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June 07, 2006
Slant Puts NYC's Human Rights Watch Festival on the Map
Were it not for a freelance assignment that feels like a human rights violation of its own at times, you can bet I would be all over the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which kicks off its 17th annual incarnation tomorrow at Lincoln Center. In my stead, however, please let me direct you to Slant Magazine, which features a pleasant-enough festival overview before delivering readers a full-blown interactive map detailing each the event's 24 films and their origins.
Ethiopian laborers spill the beans in Nick Francis and Marc Francis's coffee-meets-globalization doc Black Gold, playing this week at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (Photo: HRWIFF)
Huge kudos to Slant guru Ed Gonzalez and his colleagues Jeremiah Kipp and Fernando Croce for taking this on; while I must acknowledge their praise of overrated quasi-docs Iraq in Fragments and The Road to Guantanamo with a grain of salt, I also must applaud their comprehensive, modest and tasteful attempt at bringing the festival to their readers. God knows I hate to endure wordy, tired, self-righteous screeds if I do not have to.
Oh, which reminds me: Michael Atkinson appears to dig the festival as well, characterizing it as "the most thematically vital" in New York. I guess I've got no quibbles with that, nor with his own merciless assessment of Iraq in Fragments. To wit:
Extraordinarily beautiful footage of life in three Iraqi regions is edited within an inch of Disney's Living Desert horseshit; hardly a minute of Longley's film goes by without a cheap narrative-building suture between two mutually exclusive moments, destroying his movie's sense of veracity in the process. (That it strategically climaxes with Kurds singing the praises of the occupying army is another thorn in the eye.) So of course it won three prizes at Sundance, where audiences are yet learning about cinematic syntax versus the possibility of truthfulness.
OK, OK--be patient, Michael. I swear that "syntax vs. truthfulness" was right below "finding a parking place" on most to-do lists I saw in Park City. They are getting there.
Posted by stvanairsdale at June 7, 2006 09:15 AM
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