Human rights, wrongs

NOT LONG AGO , "terrorism" was a powerful word, but increasingly it's just a word used by the powerful – and its own power diminishes apace. After all, when Milosevic invokes it to defend himself against charges of genocide, it's probably high time to abandon the term. Groups like Human Rights Watch, however, know that this semantic bankruptcy is not liable to lessen the need to describe the dehumanizing effects of power struggles around the world. Accordingly, the films of HRW's traveling International Film Festival seek out the reality behind the words. Almost miraculously, they consistently find a resiliency among ordinary people caught where war, racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism feed a systemic disregard for human life.

Acclaimed San Francisco filmmaker and Bay Guardian Goldie Lifetime Achievement winner Lourdes Portillo's Señorita extraviada (Missing young woman) is emblematic of such work, as well as the festival's commitment to portraying realities unacknowledged by the corporate-owned media. Screening as the opening-night feature, Portillo's haunting and compelling documentary investigates the serial murders of more than 200 young factory women over the course of the past decade in the Mexican border town Juárez. Despite numerous theories (advancing everyone from a lone killer to drug traffickers to fellow factory workers), the murders remain unsolved and continue to this day, going virtually unnoticed on this side of the border and provoking only ineptitude and passivity on the part of the Mexican authorities.

A penchant for mysteries may have inspired the director of Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999) and The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), but even Portillo was unprepared for the magnitude of the story. "The mysteries I've dealt with in the past were family mysteries, provocative to a certain extent, but this one was harrowing," she says. "The extent of death, and secrecy, and horror around it was just too much. I never really expected it to be as bad as I found it." With a cogent narrative, careful pacing, and a sympathetic gaze, the film nevertheless restores to the victims and their community a dignity eviscerated by the voyeurism of the Mexican press, the equivocations of government officials, and the murderers themselves.

After documenting this ongoing carnage on the U.S. border – incredibly, another 50 women died during the 18 months she spent making the film – how does Portillo view the current trumpeting for a "war on terror"? "Well, it's very ironic," she says. "Terror, for me, is right there. But I don't see anybody really doing anything about it. It sounds much better to get thousands of troops to go into another country with billions of dollars in armaments and destroy the place looking for one person than to actually address a problem that is so rooted in this culture of extraordinary consumerism [and] drug consumption. And the trail of blood and terror and suffering that it causes is ignored."

But as the film suggests, there is more than a dark irony to the deaths plaguing this model town of the new global economy. In NAFTA's new-old economic order of cheap labor and obscene profit margins, underworld and elite feed on the same victims in a symbiosis born of enforced silence and the complicity of power. The film belies the notion that such terror in our own backyard is merely overlooked; rather, it is actively forgotten.

Children Underground, a documentary about five of Romania's more than 20,000 homeless youth, has already been nominated for an Oscar. But many other worthy films in this year's festival may, like last year's Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, disappear despite their merits. Several especially timely documentaries are worth catching while you can.

Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin (2000) follows an Italian surgeon, an Italian journalist, and an English nurse on a humanitarian mission to open a hospital in war-ravaged Afghanistan. This somewhat choppy but fascinating chronicle of two trips in 1999 and 2000 drives home the tremendous suffering endured by the victims of a 20-year civil war, as well as the atmosphere of fear and repression elicited by the Taliban. Directly addressing the camera throughout, Afghan men, women, and children convey the damage to, and tenuous survival of, traditional values in a devastated society whose plight the world for too long ignored.

As new fighting breaks out in Liberia after the all-consuming civil war of the 1990s, Behind Closed Eyes (2000) looks at four children dealing with war's aftermath in Liberia, Macedonia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, presenting mesmerizing tales of psychological wounds and social reconciliation.

Finally, Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2000) profiles the formidable African American intellectual, radical, and diplomat. One of W.E.B. DuBois's "talented tenth," Bunche began his career as a leftist critic of the New Deal at Howard University in the 1930s and ended it as a consummate insider at the United Nations, where he helped orchestrate the postwar dismantling of Western colonialism. Bunche earned the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors, an amazing story that remains vitally relevant to the region and the world more than half a century later. (Robert Avila)

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2002 runs Fri/22-Sun/24 at the New PFA Theater, Berk. For more information see First Runs, in Film listings, or go to www.hrw.org/iff.