by Becka McFadden 

Currently One World is one of the leading festivals dealing with the issue of human rights in Europe and belongs among the founding members of the Association of Human Rights Festivals, which joins together 17 festivals from throughout the entire world.  Although the films were shown 1-9 March, One World is a year round institute, which in addition to the education projects and other activities, also dedicates itself to the promotion of documentary films, for example in cooperation with Czech Television or in the form of documentary Mondays in the Světozor cinemas .  Here are a few highlights from the festival. 

Article 61 (Madeh 61) is Iranian director Mahvash Zia Sheikholeslami's contribution to the Right to Know category, highlighting lesser-known human rights issues. The title refers to an article of the Islamic penal code that entitles an individual to retaliate in violence, even to the point of killing, if life or chastity is endangered. Sheikholeslami follows four women, each sentenced to death for the type of killing Article 61 is supposed to address. We meet Fakteh, a mentally ill woman harassed by her employer, Asfareh, nearly raped by her husband's colleague, Fatimeh, whose husband molested her daughter and Raziha, who at only fifteen defended herself against gang rape with a shard of broken glass.

Sheikholeslami effectively juxtaposes the stark footage of her subjects, interviewed in prison, with images of bustling, nighttime Tehran, intercutting family photos of the women on their wedding days and posing with their children.  Several of Sheikholeslami's subjects receive media attention, with commentators and loved ones demanding stays of execution from the pages of Iran's newspaper, but the film speaks also for the voiceless – brilliantly, it ends by blending the voices of prisoners we haven't met as we see footage of their hands, which are almost uniformly nervous in a physical expression of their imprisonment and powerlessness.

Get a Life! Danish director Michael Klimt made this film adhering to Lars von Trier's rules for Dogumentaries -- a code which aims to keep documentary film-making as "real" as possible. Klimt and his cameraman travel to Nigeria on the trail of noma, a disfiguring and often fatal disease which attacks malnourished children with poor immune systems, but the story is as much about their personal journeys as it is about the disease.

In Nigeria's only noma clinic, where the power can go out mid-surgery, the line between participant and observer becomes blurred. Scenes of the filmmakers in their hotel -- Ikea-showroom sterile and very clean, canned food on the table -- alternate with shots of the hospital, where guards steal the rice patients must stand in line to get. Klimt and his cameraman confront their difficult relationship with Africa – they've become so involved that Klimt donates blood, but predict (rightly) that film won't find a primetime audience, since "no one wants to see black Africans dying in primetime."  At times the presence of the filmmakers in the clinic seems intrusive; as they record an over-worked doctor's half-hour quest to find a vein to transfuse Klimt's blood into a skeletal 3 year old patient, I felt guilty for watching, wondering if the act of filming, even to raise awareness, just made the situation worse.

In both its form and content, Get a Life! is difficult to watch. But by exposing the subjectivities inherent in any act of narration it does succeed in achieving a kind of objectivity, which forces the audience to recognize its role as part of the problem even as it is galvanized to solve it.


Go to Louisa is Polish director Grzegorz Pacek's portrait of modern South Africa. The story is simple -- Stach, a Polish entrepreneur, owns a rubber factory. Andreas, a member of the Zulu tribe, has quit working for Stach, but wants the money he's owed for work complete. The Louisa of the title is the employment officer who's supposed to facilitate this process, but she's highly inaccessible; neither Andreas nor the audience ever see her face (though we do hear her voice through a security intercom, telling Andreas to find someone with better English to speak to her).

Pacek's film is a postcard of post-Apartheid South Africa. The film is full of contradictory images that I'm still turning over in my head -- Andreas polishing his shoes before trying to find Louisa, Stach filling his pool, the blonde, angelic child of the factory manager playing with bullets from the gun her father carries for protection. Even the landscape changes as we switch perspectives -- the dustiness of Andreas' neighborhood contras with the lush greenness of Stach's home and Louisa's office -- it's hard to believe that the images come from the same city. With photographic reserve, Pacek remains silent, imposing no external narrative thread, merely witnessing an extreme polarization. We never learn if Andreas gets his money -- Louisa remains elusive till the end -- but in the world of the film, in a country of factions still struggling to coexist, perhaps the clearest ending is no clear ending at all.

"Gender Montage" is a collection of films focusing on women's issues in post-Soviet countries. Each participating nation assembled a team of filmmakers and women's rights advocates to explore the situation of women since the end of the Soviet Union. Here's a sampling:

Eleček, directed by Nailya Rakhmadieva, tells the story of Sairash – a Kyrgyz wife and mother who has left her husband because he has taken another wife. Rakhmadieva investigates the rise of polygamy in post-war Kyrgyzstan, interviewing social workers who assist women affected by the practice and following Sairash's own deliberations, as she is torn between preserving herself-respect and conforming to societal pressures.  The eleček, headdress traditionally worn by married Kyrgyz women, is the film's central symbol. Sairash's choice to keep wearing it shows a traditional act becoming a locus of rebellion – by participating in tradition, she protests, refusing to become invisible. 

Neodza Penelopa/New Penelope, directed by Georgii Dzlaev, links the plight of modern Tajik women to the fate of Odysseus' wife, Penelope. Like their Greek counterpart, the women of Tajikistan are waiting – in this case, for their husbands to return from Russia where they have gone to look for work. We meet numerous women, many of them elderly, who find themselves trying to sustain large families on funds arriving from Russia sporadically -- or not at all. Dzlaev raises the question of whether a society is sustainable when poverty forces its families apart. Like Penelope and the women profiled, Tajikistan itself seems to be suspended – the camera captures a beautiful landscape incapable of sustaining its people – and as the film ends, its uncertain what the fate of the Penelopes will be.

ženskoje ščastije ili mužskoje dostoinstvo/Women's Happiness or Men's Dignity, directed by Nika Shek and Karine Verdiyan, profiles two Armenian women with sharply different relationships to love and marriage. We meet an artist who has eschewed traditional marriage to focus on her work and the widow of a long, traditional marriage -- ironically, with an artist, which allows for a secondary discussion addressing the difficulty of being a female artist. I was most fascinated by the widow's daughter. The product of a traditional marriage, she adopts an antagonistic attitude towards any expectation yet in the last scene becomes extremely vulnerable with a man she has just met. One foot planted in each of the older women's worlds, she is perhaps the most complete character, even as she contradicts herself.
The festival's venues were Evald , Mat , Ponrepo - Bio Konvikt , Světozor , and Lucerna .  

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