executions of informers had been carried out by Palestinian activists, leaving tell-tale splotches of blood on the cobblestones.

This system of intrigue is the subject of both the Palestinian film, Omar,  and Bethlehem, the Israeli version of a very similar story. The love story in the Palestinian film is between Omar, a good-looking, typically Arabic-looking boy, played with notable intensity by Adam Bakri, and Nadia, a fresh-faced, pretty little girl played fetchingly by Leem  Lubany. Omar is in the habit of scaling the Wall, the horrendous Israeli-erected barricade that separates the residents of the particular village the two principals live in, and fetching up outside her window to carry on his courtship in  time-honored fashion. He has to be careful, because the Israeli police are constantly cruising in their vehicles, and might catch him in the act, but also because Nadia has three brothers, the elder of whom, Tarek,  is a major freedom activist who is looking out for the welfare of his sister with an intensity that matches that of her prospective lover. Omar and Tarek are boyhood friends who, along with a third friend Amjad,  have been taking target practice with their rifle. Eventually they set themselves up to take out an Israeli policeman with a long-distance shot, which they do. They are hotly pursued, and Omar is arrested, tortured by an Israeli agent, played with intriguing attraction by Waleed Zuaiter, (an American-born Palestinian who helped raise money for the film) who releases Omar for a month on the promise that he will hunt for  Tarek, and help to turn him in. Of course, Omar has no intention of betraying his friends, but rather is plotting to turn the tables on the Israelis, a feat that proves to be rather beyond him.

Omar’s acquaintances in the Palestinian town begin to ask, how come he has been released so early? Is it possible that Omar is the traitor whom they know to lurk among them? This is the evil, this impossibility to trust anyone, that lies at the base of Palestinian life, according to this brilliant film. At the end of the month, when there is no sign of Tarek, the Israelis again chase and arrest Omar, again torture him, again, reluctantly (according to them) release him as a means of “giving him another chance.”

This time, the three boys are planning an ambush of the Israelis when they come to collect Tarek: but once again their plan goes wrong. Tarek is accidentally shot dead as the three quarrel over their relationship with Nadia and his body is  delivered to the Israelis. This earns Omar favor with the Israelis, but in the street  it deepens the doubts about Omar's loyalty to the cause.

Another scary aspect of the Palestinian life touched on in the film is that they know all about Omar and his visits to Nadia, and use that knowledge to drive a wedge between the friends. 

The film has a sensational denouement, not a happy one from Omar’s point of view, but one that the audience can sense has been forced on him by the events of his life, so much of which has been controlled by the knowledge gathered of the Palestinians and their daily lives by Israeli agents.

A similar tale is told in the Israeli film, Bethlehem, another film illustrating the depth with which Israeli agents are able to penetrate the very private secrets of Palestinian life, a penetration achieved because of the intense level at which they interfere with the subjects under their command.  The picture given by these brutally realistic films of  Palestinian life shows  their society to be one twisted beyond measure by the hostile, dedicated and fanatical power that is controlling them from such close quarters, and that affects their every movement as citizens of their non-country.  This is a  melancholy picture, indeed, yet illustrating the immense courage Palestinians require if they are to maintain their self-respect under the pressures on them.

My Log 446 Oct 21 2014: Provocative film at Cinema Politica Concordia reveals the rapid growth of a surveillance state and the many dangers that lie therein

English: Maher Arar campaign button for the Security With Human Rights campaign of Amnesty International, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They know everything worth knowing about YOU! Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Cinema Politica Concordia is well into its new season, having so far shown six films --- five of which I missed --- of the fifteen planned by the end of December. These earlier films seem to have tended towards more personal issues, such as disabilities, violence towards women, and the revival of burlesque theatre, but CP hit what I might call their full, missionary stride with last week’s film by local cineaste Harold Brooks, a man who goes after the big issues, and whose film The Price We Pay, is described in the publicity material as “a searing indictment of corporate greed and malfeasance.”

I am sorry I missed that one, but his week’s offering carried on the Big Issues theme with an absorbing documentary  by an Argentinian director, Juan Manuel Biain, called Article 12: Waking Up  in a Surveillance Society. This is one of those ill-defined problems that confront the human race --- climate change, poverty, and the pressure of human populations on the Earth’s finite resources  are others ---- all of which are  central to the future of every human on the planet. All of these have in common that they have crept up on us almost by osmosis, so silently that they have not yet awakened most of us to their long-term threat.

Biain’s film was completed in 2010, a co-production of the director’s company Junco, and the London-based DocFactory, and they have been busy showing it around at special events, conferences and the like ever since. Nothing in it has been made irrelevant with the passing of four years: the only major change has been that thanks to the work of Julien Assange, Chelsea Manning and, pre-eminently of Edward Snowden, the scale of information gathered by today’s all-powerful States has been  made public for the first time, and has slowly begun to throw tremors of shock into our complacent populations.

As Biain says on his Web site: “In the West…the public doesn’t have any fear or connection with any kind of negative consequences since the end of WW2….The only connection they have is that it will make them safe.” That is not true of Argentina, where a brutal military government not so long ago violated every possible human right. So to the director, this is not a theoretical discussion.

But, he adds, “advances in technology are leading to greater use of surveillance….At the moment technology is leading us. How far do we allow this trend to develop without our consent? To what extent can we live our lives under these new forms of surveillance and government? ….Can we continue to build a safe and secure society without undermining our civil liberties? And if so, how?”

That is the dilemma investigated in this provocative film, which, I have to say, first of all, struck me as being an amazing work of research. Some 64 global experts in philosophy, privacy law, cryptography, defence analysis, hacking, political activism and many other disciplines were interviewed, and their views melded together brilliantly by editor Guillermo Nieto to present a complete picture. The message is clear: this trend has already gone far enough, and should be brought to a halt. As one of the interviewees said: in these days no one can communicate anything to anyone, by any means, with any assurance that the information therein will not be gathered by the authorities, and possibly used against you, or someone else, if the State chooses. People like myself, who communicate something to someone every day of my life, my main means now being e-mail, continue to believe that, since we are not doing anything wrong, we should be safe: it doesn’t always work out that way.

While the film was running I kept thinking about the four Canadians of Middle Eastern origin who were either handed over by the Canadian authorities to the United States, who quickly transferred them to Syria for torturing, or were detained directly by Syria on visits back to their native land, where they were imprisoned for several years. These four, Mahar Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmed El Maati, are now back in Canada, but only Arar has succeeded in winning compensation for the wrong done him. Their cases illustrate that information gathered by one government can be, and is, handed on to other governments who can make what use they wish of it. And these cases have illustrated also how very reluctant governments are to admit to error.  

In another case, Abousfian Abdelrazik visited his mother in Sudan, was tortured and interrogated by the local government, which eventually decided there was no reason to hold him, and thereafter was held in Sudan for years because the Canadian government would not give him the papers he needed to travel. They went to amazing lengths to avoid facing the obvious, even refusing to honour a ticket bought for him by the contributions of Canadians, and resisted until forced by a judgment of a Canadian court to bring  him home.   Once he arrived back, they began to make his life impossible ---- no charges were ever laid against this man --- by freezing his assets, refusing him help to get his name off a UN no-fly list, and other measures. In other words, even in Canada, this question of the powers governments gain through their collection of information about their citizens is no theoretical matter. That the information gathered is very often wrong is almost beside the point: if privacy is to be respected, governments have no right to most of this information.

One other interviewee said it had been established that high schools in the United States had handed over information about their pupils to the government, a direct violation of the right to privacy that once was taken as part of one’s heritage as citizen of a free country.

That citizens are becoming inflamed about this and other matters dealing with their relationships with the power structure is shown by coming films in the CP schedule which deals with rebellions around the world, the uses and misuses of violence, attacks on minority peoples and secret trials of so-called dissidents.

Biain’s film was built around Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document passed in 1948 which bore considerable input from Canadian diplomats. That article reads:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Canadians should know, almost above other people in the world, that this Declaration has played a formative role in measures taken in the 1950s and 1960s that first eliminated discrimination shown against minorities of various kinds, then established many new rights for citizens both at work and in their ordinary lives. It is because of the Declaration that Canada is called to account for its behaviour on human rights, particularly towards its indigenous people, a matter of embarrassment to our government that they would, I am sure, rather avoid if possible.

But the message of this film is that the current collection of detailed knowledge about every citizen goes far beyond what anyone imagined it could, just a few years ago. This is one of the dangers of a technology that in these days is running out of human control, a danger that many distinguished Canadians have warned about --- one I have personal knowledge of is the late Professor Bruce Trigger, of McGill University, who warned of this in a prescient lecture he gave on Archaeology and the Future many years ago.

It was disappointing that last night no one was available to lead the audience in a discussion of the issues, because this is one issue that really needs to be ventilated to the general public at every opportunity.

My Log 444 October 13, 2014: A remarkable Ethiopian film matches enlightenment against hide-bound tradition: a fine entry in the Festival du Nouveau Cinema

View of Addis Ababa, seen as the seat of  enlightenment in a new Ethiopian film (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the venerable (42-year-old) Festival du Nouveau Cinema underway in Montreal, screening 30 films a day with a total of more than 430 entrants, I have so far managed to see two films, from Spain and Ethiopia, both of which have dealt with the problems in the modern world of young women. In my opinion, the Ethiopian film, Difret,(the word means Courage, or To Dare, but can also mean Rape) only the fourth film from that country ever to be shot in 35 mm, is an exceptionally gut-wrenching drama, acted with impressive authenticity by a team of what seems to be largely unprofessional actors, and one which provides a model for any film dealing with a particular incident in that it keeps its focus from beginning to end on the incident in question. Director Zeresenay Berhane Mehari has not devoted a  shot or sequence that seems to be  irrelevant to the telling of his story, and the force with which its dialogue is expressed builds up a nightmarish situation in which a young woman is trapped by what appears to be an ancient, and very troubling tradition.

A 14-year-old girl, Hirut, walking home from her school, where she has just been promoted to a higher grade, is surrounded by a group of violent young horsemen, who kidnap her, take her to a house where they beat and rape her, and where her main attacker claims to be in the process of finding a wife by the method --- abduction --- that is traditional in their community.

The girl, of course, is terrified by what has happened to her, but, when her tormentor is suddenly called away, and leaves his rifle behind, she has the courage to seize the rifle and run away. She is chased, and when her captors catch her she carries out her threat and shoots her attacker and prospective husband dead. This is a crime punishable in the local morality only with death, and when Hirut is handed over to police  and the local District Attorney, her prospects for survival seem even more remote, as each of  them shows themselves to be completely accepting of the traditional mores.

A volunteer group of women lawyers in Addis Ababa hears of the case, and one of them, played with riveting intensity by a well-known Ethiopian actress, Meron Getnet. turns up as counsel for the defence, but her application to pay the girl’s bail is rejected, because, the police sergeant says, “this girl is not going to get bail,” or words to that effect. But, says the lawyer,  that is the law, and if there is a law, it has to be administered. The lawyer has to retreat, but she gets in touch with an elderly retired man of her acquaintance who has been a judge, and he agrees to intervene and ensure the girl is at least given bail.

The girl has two trials to undergo: the first is that of the village elders, shown with an amazingly concentrated ferocity as they meet under a tree, and come to the conclusion to delay application of the traditional death penalty, since the girl is now in police hands and facing a legal trial. Hirut’s elder sister had been a promising runner, but she had been abducted in exactly this way, and had become the wife of a drunk, with four children binding her to the traditional feminine role of household drudge. The lawyer discovers that Hirut’s younger sister, following Hirut’s abduction, has been withdrawn from school so that she could look after the animals and help with the farmwork. The lawyer has to obtain the father’s signature before she can get any authority in the case, but the father can neither read nor write, and there is an affecting scene where he agrees to sign with his thumbprint.

In an effort to help her young sister the girl runs away, but is caught by the police and returned before a howling mob of traditionalists braying for her death. Meantime, much to the dismay of her supporters, the woman lawyer, having been rebuffed by a lower court, decides to sue the Minister for Justice, who promptly disbars the association of women lawyers, and declares that the young woman no longer has authority to represent the victim.

The story comes to a happy conclusion: it is apparently based on a true story, one in which a similar case led to a change in the law in Ethiopia, banning abduction in these circumstances.

The film effectively uses the contrast between the city, seat of education and at least moderate enlightenment, and the hard-pressed countryside, full of impoverished and uneducated and tradition-bound farmers. The film’s story is as much about the battle for justice waged by the women lawyers as by the fight to free this young kid. I found that this film in the Amharic language of the country (which, on this evidence, seems to be a forceful and dynamic language) has an astonishing  intensity that never lifts from the first moments to the last. It is one of the candidates for next year’s Academy Awards, for which 83 countries have submitted films in the foreign language category. I would say this film  must have a chance of becoming at least one of the nine finalists, to be chosen in January. It is certainly much better than Canada’s entry, Mommy, by Quebec wunderkind Xavier Dolan.

The second film I have seen so far is called Hermosa Juventud (Beautiful Youth) a bittersweet Spanish film by director Jaime Rosales, about a young couple, lacking significant education, trapped by the recent desperate state of the Spanish economy, who can think of only one way to get some money, which is to collaborate in appearing in a pornographic film. Their state of mind is something that seems to be typical of youths of this sort almost everywhere these days --- aimless, disinterested in anything much, drifting, unemployed and virtually unemployable, and without the moral fibre or understanding of themselves, or the resources,  to pull themselves up, as it were, by their bootstraps. Eventually the girl gets pregnant, and decides to keep the child, who becomes at once their most prized possession, and a weight around their neck that further diminishes their prospects in life. The girl decides she will leave her husband and child to try her luck in Germany, where she is shown to have no more luck than in the beginning of the film. This is a less involving film, perhaps because one’s sympathy for this aimless couple is somewhat attenuated, and the telling of the tale in no way matches the intensity shown in the Ethiopian film.

Still, these two films, taken together constitute a powerful indictment of how capitalism in these days of inequality is failing to provide the good life that used to be promised for the future that is now upon us.

My Log 443 Oct 1 2014: Cinema Politica in dangerous territory: it produces a book, full of good and bad stuff, about documentary film activism

Hall Building and McConnell Library Building,  Concordia University, Montreal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Screening Truth to Power: a reader on Documentary Activism, edited by Svetla Turnin and Ezra Winton, published by Cinema Politica, Montreal, 2014. Pps 208.

What to write about this book? The question has been gnawing away at me for some months, and I still haven’t come to a decent conclusion. At first I thought I would content myself with a few mild criticisms of its title, which is actually the slogan of the remarkable documentary network created, organized and run by the two authors in Concordia University, Montreal.  To me, the title has about it a whiff of smugness, even  a touch of self-satisfaction, and maybe even of delusion. I have heard the title or variations of it for some years. I worked for some time in the Challenge for Change programme at the National Film Board, many of whose members gave themselves the inaccurate conceit that they were screening truth to power. As someone said to me years later, “The programme  was based on the idea that if only the government knew what was going on out there, they would do something about it” --- a slight inaccuracy, to be kind.  Not quite screening truth to power.

However, I decided not to pursue that line because of my great enthusiasm for the work done by Svetla and Ezra, the immense success Cinema Politica has achieved, and the great inspiration given by their weekly series of documentaries that have drawn consistently large crowds for ten years, meanwhile  spreading their message to more than 90 affiliates in Canada and other countries around the world.  I know this admiration isn’t an adequate reason not to offer criticism, but why knock them when they are doing such great work?

Then I thought well, I will read the introduction written by Ezra and Svetla under the title Encounters with Documentary Activism, a special branch of documentary-making that seems to be so established that they even dared to playfully invent a word for it: doctivism. But here again I ran up against another obsession of mine which, like my scepticism of their title, arises from my experience: I have a deep, deep scunner on academic language, and to my great surprise (for I know Ezra to be a down-to-earth kind of guy) their introduction was peppered with academic circumlocutions of the kind that I believe any text on any subject can well do without. Determined, in spite of all this, to be friendly, I thought over their enthusiasm for documentary activism which suggests that it is not really enough to make documentaries, and that only the film-maker determined to change the world should be classified as really serious. Since my view is rather that any film-maker who believes he can change the world is somewhat deluded, or has a messianic misunderstanding of his or her place in the universe, I have to feel that the emphasis on activism is a little overcooked, just like their slogan and title.

I looked through the book, came upon a closing essay that looked as if it might give me something to hang a piece on: but, whoa there boy! This author, Darrell Varga, described as the Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at some university or other known to the editors of this book as NSCAD, so evidently a place familiar to everyone that they didn’t feel the need to spell it out, this man has been severely bitten by the academic language bug.  His opening explanatory paragraph was so convolute that I should have given up right there. But, gamely, I pressed on to para two where I read that, quoting the recently deceased British sociologist Stuart Hall, whom I remember from the 1960s as a brilliant speaker, but not one who ever made a joke (like almost all the intellectual leaders of the Left), that it was clear that “the usefulness of theory is not in providing us with a determinist script but with the tools to understand the forces of power, language and ideology under which struggle is written, and that this process takes place on what he (Hall) called a ‘determinacy without guaranteed closures.’ ”

Hold on a minute or two while I try to get hold of that. A page or two further on I read Varga’s description of a photographer whose “images are of the places where the limits of expression are calculated, aided by the privatization of information as data-commodity for the financialization of what, in another view, could be seen as the public commons of online media.” Wow, really? And this guy is a teacher?  I’m not saying it means nothing: just that I am not on the wavelength, I guess.

Okay, I give up. I can report, however that not all contributors write as if they had a shovel up their arse. There is a very interesting piece by a Palestinian-Swedish filmmaker Lina  Makboul about a film she made on the career of Leila Khaled, who will be remembered as the hi-jacker of a TWA plane in 1969, an action carried out for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and who remains a great hero to the Palestinian people.

I was pleased to see from Shannon Walsh, an internationally-known documentarist, a penetrating analysis of the assumptions of Participatory Video (PV, as it is called by the insiders), which, she says, really originated with the Challenge for Change programme at the NFB in the early days of the hand-held video. The video-makers believed that by putting the instrument into the hands of challenged people, allowing them to speaking for themselves, was a step towards a changed society. “There is an implicit naivety in much PV philosophy,” writes Walsh “…... It implicitly implies that once the decision-makers realize, for example that farmers are being forced off their land and into precarious conditions for the development of carbon credits, or for mineral extraction, these practises will stop. The liberal ideology that each one is entitled to a set of rights and must just go and take them is a dangerous, yet convenient lie.” This is good stuff. I remember cupboards full of videos at the NFB made by inexpert citizens that no one would ever want to watch again. But the video-makers of that time did produce a slick, persuasive quarterly journal they distributed around the world describing their new  video revolution. This attracted many people from abroad to sit at their feet, and I recall many who were disappointed at a reality that fell short of the promise.

Thomas Waugh and Liz Miller, film teachers at Concordia, in their piece use more straightforward language to discuss ways of seeing films. They come out solidly for screening documentaries to actual people, gathered in actual halls. “Previous generations of makers and activists have sometimes been sidetracked by the fantasy of theatrical exhibition or broadcast or cable, but Cinema Politica is showing in the digital age that audiences in the flesh, filling targeted non-commercial spaces, that is, bottoms in seats (and hearts and brains) are still the bottom line.” (It is an odd expression: I would suppose bottoms in seats more or less have to be the bottom line, whatever that means.)

Winton and Turnin produce in their piece the idea of the four Ps: producers, publics, programming, and the politics of presence, none of which, they write in a slight touch of the obvious, Cinema Politica could do without.  They also quote the late Peter Wintonick as saying that documentary makers should take “the poverty oath” in order to retain an uncompromised point of view, and independence from systems under critical scrutiny. This strikes me as a strange idea: how about the guy with four kids and a wife who wants to make honest documentaries, but needs something to keep his family alive? Is he disqualified because he makes enough to live on? I guess this comes as one of the tenets of doctivism, which could be the subject of a more complete analysis in another book, hopefully one shorn of academic language.

There are some interesting lists of films compiled by various film-makers and theorists at the request of the editors, but it remains that in addition to celebrating the ten years of Cinema Politica activity, this book tends rather to the sort of navel-gazing that is so  common, and so tedious, among academics.

I thought perhaps in this piece, finally, I might join the various contributors by putting in my own five cents worth to the discussion. I have had the experience of working in the media in many of the forms that were extant in my years of activity --- I know nothing about all these new technologies, and doubt that I could handle them --- but I have some basis for judging the efficacy of the documentary film, compared with a TV programme, a book, or a newspaper or journal article.  In twenty-five years as a daily journalist I could never deny that the newspapers had a lot of influence on society, but the individual journalists, no matter how prominent they might be, had little if any influence on anything or anybody. 

When I finally got to making films (in my forties by this time) I tended to regard films as a weapon to be used in  improving society. Of course, I soon found that to have a messianic attitude was wrong, misplaced, counter-productive even. At first I was contemptuous of those who strove for technical excellence, but pretty soon I realised technical excellence was part of your weapon in the struggle for ideas: you got your message over better if the film was good, than if it was amateurish or just flung together somehow.

I have always been mystified as to the results of anything that appears on TV. What impact is it having? There is hardly any way of knowing. You work over your programme for months, it comes on, and then overnight it disappears, more often than not it is not even noticed by any of the critics, and even if it is, not often usefully.

The first films I made were about the native people and their lives. Everything I had learned through my twenty-five years of journalism was confirmed: the establishment, anyone with money, anyone with power, couldn’t have cared less about the native people. No matter how often you told them in what terrible conditions they lived, these people would shrug and walk away. Nothing to do with them.

By taking my first, rather crude, amateurish film around church halls I began to realize that this was a more effective way than the TV screen to get a message across. I figured then, if four people out of a hundred came up to me afterwards and said how much they appreciated it, often saying how they never realised that native people were in such conditions, if that happened, you had a huge success. It is possible to get thorough to people, a few people, with a film, and I agree with Waugh and Miller that they need to be in an audience and to have shifted themselves to get there. You might even change the lives of people, occasionally I have  heard from  people who tossed up their jobs because of a film they had seen, and embarked on a different life-path.

But honestly, I have always felt that the medium of information that has the most influence is the book. I think the basic reason is the tremendous commitment a reader gives to the author, hours and hours of his or her time just as the author has given weeks and months and even years of his time to get the story to them. Books rest in libraries, sometimes in book shops, for many years, and can always been accessed by interested people. In other words, the medium with the smallest circulation paradoxically enough, has the biggest influence.

That’s my five cents worth: forget messianic ideas that you personally can change anything, you have to be content if you can reach a few people with whatever your message is. That some people should have made a life’s work out of analysing this simple thing, this question of a film, its audience, and its maker, is surely surprising enough (I guess they have not taken the vow of poverty, these academics !). And it is certainly testified to by this book.

On the whole I would say forget these analysts and theorists: just go ahead and do your thing. If what you produce is any good your piece will find an audience. Cinema Politica will be standing ready to help you do so. And you never know: you may change someone’s view of the world.