HRWIFF 08.

"For the opening of the 19th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival on June 13, 2008, the organizers made a smart but possibly problematic choice with Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead." So begins Chris Barsanti's overview of the festival; this film in particular, though, is also reviewed by Nick Schager in Slant.

In Salon, the subject of the doc, Ariel Dorfman recalls going back to "revisit the joys of the Allende revolution and the murderous aftermath of Augusto Pinochet's military takeover, and one of the rewards of that journey into the past was that I finally got to track down and thank the woman who had saved my life."

Back to Slant: In To See If I'm Smiling, Tamar Yarom "may illuminate the unique struggles women face when they're drafted by the Israeli army, but the guilt and regret these women feel (like their sense of themselves as oppressors) has nothing to do with sex—an insight that becomes the documentary's grace note," writes Ed Gonzalez.

Updates, 6/12: Rob Humanick offers a quick take on The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) at Slant. Earlier: Dennis Lim in the New York Times.

For Ed Gonzalez, Prisoners in Time is "rife with volatile themes about uncertainty and forgiveness, the narration does most of the heavy lifting. If Roman Polanski made [Ariel] Dorfman's propensity for psychological self-scrutiny feel vibrant and cinematic [in Death and the Maiden], [Stephen] Walker is content evoking the feel of actually lying on a psychologist's couch."

Updates, 6/13: In the New York Times, Stephen Holden offers quick takes on A Promise to the Dead and The Betrayal - and also Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North: "The implications of the film are devastating. The North was the South's complicit economic enabler, and the movie suggests that the North's high-toned abolitionist rhetoric was a cover story. The old saying that 'behind every great fortune there is a crime' echoes silently through the movie, which extends that notion to implicate an entire society."

At the House Next Door: Lauren Wissot on A Promise to the Dead and To See If I'm Smiling.

Bill Weber for Slant: "That discrimination and land theft are still brazenly practiced by the US government against Native Americans is the cri de coeur of Beth and George Gage's American Outrage, documenting the legal battle between Washington and a pair of octogenarian ranching sisters, Carrie and Mary Dann, members of the Western Shoshone community of central and eastern Nevada."

Updates, 6/15: Bill Weber, Slant: "The Human Rights Watch fest profiles one of the organization's own in The Dictator Hunter, which trails HRW lawyer Reed Brody as he strives to close an international-justice dragnet around Hissène Habré, known as 'the African Pinochet' for his brutal (and Reagan-backed) rule in Chad in the 1980s."

"The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) is slow-paced but not slow moving - thoroughly engrossing," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door.

"Under the Bombs is half a great film," blogs Slant's Ed Gonzalez.

Update, 6/16: At Slant, Nick Schager finds Calle Santa Fe "redundant, artless and lacking anything approaching directorial restraint."

Update, 6/17: Nick Schager, Slant: "A counterpart to her 2004 documentary Justice, Maria Ramos's Behave focuses on a Buenos Aires juvenile court system wracked by inefficiency and hopelessness, due in part to a crushing caseload that makes anything more than quick, cursory legal hearings impossible."

Update, 6/18: Nick Schager, Slant: "Six diverse women attempt to shape their country's future in The Sari Soldiers, Julie Bridgham's affecting documentary, shot over three years, about Nepal's tumultuous civil war."

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2008 2:04 PM