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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), from Tuesday (February 22) to March 4. See Indie & Rep Film listings Rating: NNNN


The drawback to a festival like Human Rights Watch is that the audience is inevitably invited to immerse itself in one miserable situation after another. There isn’t always a lot of light at the end of these tunnels.

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Case in point? This year’s HRW opens with Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave (rating: NNN), which looks at the 2009 Iran elections and that moment when it appeared Iranians might be able to get rid of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – only to see their democratic revolution crushed by militias out to repress any sign of dissent.

Ahadi tells the Iranian people’s story by combining sorrowful talking-head interviews with animated re-enactments of events, a technique applied with much greater impact in Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir. (Scenes of detainees being beaten by shadowy security forces feel a little more film noir than necessary.) The early footage of jubilant protesters assembling in a football stadium can’t help but bring the Egyptian revolution of January 25 to mind, but this story doesn’t end nearly as well.

Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese (rating: NNN) looks at theatre director Daccache’s efforts to stage an Arabic version of Reginald Rose’s play 12 Angry Men in a Lebanese prison, enlisting convicts as actors and stagehands. It’s part of a rehabilitation project, getting the inmates to confront their own conceptions of guilt and responsibility through the text. Daccache isn’t as adept a filmmaker as she is a therapist – the doc’s first half is pretty draggy – but what she’s doing is remarkable.

Familia (rating: NNNN) explores the emotional cost of migrant work through the story of a Peruvian family whose mother, Naty, takes a job as a hotel maid in Spain. Directors Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovitz have known this family for decades, and the result is an almost claustrophobically intimate study: we feel every pang of guilt and sorrow as Naty’s economic exile drags on and on.

Among the fictional features, When We Leave (rating: NNNN) casts the terrific Sibel Kekilli (Head-On) as a Muslim woman who abandons her husband in Turkey to return to her family in Germany, only to find they think she’s dishonoured them by fleeing a violent marriage. Writer/director Feo Aladag creates a suffocating atmosphere that gives the story’s grim trajectory – signalled in the very first scene – a terrible feeling of inevitability.

Less successful is Olivier Masset-Depasse’s overwrought Illégal (rating: NN), which turns the story of a Byelorussian mother living without papers in Belgium into a sensationalistic broad-strokes drama, with every last casual inhumanity captured by a jittery handheld camera.

The American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay turns up in a pair of documentaries that have previously played in town. The Oath (rating: NNNN), which screened last year at Hot Docs, tells the stories of Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and driver, brothers-in-law who fell into U.S. custody after 9/11. Director Laura Poitras uses their divergent fortunes to examine the two sides of America’s moral character under the Bush administration.

The issues of illegal detention and sanctioned torture hit closer to home in You Don’t Like The Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo (rating: NNNN), Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez’s powerful presentation of Omar Khadr’s first interview with Canadian interrogators at Guantánamo, a sickening look at a Kafkaesque holding system designed to intimidate and punish rather than prosecute.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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