Amsterdam Dispatch. 1.

This year, IDFA looks like an alumni gathering, as it welcomes back an army of veterans, from Peter Wintonick (whose latest film is made with his daughter) to Anand Patwardhan (here with Father, Son and Holy War from 1994) to Henny Honigmann, with a look at her home town through the eyes of some of the less-powerful. In El Olvido (Oblivion), Honigmann asks a selection of people from her native Lima what it is that they remember, both fondly and bitterly. The key to any movie is casting, and if you can call Honigmann's choice of interviewees casting, then she has done it magnificently. These are people who tend to be called ordinary, and Honigmann shows that they are anything but that in their observations of their lives and, beyond that, of Peru. This series of meetings with Lima natives first shows you that being "from" this city of eight million, most of whom struggle to survive, is being from the countryside and coming to the city out of necessity. Fond memories almost always are of family. Bitter ones are of the sacrifices made when family is uprooted.

Part of surviving is pretending, acting as if serving the privileged is normal, as we see in a class of waiters in training, and we hear from the bartender Jorge Kanashiro. Politicians are friendly, we're told, but none of them merits much more respect than that from those who have served them drinks or food, or who have repaired their briefcases. Kanashiro, a warm and polite man, recalls one arrogant politician who returned from decades overseas to be the country's finance minister. He gives the bartender two soles and asks him to go out and buy every daily newspaper. Kanashiro points out that just one newspaper costs more than that, and notes that the request was an indication of how effective this official would be. Here is the finance minister, after all. Another man who speaks to Honigmann makes the presidential sashes that are worn when a new president of Peru swears to God and the "Holy Apostles" that he will uphold the constitution. He notes that in the country's colorful history, a bandit who would swoop down on the city in robbing sprees was actually president for one day. And today's politicians?, Honigman asks. "Bandit is too good a word," the man says.

As in much of Latin America, children in Lima perform for tips at traffic lights. Two young sisters turn cartwheels and then walk between cars to collect coins which they bring back to their mother, who sits at the side of the road nearby. It looks effortless, but then we hear that the oldest of what were four daughters was doing just that when she was run down by a car that went through a red light. She died after ten days in a coma. We never see where the family lives. It may be right there on the side of the road.

Life for everyone in the city was regulated - if that word isn't to gentle - when the Shining Path in the 1970s began a campaign of violent intimidation of rural villages and bombings in the cities like Lima. Toward the end of that period, Peru suffered an economic collapse and its currency was deeply devalued. Mauro Gomez, who operates a "clinic for bags," tells Honigmann that the devaluation that cleaned out his savings hurt him far more than political terrorism. He still has not been able to buy inventory to put on his empty shelves.

As in all of Honigmann's films, there is a tenderness for the people who are taken for granted, and a sense of discovery when you hear them speak. Caution: she only shows people whom she likes here, which may make you wonder why Peru has been such a place of violence and inequality if everyone is so warm and caring, and perceptive. That said, she knows when to shoot a close-up (and she also knows how to negotiate the traffic in Peru to shoot her young gymnasts), and the camera reveals as much about her characters as their testimony. She visits their homes. Some live with dirt floors, others in austere cinder-block shells. And these are far from the poorest of the poor, but people who have held jobs all their lives, making the privileged comfortable.

Much less cinematic than Honigman's tour of Lima was a documentary In the Holy Fire of Revolution by Masha Novikova, whose crew toured Russia in late 2007 and early 2008 as it accompanied the presidential campaign of Garry Kasparov. The former chess player has been a prominent voice in opposition to the consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, as other voices have either dropped out or been eliminated - in the case of journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, murdered. (Kasparov and his wife and small child are shown with bodyguards, wherever they go.)

Kasparov's coalition with the volatile and undisciplined National Bolsheviks never came close in its bid to challenge Putin, a reminder of the pitfalls of alliance-building in the minefield of Russian politics, but it alerted anyone paying attention to the rollback of freedoms introduced after the fall of the Soviet Union. The two-hour film is filled with details on how a political campaign is conducted in Russia - or prevented from being conducted. Shot in the unspectacular close-to-the-ground style of television journalism - no surprise, since the filmmakers seem to have been either running to catch up with Kasparov, or running away from police who broke up his rallies - the film may have a chance to be seen on European television, if it isn't already viewed as having been overtaken by events. (The movie wrapped before Russian troops invaded Georgia in the summer.) Russian television is more of a challenge as the doc's examination of media bullying reflects.

It wasn't enough that Kasparov and his alliance came nowhere near threatening the Kremlin electorally. (Putin, then and now, seems to have convinced a majority of voters that his crude authoritarianism and militarism, the very approaches that Kasparov opposed, are just the signs of leadership that the country needs.) The threat posed (or perceived) by the mere fact that the Kasparov campaign was raising questions about political corruption and strong-arming attacks on freedom of expression led Putin to retaliate. First came a cold shoulder from mainstream television, intimidated into following the Kremlin line. Then there were violent assaults on Kasparov supporters when they assembled publicly. Eventually, Kasparov and his inner circle were arrested and thrown in jail for organizing an illegal demonstration. Thanks to some press freedoms that have survived in Russia, the camera was in court to witness a charade that seemed right out of the Soviet era: the bureaucratic verdict from a judge who agreed with the government's charges that a presidential candidate had organized an illegal political assembly.

Watching Kasparov's brave campaign to remain in the public eye challenging Putin, "a brutal dictator," you think that the campaign against it by the police could have been worse. Remember the old line, in the gulag, about "Comrade Stalin, what a nice man, he could have had us shot?" Given the Kremlin's campaign against critics, the miracle here may be that Kasparov is still walking the streets.

Putin may be taking Russia backward into what looks, for some, like the dark days of Soviet rule, but he's no Kim Il-Sung, leader of North Korea until his death in 1994, when he was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-il - at least not yet. If what you've already heard about North Korea isn't troubling and unbelievable enough, Yodok Stories takes you into a domain of a particularly systematic sadism, even by the standards of the Kim Il-Sung clan. The subject here is the network of concentration camps in the North, which came to the attention of the director, Andrzej Fidyk, who, in an earlier film, Carnival, looked at a huge managed spectacle - a government rally in Pyongyang that had been rehearsed for a year. Fidyk's approach to this film is nothing if not novel. He tracked down some of the rare escapees from the network of camps, from which accused enemies of the state and their families almost never walk out alive.

One of those survivors is a theater director, Jung Sung San, whose parents were killed in Yodok, also known as Camp 15, the only prison in the system from which inmates are released. They put together a musical about the camps, based on testimony from Jung Sung San and from a wider circle of camp alumni, with a woman who escaped through China, and a former guard who also escaped. The conditions they describe make the places sound as if Hannibal Lector were in charge - public executions, starvation in solitary confinement, murder of parents on front of children, life terms to people heard making the most innocuous comments about the family of Kim Il-Sung (and there couldn't be an easier target for jokes). For those lucky enough to escape to China, conditions there were so difficult (amid fear of being reported and returned to certain death) that Korean women banned from working became prostitutes to survive. The documentary begins as the staging of a premise concocted by Fidyk (questionable, perhaps, for a documentary), and becomes much more in the hands of the stage director who is now part of a Christian sect that sends air balloons with leaflets across the border. The testimony of former prisoners describes conditions so extreme that you can't imagine them in a musical. Yet what could be turned into kitsch is haunting - the drama draws you closer to the unspeakable.

Posted by dwhudson at November 24, 2008 8:51 AM