HRWIFF 08, week 2.

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival rolls on in New York through June 26; the New York Press offers reviews of USA Vs Al-Arian, Project Kashmir and Letter to Anna.

Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door: "Wiseman-like in its patient stillness and no frills style, lacking in overbearing soundtrack or any other potentially distracting enhancements, Maria Ramos's Juizo (Behave) is a study of the Brazilian juvenile judicial system illuminated through both 'fact' (all the adults, from judges to lawyers to prison guards to parents, are the real thing, filmed during court hearings and on visits to the correctional facility in Rio de Janeiro) and 'fiction' (the accused involved in the cases are minors and cannot be filmed, thus Ramos ingeniously substitutes other children from the favelas to play their roles)."

Updated through 6/24.

Ed Gonzalez in Slant on the Youth Producing Change program: "In spite of their largely unsophisticated filmic sense, these shorts produced under the Youth Voices banner are all impassioned rallying calls."

Update, 6/20: Project Kashmir's "final lack of clarity - mirrored in the necessarily jerky camerawork - may be precisely the point, but in the end, it makes for a largely unsatisfying piece of cinema," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant.

Update, 6/21: "Katrina Browne exhumes long buried secrets in Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, a nonfiction portrait of her ancestors' forefront role in the US slave trade," writes Nick Schager at Slant. The doc premiere on PBS on Tuesday; see the POV Blog for more.

Updates, 6/23: "Possibly the most poignant, profound and artistically viable film you'll see at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this year is Georgi Lazarevski's This Way Up, a portrait of a senior citizens' home for Palestinians just east of Jerusalem." Ed Gonzalez.

Also at Slant: "Critical Condition offers a salutary lesson in the difference in viewer response between the fiction and the nonfiction film," writes Andrew Schenker. "What we can comfortably deride as a self-conscious miserablism when it's mediated through the performances of well-paid actors is not so easy to dismiss when presented directly as the sufferings of real-life individuals."

Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door: "[T]here is limitless drama (the stories in Traces of the Trade could easily fill a PBS miniseries) with everyone involved in a perpetual soul-search - this is what makes cinema (and life) so interesting."

Update, 6/24: Lauren Wissot on USA vs Al-Arian at the House Next Door: "Like the slain journalist at the center of Eric Bergkraut's Letter to Anna, [Sami] Al-Arian learns that activist fame will not shield him in George W Bush's America any more than Anna Politkovskaya's high profile protected her in Putin's Russia. In fact, it can make things much, much worse." More from Bill Weber at Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at June 19, 2008 10:02 AM