Born under punches

The need for concerned documentary filmmaking has been felt acutely at cinemas over the past couple of years, though what's actually onscreen has all too often tended toward the didactic. Such is thankfully not the case with this year's Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, at the Pacific Film Archive. The festival's curators have done an important job by parsing an ever expanding field for work from filmmakers who recognize that being engaged doesn't necessarily entail inflated polemics. Indeed, most of the films in this year's festival possess a clear-eyed sense of ambiguity. Such is certainly the case with two works already favorably reviewed in these pages: Vietnam-killer Winter Soldier and a modern refraction, Occupation: Dreamland. The two-part series Video Letters makes the most of the digital technology that has elsewhere led to lazy filmmaking. In it, Dutch filmmakers Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek courageously shuttle camcorders between friends cut off by the Bosnian-Serb conflicts of the mid-'90s. The letters begin as personal connections but inevitably become complex meditations on nationalism and atrocity. War traumas don't loom over Living Rights, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a documentary as quietly effective at revealing the cruelness of an imposed, unmovable reality. Duco Tellegen's movie consists of three segments, each focused on an adolescent struggling for fundamental rights like education, health, and independence. The director is a moral stylist in the manner of Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have), carefully shaping deeply felt, respectful portraits of his subjects with or ok as is? revealing long takes and unadorned compositions. The episodes concern three very different children from three very different cultures, but there's a connective consistency to the director's tender craft. Despite all the talk of globalized filmmaking, Living Rights demonstrates a rare ambition for genuine multiculturalism. (Max Goldberg)

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2006

Through Sun/26

See Rep Clock for showtimes.

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

$4–$8

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

www.hrw.org/ff