Also this issue:

Truth Hurts
Steve James talks about turning the camera on himself.
-Sam Adams

Tomorrow Today
Justin Lin on Better Luck Tomorrow’s stereotype subversion.
-Cindy Fuchs

Boom Time
A banner year for the Philadelphia Film Festival.
-Sam Adams

April 24-30, 2003

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (Thu.-Sun., April 24-April 27, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., www.ihousephilly.org) International House's program of selections from the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival kicks into high gear with five films in four days, ranging from a film essay on Haitian economic inequity to an advocacy documentary about police brutality in New York City.

Patricio Guzmán's The Pinochet Case (Fri., 8 p.m.) may be the series' most sweeping work, although its somewhat chaotic structure dulls its impact. A sort of addendum (though not, unfortunately, the epilogue) to Guzmán's landmark The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case follows the attempts to strip the former dictator of his diplomatic immunity and have him prosecuted for international crimes against humanity, mainly torture. At the same time, the film mounts a case of its own, literally exhuming the past and collecting testimony from prisoners who were subject to horrific tortures -- often electrical wires placed in every conceivable (and some inconceivable) orifices -- under Pinochet's regime. The machinations surrounding the attempts to try Pinochet criminally are convoluted, often turning on obscure points of law, so it makes sense for Guzmán to integrate the less abstract investigation of the horrors of Pinochet's reign. The investigation also provides a sense of linear progress, which contrasts with the infuriating back-and-forths of the criminal case. (Pinochet has his immunity stripped and restored more than once.) It may be true that, as one British official ventures, the modern world simply could not function if heads of state or even former heads of state were subject to arrest -- it certainly wouldn't function the same way -- but at the same time, your blood boils to see Margaret Thatcher cozying up to Pinochet and thank him for preserving "freedom" (i.e. murdering communists) while he's under house arrest. (It's worth recalling that Pinochet was installed by a U.S.-backed coup on Sept. 11, 1973.) Pinochet never was jailed, of course, and The Pinochet Case serves both as a cry of outrage and an attempt to heal the still-gaping wound. A panel discussion titled "Memory Erupting in the Present: The Chilean Case" will follow the screening.

Justifiable Homicide (Sun., 7 p.m.) deals with a problem much closer to home. Directed by Jon Osman and Jonathan Stack (The Farm: Angola, U.S.A.), the film is partly a profile of Margarita Rosario, whose son Anthony was shot to death by New York police detectives in 1995 along with her newphew, Hilton Vega. (A third was wounded.) The detectives had been laying in wait for them, told by the inhabitants of a Bronx apartment that three men had robbed them the night before and had promised to return again. Though only one of the men shot by the detectives had any kind of criminal record, the apartment's owners, who were then running a green card marriage ring, had a long string of convictions, posing the question of why the detectives would have taken their word on the situation. Though the young men came armed -- in order to collect money owed to Vega's girlfriend for participating in a sham wedding -- they never fired their weapons. A review of autopsy reports conducted by an independent pathologist indicates the two men were shot multiple times in the back, the angle entry and condition of exit wounds indicating they were lying on the floor at the time.

Though a grand jury disagreed, the case against the officers would seem at least strong enough to warrant investigation. In fact, the evidence is so compelling that you wish Osman and Stack had let it speak for itself, rather than engaging in heavy-handed techniques and leaving obvious holes in the story. (When a TV news reporter says the victims had a bad reputation in the neighborhood, you want to hear more, if only as evidence of how quickly people rush to justify the police's actions.) Still, the film serves as a cutting indictment of the law-and-order culture instilled by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in a particularly cruel move, cuts off Margarita Rosario when she calls in to his radio show, then proceeds to lecture her on good parenting as if she were still on the air. (Split-screen video captures both sides of the conversation.) A panel discussion with Osman and Rosario will follow the screening.

Also on the bill at I-House: The Eye of the Day (dir. Leonard Helmrich), a document of the Indonesian Reformasi, and Lumumba director Raoul Peck's Profit and Nothing But!, a Marxist attack on Haitian capitalism (both Thu., 8 p.m.), and Steven Silver's The Last Just Man (Sat., 8 p.m.) a profile of Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who tried and failed to stop the Rwandan genocide of 1994. A discussion with the University of Pennsylvania's Fernando Chang-Muy will follow the film; given the current situation in Iraq, fascinating parallels are sure to emerge.

IT Summit (Fri., April 25, 8 p.m. and Sat., April 26, 8:30 p.m., $12, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) It's hard to think of a more exciting collaboration than this pairing between the percussive jazz of Sonic Liberation Front and the ever-mutating video styles of Termite TV, not to mention the dancers of the Maewa Cultural Ensemble. It's impossible to know what to expect from this multimedia event -- which features traditional and modern dance, live video mixing, and "Afro-Cuban Yoruba jazz jam-band electronica" -- but that's exactly the point.

Home Movies (Sun., April 27, 1:30 p.m.; Mon., April 28, 7 p.m., County Theater, 20 E. State St., Doylestown, 215-345-6789, www.countytheater.org; Wed., April 30, 7 p.m., Ambler Theater, 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler, 215-345-7855, www.amblertheater.org, both $5.25-$7.75) Chris Smith must have some sort of specially made eccentric detector: How else to explain how the man who found American Movie's obsessive monster-moviemaker tracked down five equally wacked homeowners for this charming look at domicile insanity. Granted, not all of his five subjects' peculiarities are equally expressed in their homes: the Louisiana alligator wrangler's houseboat seems tame compared to the Illinois inventor's remote-control ranch house, where the toilet is enclosed in a flowerpot that whirs aside at the touch of a button. Some are frenetic, like the home of two cat lovers who've reconfigured their home (and their lives) to suit their 11 felines. (The woman has been told she's allergic, but she got another doctor.) And some are peaceful, like the Hawaiian mountaintop retreat of an American who once starred on the No. 2 sitcom in Japan. The home of one Kansas couple manages to be both. Made from a converted nuclear missile silo, their underground warren is a shrine to peace and harmony, although you'll catch the couple's male half bragging about how many megatons of TNT their home can withstand. He also has the movie's best quote: Speaking of transforming the onetime launch chamber into the living room, he notes, "This was a really serious room." Home Movies is slight (it was sponsored by a home-furnishings website), but it's a winning look at what seems a particularly American phenomenon.

Cinema Paradiso (Wed., April 30, 7 p.m., free, International House) Giuseppe Tornatore will introduce a free screening of the original cut of his mushy crowd-pleaser, and lead a Q&A afterwards.