This year the 8th Encounters Documentary Festival has, as expected, its share of movies about Iraq, photojournalism, global militarization and the vicissitudes of the USA’s take on global power writes William Pretorius – Artslink.co.za.
Children are a mini-theme, as well, from American kids who do ballroom dancing in Mad Hot Ballroom to Kevin Carter’s famous photo of a vulture watching a starving girl in the Sudan. Being a photojournalist isn’t easy as we learn in The Death of Kevin Carter: Causality of the Bang-Bang Club – Carter committed suicide some time after taking the photo.
How objective should the camera be? Interestingly, the movies that deal with Iraq try to understand the situation through other eyes. We’re used to mainstream news reporting and analysis. We tend to forget that people are living there.
James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments explores the aftermath of the US invasion from street level. Kids become our narrative guide. There’s Mohammed who lives in Baghdad and who scrabbles to make a living to support his family; Sheik Aws al Kafaji a member of Moqtada Sadr’s Shiite movement; and, finally, two Kurdish boys who are shown as loving and peaceful kids.
These three segments show that the situation there is anything but simple. The Shiite section portrays people living in a state of perpetual religious fervour. Adherents beat up traders selling alcohol in the marketplace. Hussein’s brutality has been replaced by another kind – religious fundamentalism. The USA has provided a focal point in this explosive situation, enemy number one.
The last Kurdish section is idyllic, a bucolic paradise after the urban struggle that Mohammed endures, and the pounding Shiite emotionalism. The movie is subjective, but this cracking of objectivity makes the kids central to the narrative rather than preconceived ideas about the country. The kind of society they have to live in is called into question, as well as the USA’s attempts to change it.
The film, too, breaks down perceptions of Islam as an absolute narrative. In some press, of course, Islam is associated simply with terrorism. Iraq in Fragments portrays Islam as a complex multi-narrative. We also get the kind of human contact that’s not possible in news reports – after watching the film our interest in news will be different. How will future events impact on these kids?
A similar process is at work in Leila Khaled Hijacker about the woman who hi-jacked a plane in 1969 to highlight the plight of Palestinians, and became a media icon. Lina Makboul, a Swedish-Palestinian filmmaker, decided to interview Khaled, and discovered – an ordinary, warm-hearted, middle-aged woman.
Interestingly, the documentary movie – at least those I’ve seen so far – complicate the idea of right and wrong in situations the American news sees as clean-cut us-and-them. The documentary, too, gives us a more substantial context than TV news that also gives us body language, voices, people. For example, in Jean-Pierre Krief’s Saddam Hussein, the Trial there’s a scene in which Saddam Hussein listens to the charges against him.
He looks disoriented, bewildered. But then he gathers his, as the narrator says, “wherewithal”. One can see energy building in him, a recalcitrant fierceness and egotism – and one understands how it’s possible to have the utter belief in personal infallibility and ruthlessness that he has. Other lives don’t mean much. And one sees what the judges are up against.
Even the concept of justice is fraught. Hussein is to be indicted in his coming trial for genocide for gassing a Kurdish village. But what is genocide and what isn’t? His officially-appointed defence team suggests he will say that he was merely combating terrorism, as the Americans are doing now. Hussein has his own axis of evil.
Intrigues and disinformation also come to the fore. Did Hussein actually gas the Kurds? Other evidence implies it could have been Iran. Then we’re told of a behind-the-scenes complot: there were whispers in high circles about providing evidence that a third party was responsible. The truth is a nebulous thing.
The documentaries as a whole provide a counterfoil to the overwhelmingly trite Hollywood formulas that form our staple diet. Leila Khaled is the kind of figure Bruce Willis would be called upon to eliminate to provide spectacular action. Political themes, unless they’re high-explosive bang-bang, are avoided, yet one of the most moving films on the festival for me was journalist William Nessen’s The Black Road about the Aceh’s struggle for independence against the Indonesian government and army. Aceh is located on the tip of Indonesia.
Nessen lived with the rebel army for several months. He married an Aceh activist. His subjective involvement with their struggle strengthens his documentary. We get to know people who are tortured and killed during the course of the film. Events are written by real life. At the end, Nessen, who was deported, is able to return after the tsunami to a devastated country and an uneasy peace between the Indonesian government and the rebels.
The Black Road has the tempo and techniques of a fictional movie. One can imagine the mainstream sentimentality and clichés that would creep in to weaken it, and turn an extraordinary story into something ordinary. Even a poetic, surreal film like Nicolas Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread disturbs by showing in a series of neat, clean images, the destructive wheels and cogs that produce the most common of necessities, food in our societies.
Good documentaries, the return to the home base of reality even if it’s subjective, are often more imaginative than the genre fiction films Hollywood churns out these days. Reality has the better stories. The documentary is also highly important in an increasingly info-overloaded, controversial, militarised global society that’s constantly changing as Erik Sandini and Tarek Saleh remind us in Gitmo: The New Rules of War, a look at what really happened at Abu Ghraib and what’s happening at Guantanamo Bay.
They conclude that the USA is writing its own conventions for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war. The photos from Abu Ghraib of naked, abused prisoners seem to be new methods of torture that are used at Guantanamo as well. It’s difficult to find out. Spin doctors rule in the American military. The lessons of advertising have been well-learned. The Americans have perfected hype, smoke screens and mirrors.
The old, familiar world, the documentary suggests, has gone. The new one’s puzzling, technologically sophisticated and devious. But Sandini, a Swedish moviemaker, and Saleh are there with cameras and questions, doing what movies are supposed to do: unsettle, probe and discover.
* The 8th Encounters Documentary festival is on in Johannesburg at Nu-Metro cinemas in Hyde Park from 13 to 23 July and in Cape Town at Nu-Metro cinemas at the V&A Waterfront from 20 July to 6 August, 2006.
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