humanrights

The Lady

by Drew Kerr on September 29, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

The Lady

The Lady (Director: Luc Besson): Director Luc Besson steps out of his com­fort zone with The Lady, a biopic about Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese politi­cian who spent almost 15 years under house arrest in her family com­pound for leading a demo­cratic uprising that opposed Burma’s oppressive and cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. Best known for high energy movies like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, and Leon: The Professional, Besson reins in the action for this expansive drama, which sur­pris­ingly focusses as much (if not more) on Suu Kyi’s rela­tion­ship with her family as on her polit­ical his­tory. In per­form­ances sure to gen­erate Oscar buzz, Michelle Yeoh plays the tit­ular char­acter and David Thewlis plays her hus­band Michael Aris, a pro­fessor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford.

Suu Kyi lived abroad in England for most of her adult life, where she and Aris raised two boys, until returning to her native country in 1988 to tend to her sick mother. Once there, she is approached by locals to lead efforts to form a new gov­ern­ment that will bring demo­cracy to the country, ending the iron-handed rule and human rights abuses of the leaders in power. This is one area of the film where the expos­i­tion felt clum­sily handled; it’s jar­ring and con­fusing when Suu Kyi rap­idly goes from seem­ingly being a simple Oxford house­wife to the high pro­file leader of a polit­ic­ally chaotic country. No back­ground is given on her adult years before her return to Burma (was she polit­ic­ally active while in England?) and there’s no real probing into her motiv­a­tions or qual­i­fic­a­tions for taking on such a weighty and dan­gerous pos­i­tion, other than the fact that her father aspired to be a figure of change in the country before he was killed by opposing mil­itary forces when Suu Kyi was a child. That was obvi­ously a factor, but a deeper explor­a­tion of this crit­ical point in Suu Kyi’s life is needed, espe­cially when we see the massive sac­ri­fices she makes for her beliefs (she misses years of her family’s lives and is unable to be with her hus­band as he fights and ulti­mately suc­cumbs to cancer in 1999). Thewlis gives an excel­lent per­form­ance as Aris, who devotedly shared in his wife’s struggle and unre­mit­tingly fought for her freedom.

Yeoh delivers a dig­ni­fied, com­pas­sionate por­trait of Suu Kyi, but is hand­cuffed some­what by Besson’s and screen­writer Rebecca Frayn’s rather ped­es­trian sum­ma­tion of her struggle. Despite its lengthy run­ning time (145 minutes), the film feels rushed and fails to res­onate quite as deeply as such a remark­able story should. Yeoh met the politi­cian in Burma last December, a month after Suu Kyi was finally freed, and attempted to visit her again in June while on a break from shooting The Lady in Thailand, but was deported and black­listed by Burmese officials.

I’d never heard of Suu Kyi until U2 brought her name to a wider audi­ence with the song “Walk On” and during brief seg­ments about her at every show on their last couple of tours, for which Besson gives the band a couple of shout-outs in his film, how­ever awk­ward (one of Suu Kyi’s sons wears a shirt from the band and one of their songs plays on the soundtrack). The Lady, although flawed, is a well-intentioned effort that will bring fur­ther atten­tion to her extraordinary life and the ongoing fight for human rights in Burma.

Tagged as: #tiff11, biopic, Burma, humanrights, politics

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SoleJourney

by James McNally on May 19, 2009

in Documentaries,DVD

SoleJourney

SoleJourney (Directors: Kate Burns and Sheila E. Schroeder): I’ve admired the work of Rev. Dr. Mel White and the Soulforce organ­iz­a­tion for years now and this doc­u­mentary, par­tially funded by Soulforce, prom­ised to shed some light on the organization’s con­tinuing fight against the anti-gay agenda of Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family organ­iz­a­tion. Unfortunately, the film comes up short for a number of reasons.

First and fore­most, it’s not ter­ribly clear what the main focus of the film is. The title itself con­fused me until I real­ized it was refer­ring to the 1000 Watt March, a Soulforce “action” in which GLBT fam­ilies marched from Denver to Colorado Springs (home to Focus on the Family), a dis­tance of 65 miles, in five-mile “relays.” But the march doesn’t even really enter into the film until about the halfway mark. For the first 30 minutes or so, we get some­thing closer to a his­tory of the begin­nings of Soulforce, and its con­nec­tion to the non-violent res­ist­ance philo­sophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Although Rev. Dr. White does appear in the film, I didn’t feel there was enough of him for this to be con­sidered a real his­tory of his organ­iz­a­tion. Instead there were lots of news clips emphas­izing the media’s view that Focus on the Family is an influ­en­tial and important organ­iz­a­tion. I found this unne­ces­sary, and it seemed to unbal­ance the film and expose its lack of structure.

When we do get to the march itself, we simply get random shots of small groups of people walking along the highway, inter­spersed with some footage of their reg­ular family lives at home. Although these fam­ilies are def­in­itely worthy of having their stories told, I wanted more of the at-home stuff and less of the anti­cli­mactic “march” stuff. I even enjoyed the talking head inter­views more than the cov­erage of the march, although none of it seemed to ever coalesce into a larger whole. I found the soundtrack cloy­ingly sweet, too, although it def­in­itely con­trib­uted to the overall “inspir­a­tional” feeling I think the film­makers were aiming for.

Soulforce’s mis­sion is to combat “religion-based oppres­sion” of LGBT people but there was very little about the reli­gious basis of that oppres­sion. In that respect, I found the film com­pared quite unfa­vour­ably with Daniel Karslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So (review), which even used some of the same footage of the demon­stra­tions at Focus on the Family’s headquar­ters. That film also man­aged to fea­ture some LGBT fam­ilies in a sens­itive way, and I’d hoped that SoleJourney might have built upon the earlier film. Instead, I don’t think it will have much appeal to anyone who doesn’t already believe in what Soulforce is doing.

Official site of the film

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: christianity, faith, homosexuality, humanrights, religion

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Shadow of the Holy Book (Pyhän kirjan varjo)

by James McNally on April 21, 2008

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Shadow of the Holy Book (Pyhän kirjan varjo)

Shadow of the Holy Book (Pyhän kirjan varjo) (2007, Director: Arto Halonen): I read about this film when it played at IDFA in Amsterdam and was so intrigued by the premise, I emailed Hot Docs pro­grammer Sean Farnel imme­di­ately to ask him to bring it to Hot Docs. He emailed me back to say that he and the dir­ector had been drinking vodka the night before and that it would likely be screening here. What had me so excited? Here’s the premise: Turkmenistan is a central Asian country with huge reserves of oil and nat­ural gas. It’s also one of the most repressive dic­tat­or­ships in the world. After ruling since 1985, dic­tator Saparmurat Niyazov declared him­self “President for Life” in 1999 and pub­lished a book called the Ruhnama in 2001. Turkmens are over­whelm­ingly Muslim, but Niyazov placed the Ruhnama above the Koran as a holy book and required all cit­izens to study it. So far, so bizarre, right? But the really inter­esting thing is that the film­maker found that for­eign cor­por­a­tions doing busi­ness in Turkmenistan had gained favour by “spon­soring” trans­la­tions of the book into their own lan­guages and by oth­er­wise pro­moting Niyazov’s strange cult of per­son­ality. At least, that’s how they por­trayed them­selves to Niyazov. In reality, the com­panies kept all of this quiet in their own coun­tries, not wanting to be seen as bribing a dic­tator just to gain luc­rative contracts.

Despite the fas­cin­ating concept of exposing cor­porate mis­chief in a strange and repressive country, the film frus­trated me at every turn. Finnish dir­ector Halonen enlists the help of American journ­alist Kevin Frazier and the two make an odd couple. The dour Finn and the nebbishy American with the slight lisp set out to con­tact many of the cor­porate vil­lains but are hope­lessly inept. Much of the film’s run­ning time is footage of the two of them in hotel rooms in various cities failing to get through to the right cor­porate con­tacts. As well, the use of sev­eral tacky sound effects (a cash register “cha-ching” each time a corporation’s profits are men­tioned, a type­writer intro­du­cing every on-screen title) drove me to dis­trac­tion very quickly. By the time the film­makers arrive in America to track down exec­ut­ives from Caterpillar and John Deere, the film enters Michael Moore ter­ritory, except without any of Moore’s (debat­able) cha­risma. One baff­ling Moore-like stunt has Frazier reading Ruhnama excerpts on the New York City subway, after refer­ring to America’s con­sti­tu­tional right to freedom of speech.

Overall, the travelogue approach wears thin pretty early. More prom­ising were inter­views with some Turkmen human-rights act­iv­ists and polit­ical dis­sid­ents. Unfortunately, though, far too much use is made of some crude Flash anim­a­tions cre­ated by the son of one of the act­iv­ists. By the end of the film, we realize that the pair have not been able to put together a single sub­stan­tial inter­view. Though they do get to travel to Turkmenistan on two occa­sions, they have to film clandes­tinely and are really only able to show us some of the massive con­struc­tion pro­jects awarded to the for­eign firms. We learn later that the numerous English-language Turkmen “news­casts” and Ruhnama “reading circles” were re-creations.

There were some important alleg­a­tions uncovered by the film, and some brave and dan­gerous under­cover work was per­formed by a Finnish dip­lomat. Hopefully, some of the material uncovered in the film will lead to changes in cor­porate beha­viour. But as a doc­u­mentary film, I think Shadow of the Holy Book is a bit of a missed opportunity.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Arto Halonen and writer Kevin Frazier from after the screening:

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Duration: 16:36

Official site for the film
Trailer
Freedom for Sale, estab­lished by the dir­ectors to focus atten­tion on human rights and free speech issues in dif­ferent coun­tries, starting with Turkmenistan.

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, corporations, humanrights, turkmenistan

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