Looking for films to screen during the Genocide Intervention Fund’s 100 Days of action? Here are a few of the best.
With the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan now entering its second year, there are no excuses for sitting on your ass. One of the most affecting things you can do on your campus – to raise money and awareness—is to put on a film screening.
Campus Progress abandons its usually snarky tone to highlight nine genuine and powerful films that engage with genocide, civil war, and their aftermaths. The cynical movie industry rarely rises to the occasion to take on something so grim, but occasionally it does. From large-scale Hollywood productions to small documentaries, here are some of the best.
1. Ghosts of Rwanda
This PBS frontline documentary created for the 10th anniversary of the genocide is comprehensive, gruesome, and totally necessary. The film skewers the web of social, political and diplomatic failures that enabled the genocide. With first-hand accounts of the genocide from the soldiers, survivors, and perpetrators who lived through it, along with exclusive interviews with UN Secretary-Generals Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros Ghali and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
2. Welcome to Sarajevo
Based on Natasha’s Story, a book from real-life journalist Michael Nicholson, this film follows Henderson, a cynical journalist, and a pack of reporters searching for gore and a good scoop in the streets of a Sarajevo under siege. Henderson ends up getting involved with a local orphanage and campaigs to get the kids out of Yugoslavia – including Emira, a young girl who he promises to adopt and take home to England. But soon he must return when Emira’s mother, who abandoned her, demands that she be returned to war-torn Sarajevo. The film powerfully explores the dissonance between what was happening in the streets and what got reported in the mainstream news, as we see Henderson’s report of a massacre kicked aside for a puff piece on royal family romance. (If you’re someone who’d rather have read the puff piece, you can check out this film for ER’s hunky Dr. Kovach.)
3. Lost Boys of Sudan
Megan Mylan and John Shenk document the journey of two Sudanese boys, Peter and Santino, beginning a new life in America in 2001 after being orphaned by the long-running civil war in Sudan. When one of the two hopeful teenagers talks about his upcoming voyage to America, he says that “the journey is like you are going to heaven.” This line rings in your head and makes your heart break a bit as you watch the pair encounter loneliness, cultural misunderstandings, tiny daily defeats, and alienation in their new homes of Nebraska and North Dakota as they trade in corn meal for Cokes and deadly gunfire for getting mugged by classmates. Gripping, disappointing, hopeful and compulsively watchable.
4. Shoah
Sublet your apartment first: This brilliant French documentary clocks in at an audacious 570 minutes. An uncompromising mix of interviews with Holocaust survivors as well as several ex-Nazis who helped perpetrate the atrocities, the film, amazingly, is compelling throughout. Director Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years criss-crossing the globe looking for concentration camp survivors, SS commandants and eyewitnesses. Even without the use of elaborate reenactments or archival footage, the end result is totally haunting.
5. The Killing Fields
This unflinching film about the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities in Cambodia stars Cambodian doctor and non-actor Haing Ngor, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide (although not of Los Angeles – he was mugged and murdered by gang members in 1996), as well as John Malkovich, Sam Waterston, and Spaulding Gray. Based on the real-life story of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, the film follows an American journalist covering the secret US bombing campaign in Cambodia. He convinces his Cambodian assistant and friend, Dith Pran, to remain behind with him to cover the story after the Khmer Rouge takeover and the withdrawal of the US military, but he miscalculates a Cambodian’s chances for escape. The two are separated when the Westerners are evacuated just in time to escape with their lives during the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. The rest of the film chronicles the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime (and doesn’t shy away from critiquing America’s role in the whole thing) and Dith Pran’s endurance as he struggles to stay alive in the rural, murderous “reeducation” camps during the bloodbath that killed 3 million Cambodians.
6. Hotel Rwanda
A wrenching political thriller that recreates the disastrous three months of slaughter in Rwanda has been criticized for being a bit squeamish about showing the full extent of the savagery. Nonetheless, the film is devastating and unsparing as it indicts the media and an apathetic international community with excellent performances from Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo.
7. Ararat
Ararat brings to life the Turkish massacre and forced deportation of more than a million of its Armenian citizens in 1915. The film utilizes an artily convoluted “film within a film” structure by following the lives of a group of contemporary Canadian-Armenians who are making a movie about the tragedy. Ararat is a moving and thought provoking mediation on the relationship between history, personal memory, and art. Turkey still denies that genocide occurred.
8. The Letter
1,100 Somali immigrants fled civil strife at home and settled in the formerly prosperous old mill town of Lewiston, Maine. In the wake of September 11th, the mayor, Larry Raymond, writes an open letter to the immigrants saying: “Tell your friends and relatives not to move here.” In the film, David Sterns of the local World Church comments, ‘’They’re doing the same things that the African-Americans are doing here. They’re leeching off the system. They’re eating up subsidized housing. They’re spreading diseases.’’ Neighbors start to feel threatened by the immigrants and we witness outbursts of tremendous racism as well as support for the immigrants as their alienation grows and the small town verges closer to a major culture clash. The film is an affecting, straight forward portrayal of an American town at its best and worst.
9. 100 Days
An eyewitness to the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, director/cameraman Nick Hughes wrote a script recounting what he saw, focused on one family and, in particular, their teenage daughter. The film pays particular attention to the tragically inadequate roles of the UN, the French government and the Catholic church. This raw and devastating film highlights the global disinterest during these three months – and reminds us of what happens to the forgotten people left behind.