March 11-17, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Human Rights Watch Film Festival (Through Sun., March 14, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) We're constantly told that the world is getting smaller, that new technologies are "bringing people closer together." But information isn't understanding. Any one of thousands of news sites can tell you what's happening in Rwanda, or Colombia, or the Republic of Georgia (or, for that matter, Haiti or Iraq), but they rarely give a sense of what it's like to live there, to experience events on a personal and social level, and not merely journalistically.

As concepts go, "human rights" is among the more important, but it's still only a concept until it comes face to face with the realities of a nation in turmoil (and that includes our own). What does it mean, for example, to say that someone has a "right" to a fair trial, or to freedom from tyranny, or to economic self-determination? In the U.S., we think of rights as entitlements, freedoms to which we are entitled, which the government may permit or deny. But what if no institution exists to bestow those rights (voluntarily or not)? A right then becomes something more elusive, an ideal rather than a concrete goal.

The best movies in International House's Human Rights Watch Film Festival deal with nations in transition, and the attempt to build solid institutions on shifting ground. Directed by Paul Devlin (SlamNation), Power Trip (Sun., March 14, 7 p.m.) chronicles the attempts to bring safe, reliable and, of course, profitable electric power to the former Soviet state of Georgia. I doubt many Americans include electricity on a list of human rights -- mostly because we can't imagine not having it -- but as Laika, a Georgian journalist puts it, "Electricity is very much connected to hope." The scariest thing in Georgia, she says, is not political or military unrest (this is before the recent upsurge in terrorism) but the electric bill.

The bills come from AES-Telasi, a hybrid of the former state utility company and the Washington-based AES corporation, who purchased it at the fire-sale price of $35 million. But with the average bill exceeding the average Georgian's monthly salary, AES-Telasi is losing an estimated $120,000 a day, while 40 percent of the 1.2 million citizens of Tblisi, where AES has its Georgian headquarters, get their power by making their own illegal (and sometimes deadly) connections. The power lines running through the city's streets are a mass of electrified spaghetti, a perfect metaphor for the country's chaotic state.

With the government eager to duck its bills as well -- Cabinet positions, we're told, go to those who are best at getting the government free power -- AES-Telasi becomes desperate to take in funds, and it starts shutting off power to customers large and small. If the outsiders in charge of the company don't seem unduly mercenary, their shallowness can be appalling. It's clear Devlin has a liking for Piers Lewis, the globetrotting project manager who looks as if he's been recruited from the nearest campsite, but when an overzealous employee shuts off the airport's power as a plane is landing to force payment, Lewis' response that "They freaked out and paid the bill instantly, man!" seems pitifully inadequate.

Shot over a period of years, Power Trip encompasses a painful process of learning on both sides: The executives learn how to deal with the populace, and the Georgians, used to living under communism, learn to pay their bills on time, and what happens if they don't. The longer the process continues, though, the more endangered it is; AES is almost compelled to pull out of the country when the Enron scandal precipitates an abrupt change in management. Even more precarious, and more painful, is the learning process in Anne Aghion's Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda? (Thu., March 11, 8 p.m.) In 1994, Rwanda's Hutu-led government brought long-simmering ethnic tensions to a boil; newspapers and radio stations joined the incitement, and when the dust settled, 800,000 Rwandans, most ethnically Tutsi, had been slaughtered by their own countrymen.

It would seem a wound impossible to heal, not least because the country's law-enforcement institutions were so deeply implicated in the genocide. Seeking out a new method of administering justice, Rwanda's leaders returned to tribal customs, the idea that a community, and not individuals, should decide. Aghion (In Rwanda We Say É ) investigates the institution of the gacaca from the ground up, actually spending most time on the pre-gacaca hearings. Those who may have committed crimes stand before the community, and if no one speaks against them, they are free to go. Some accusations sound like hearsay compounded by grief -- the bereaved identify culprits with dead certainty, despite not having witnessed the crime -- but Aghion's film is so concerned with showing events from ordinary Rwandans' perspective that she neglects to add her own. The result is a confusing portrait of a confused process that sheds less light than it could or should.

Life and Debt (Sun., March 10, 7 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Stephanie Black's documentary isn't part of the HRW festival, but it might as well be, with its depiction of a Jamaica ravaged by globalization and narration by anticolonialist Jamaica Kincaid. A Scribe Producers' Forum event, the screening will be followed by a Q&A with Black.

NFB Tribute (Wed., March 17, 7 p.m., $6, International House) I House's far-flung tribute to the British Commonwealth kicks off with an evening of short works funded by the National Film Board of Canada, so diverse they could make you cry for the lack of a similar American institution. Highlights include three shorts by animator Norman McLaren and Lonely Boy, Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig's cinema verite portrait of Paul Anka, reportedly the source for much of the dialogue in the recently retired Peter Watkins' pop-manipulation fable Privilege.

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