Re-Storying Justice Through Human Rights Film: A Selection of Films from the 2008 New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival

All of the films reviewed here ask us to put back together the loss of individual freedom and dignity by seemingly simple acts of remembrance. But can a work of art, even documentary art, which tries to render the facts of particular lives and historical experience, accomplish this? Can a record of events ever restore a sense of justice? These films pose that question. The answer is no. No film, no matter how expertly produced, can make one whole again; once a life is broken through injustice and the denial of human rights, it is broken. What film can do is re-story justice in such a way that we are never allowed the privilege of forgetting.

A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman (Peter Raymont, Canada, 2007, 92m) Winner of the 2008 Gemini Award for Best Original Musical Score for a Documentary and nominated for Best Director.

The premise of this film is the return of Ariel Dorfman to his homeland, Chile. Dorfman, the famed author of How to Read Donald Duck, Death and the Maiden, and a host of other books, articles, and plays, served as the Minister of Culture during the Allende regime before fleeing the country following the 1973 military coup. Dorfman briefly lived in Buenos Aires, but most of the time he has lived in Durham, North Carolina as a Professor at Duke University.

The film makes a strenuous effort to raise the issue of the meaning of exile. Unfortunately, however, as the film progresses the viewer realizes that this is not Dorfman’s first trip back to his home country. One scene consists of archival footage from 1988 of Dorfman providing commentary on Chilean television concerning the national referendum that eventually led to the removal of General Pinochet from office. The point is that Dorfman has already returned home—perhaps a number of times—which raises the question why the trip depicted in the film is so meaningful. Moreover, there is an uneasy feeling that the viewer is being manipulated. What only adds to this is information provided at the end that the film was made in conjunction with a forthcoming book. This criticism is not to suggest that many of the issues raised in the film are not important; what is being questioned is just how genuine this film is in raising them. Recommended with reservations. http://www.promise-tothedead.com

Traces of the Trade (Katrina Browne, Alla Kovgan & Jude Ray, US, 2008, 86m) Nominated for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.

This film follows members of the DeWolf family—the largest slave-traders in the United States in the nineteenth century—as they attempt to confront the crimes of their family’s history. Although there are hundreds of DeWolf relatives, only a small number take up the challenge of filmmaker Katrina Browne (who is herself a DeWolf descendant) to meet in Bristol, Rhode Island, and then to travel the slave route their ancestors had developed and profited by, from Ghana to Cuba.

This is, for the most part, a likeable enough group to travel with, and their frustrations and lack of direction in terms of what “to do” about the past can certainly be shared by viewers. In some ways, the family’s slave-trading past becomes quite real to them, but in other ways it remains in the realm of the theoretical. There are, of course, no easy answers, but the film does not pretend that there are. One of the more telling scenes occurs at the end of the trip when the group is eating dinner back in Bristol and the discussion turns to the Ivy League pedigree that all but one share. Each person is absolutely convinced that there was nothing about their circumstances in life that gave them an advantage, in the same way that white Americans continue to be convinced that they also have earned their superior position in US society. While the film represents an effort to deal with...