Amsterdam Dispatch. 3.

As your morning paper's friendly travel writer might blithely put it, "If you're thinking of going to Turkmenistan...," The Shadow of the Holy Book (site) might be worth viewing before you book non-refundable tickets. Director Arto Halonen and writer/lawyer Kevin Frazier examine the eccentricities of one-man rule in the post-Soviet autocra-stan which sits on vast reserves of gas and oil, making it a friend these days of the United States and other countries who covet those energy sources. Turkemenistan has the world's third-largest gas reserves.

And you thought There Will Be Blood was the oil film of the season. From the fall of communism until 2006, Turkmenistan was ruled by Saparmurat Niyazov, who declared himself president for life. Like so many of his petroleo-crat peers, Niyazov built huge marble palaces and other gargantuan "architectural" tributes to himself. His own residence in Ashgabat resembled the Chateau de Versailles, or at least Frenchmen seeking to do business with him told him so. Like so much else in Ashgabat, it looked like a super-sized knock-off somewhere in Las Vegas or Orlando.

Niyazov even had a favorite French architect who became the Albert Speer of Ashgabat. Niyazov's taste looked a lot like Saddam Hussein's, with a special preference for what we might call Authoritarian Vegas. No coincidence that Ashgabat is in the middle of the desert. (Niyazov himself looked a bit more like Leonid Brezhnev, only larger.) As with Saddam, western countries tried to get as much of his oil, gas and money as they could.   Flattery was a sure way to open the door.

But Halonen and Frazier are more eager in Niyazov's grotesque uniqueness than in the generic life-style that befits membership in the dictators' club. Niyazov's delusions and his means to put them into practice made him his region's Kim Jong-Il. Niyazov was nutty enough to think that was a compliment. Citizens in kitschy folkloric costumes were required to swear allegiance to him at mass rallies. Part of that oath involved wishing that their body parts would fall off if, God forbid, they were to do anything to hurt their leader. (Once the police beat a confession out of someone accused of anything suspect, they'll know what to do next.)

Halonen and Frazier have fun with Ashgabat's contribution to monumental sculpture, a 30-foot illuminated book that opens to different pages. (It's something that the operators of Bible theme parks can only dream of.) The book is the gold, green and purple the Ruhnama, the official text of Turkmenistan since 2001. It makes claims for Niyazov - now called Turkmenbashi - which most religious texts wouldn't even make for God.

Turkmen citizens have to endure this, at the barrel of a gun, as the old saying goes. They also have to endure unemployment at 60 percent and quixotic policies from their leader, who closed rural libraries "because rural Turkmen don't read," banned opera, ballet lip-synching, and stashed some $2 billion away in a German bank.

But Niyazov's gospel is taken beyond his borders with dozens of translations of the Ruhnama, and it turns out that each of these translations is paid for by a major corporation. Halonen and Frazier set out to talk to these corporations like Siemens, John Deere, Caterpillar and Bouygues about the Ruhnama, and the firms respond by ignoring calls, hanging up, slamming doors, and throwing the filmmakers out of corporate lobbies. All of the search for accountability is captured on the jostling camera. If this sounds a lot like Michael Moore, there are similarities.

Yet if publishing the Ruhnama is a noble undertaking, why don't the companies funding it say so? It's the same reason that companies which bribe officials in other countries don't talk about. It's embarrassing, sometimes illegal, although translating the epic by Niyazov doesn't seem to be a crime against anything but sanity.

(To be fair, Turkmenistan isn't the only place where flattery is offered for a quid pro quo. Think of the film festivals that "honor" distributors with career achievement awards while they hold their noses, or put sales agents on juries, in order to ensure that they get the films that they want from these industry types.)

Deere and Company, the makers of John Deere tractors, puts a copy of the Ruhnama in its company museum in Moline, Illinois, but makes excuses when the filmmakers visit. An employee of Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, sets up a web guide to the Ruhnama, complete with offerings of Ruhnama souvenirs, yet protests that his corporation had nothing to do with the site when the filmmakers go searching for him. The site now seems to be down, although Caterpillar is still doing business in Turkmenistan. You'll have to go to another global corporation for a Ruhnama t-shirt.

The businessman who seems to have profited most from Niyazov's vanity is Ahmet Calik, the head of a Turkish energy and construction conglomerate, who has worked his way up to the post of minister. No surprise, he commissioned the Turkish translation of the Ruhmana, and his firm is flourishing there. Again, no surprise: we never hear from him, although the dodging and evasion from his press spokesman could be inspiration for a skit on The Simpsons. Close behind him is French tycoon Martin Bouygues, whose industrial group has its signature on much of what is mock-monumentally new in the capital. Bouygues controls TF1, France's largest private television channel, which prepared a special laudatory program devoted to Niyazov. The program, presented as a TF1 production, only aired in Turkmenistan. Did Niyazov know this? When Kevin Frazier calls Bouygues to inquire whether the company sees an ethical problem in trading with a government that violates human rights, the firm's flacks decline comment with Gallic scorn, and hang up on him.

Those who do talk are critics - Farid Turbatullin, a human rights activist now in exile in Vienna, and his son, Ruslan, who makes satirical cartoons about Niyazov and oppression in Turkmenistan, and Boris Shikmuradov, Jr, exiled in Moscow, who has been searching for his father, a former official, since he was arrested in 2002. It would have been good to see something more concrete about human rights abuses. Naturally, the government wants to keep cameras far away from that.

One businessman who does talk is the CEO of the Finnish energy firm ESCO, who regrets any role his firm had in commissioning a Finnish translation of the Ruhmana. The executive is clearly embarrassed, but he's the only one who comes close to admitting it. Accountability among those doing business with this dictator is rare indeed.

The Shadow of the Holy Book was shot on the run, and looks like it, although it also has the no-budget research look, since Kevin Frazier often gets no farther than a hang-up from a major firm thwn he calls from his threadbare office in Helsinki.

The team almost lost their project in late 2006, when the Turmenbashi dropped dead of a heart attack. When hopes for a commitment to human rights in Turkmenistan collapsed under Niyazov's successor, the filmmakers knew they still had a movie. These days in Ashgabat, natural gas is worth more than ever, and the Ruhnama remains a sacred text. (The Shadow of the Holy Book was funded in part by ITVS, and will be shown on American television next year.)

Also at IDFA (and eventually to be seen on PBS, via ITVS) is Up the Yangtze (site), a Canadian doc by Yung Chang about jarring displacements of families in the Yangtze valley, as high-rises go up like monstrous weeds above the projected high-water line and cruise ships carrying comfortable tourists ply their way along the river.

There must be a Chinese translation of the Ruhnama. When it comes to oil, it sems that Beijing hasn't met a dictator it doesn't like.

What's filling up the Yangtze is water from a dam, which will cover many thousands of homes. It's great for the cruise ships that bring thousands of tourists. It's less encouraging for a young girl from a displaced family who gets a job washing dishes and serving on one of the ships. We follow her in her first contact with western consumer culture. This is progress? The culture clash has a standard PBS look, but even that is an achievement - Yung Chang shot his film without any official permits, which can get you into a lot of trouble.

There's a lot of testimony from aggrieved Chinese, who remind us of the project's huge human cost, and we see that cost on their faces, and on the riverbanks. This is not lost on all the tourists, who watch the rising river from the treadmills where they walk in place to elevator music in the ship's exercise room. Whatever happened to the old adage that a rising tide lifts all boats.

One of my favorites so far is Mechanical Love (DFI), a Finnish-Danish doc. If the title set you off looking for sex toys or for prostitutes in chains and futuristic chastity belts, you were in the wrong neighborhood in Amsterdam.

Phie Ambo's film looks at people creating and interacting with lifelike man-made creatures. The Paro is a stuffed seal robot, complete with a cry, if not a voice, that is given to patients with dementia. As a pacifier for people who can't be left completely alone, it's cheaper than a real babysitter. When patients in Japan, Germany and Italy take the seals and make them whine, scientists can record an intensity of brain activity. The seal enhances the life of the person holding it.

Yet there's something of a Frankenstein effect, which we can see in the case of the Geminoid, a life-like android that is sculpted to the likeness of the scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who is leading a team of scientists studying robots and the problems that arise when you bring them into a human community. Ishiguro cooperates with gentle good humor in the studies that he conducts, sitting with an android that looks just like him, and speaking through that android to his frightened daughter, who is also a guinea pig in the tests.

Will there ever be a time when human life is no longer necessary, the scientist asks, as a skittish poodle jumps around, dramatizing the undeniable inconvenience of living things. The scenes with Ishiguro are charming vignettes that remind you of the philosophical plays of Marivaux, with witty interplay among the scholars, soliloquies by Ishiguro on his family and work, tender family scenes, and experiments with the scientist's only daughter. Talk about a Faustian bargain. Few of the fundamental questions are answered.

It's a shame Mechanical Love won't be showing anywhere soon. You could see it along with the stage version of Young Frankenstein.

Posted by dwhudson at November 29, 2007 1:59 AM