Human Wrongs

shot by both sides: Discordia's Aaron Mat, a Jewish student who joined the Palestinian cause.

An off year for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival

by Sam Adams

International House's redaction of the annual Human Rights Watch festival is usually an event to look forward to, but this year's selection is smaller and much weaker than usual. One of the three films in this year's brief program, the Korean documentary Repatriation (screening Saturday at 1 p.m.), not only fails to do justice to its subject, but actively contradicts the festival's stated goals.

Before it becomes offensive, Kim Dong-won's lengthy, turgid film is merely trying. Kim, a South Korean documentarian, opens the film with a dedication to his father, followed by a title acknowledging that his anti-communist father "would have been furious at my work" — proof that even parents get it right sometimes. Kim's subject is a fascinating one, which only makes his soppy, unexacting approach more exasperating: the dozens of North Korean spies who have been languishing in South Korean jails for more than three decades, refusing to repudiate their allegiance to the North and barred by the South from returning home.

As Kim details, the South has only two terms for former spies: "converted" and "yet-to-be-converted." Prolonged resistance (or, if you like, intractable blindness) is literally unspeakable. In the early 1990s, many of the unconverted were released from prison, but they were met with a coldness and outright hostility. With weepy music, tender close-ups and overweening narration — one ex-spy is described as having a face "that can make you believe in the goodness of humankind" — Kim toils mightily to sympathize his protagonists, but he only rarely, and fleetingly, acknowledges that they are in some respects reaping what they sowed. The fear and recrimination that greets them is due in no small part to the espionage for which they show no remorse. Despite Kim's best efforts to make them likeable, the ex-spies' inflexibility provides some of the movie's most revealing moments, if not its most inspiring: Even after the South has decides to allow repatriation, one North Korean storms out of a gathering where someone implies that the North might be holding Southerners hostage, refusing to admit the possibility that he might have a counterpart on the other side of the border.

It takes Kim nearly an hour to make his first mention of the North's shoddy human rights record, and barely are the words out of his mouth before he moves to shift the blame to the United States. According to Kim, the United States has "been at war" with North Korea for the last 50 years — a state of affairs that would surely be news to both countries — and "the war limits the rights of the North Korean people." Pointing out that economic sanctions often harm the people more than their government is fair game, but such bent-backwards apologism reeks of the days of Stalin. That it should find its way into to a film festival allegedly devoted to human rights is both a shock and a disgrace.

Being merely a bore, Francisco Lombardi's What the Eye Doesn't See (Friday at 7 p.m.) is something of a relief. Set in Peru during the waning days of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, Lombardi's sprawling drama aims for a composite portrait of a society in transition, but merely fills the screen without generating ideas. Eyes gets so tangled in clichés and clumsy metaphors — the coddled journalist whose soul-sickness manifests as a cancerous mole, the wealthy lawyer with a penchant for opera and little girls — that it neglects to do more than keep track of the political changes roiling outside.

Surprisingly, the festival's least ambitious and shortest (by a factor of two!) movie is also its most effective. Discordia (Thursday at 7 p.m.) opens in chaos, with the protests that shut down former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned talk at Montreal's Concordia University and erupted in a near-riot. Rather than sketch the background of the protests, Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal's concise documentary takes them as a starting point for an examination of the tense, often hostile relationship between the campus Hillel and its Palestinian solidarity organization. (Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim students outnumber Jews, although Montreal is home to a large Hasidic community.) The film zeroes in on Aaron Maté, a Jewish student who allies himself with the Palestinians and is consequently attacked from both sides: Zionist protesters predictably label him a "self-hating Jew" while one of his ostensible comrades remarks that Aaron ought "to stand behind us — not beside us."

Apart from Aaron's brief meeting with Noam Chomsky, Discordia wisely keeps the professional commentators on the margins, focusing on the students' often awkward and wrongheaded attempts to work out their differences, and how those attempts are compromised and outright sabotaged by a mass media intent on inflaming the controversy. In the end, Concordia's students decide to shake things up by, well, not shaking things up, electing a student government that promises "evolution, not revolution." Their passionate infighting has succeeded only in converting the student body to a militant form of apathy.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival Thu., May 26 - Sat., May 28, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542