[Litst] Documentaries 2010

1. Afghan Star: After years of Taliban rule under a strict interpretation of Islam which forbid singing and dancing, Afghans determine to enjoy life again through Afghan Star, the Afghan version of “American idols” or “British got talent.” I was supposed to watch a film about religious fanatic in Iran in the same time slot. I was tempted by Miri’s advertising for this film “music, funny and not so heavy.”  ”But I watch documentaries to think and not to have fun.” So I said.  Anyway, Miri and I went for a quick coffee break after the film “Men of the city” while waiting for our next films. Maybe it was the beer and the cosy, new-age feel of this tiny bar hidden in the labyrinth of Lucerna that made me say the following words which were so untypical of me.  ”Miri, I should say that I really appreciate having a local as a friend (She’s Slovak, but Slovak is Czech, Czech is Slovak, who cares?) I can’t imagine living in foreign country and hang out with only foreigners.  I usually care more about my brain than about other people, sometimes even friend.  So uh hmmm uh, I’ll watch this movie with you okay?” Enough said. The film documents the journeys of four contestants on their quests to become the new Afghan star. Serata was eliminated early in the final round due to her rebellious character; she dared to dance in public. On her final act, she surprised everybody by really dancing.  You would think that the girl performed a Shakira, Madona type of dancing right? No. Serata, dressed in national costume, soft of wiggled her body a little bit. For this act alone, she was condemned by both men and women around the country, especially those in her city. One interviewee openly expressed his opinion that she should be killed. The three other contestants moved on to become the final contestants.  Coincidentally (or is it?) they hail from three main ethnic groups of Afghanistan: Lehma, Pashtun; Rafi, Tajik and Hameed, Hazara. If you read the book or watch the film “Kite runner”, you’ll understand more about the relation between the Pashtun, the ruling class and the Hazara, the oppressed class. While the males Rafi and Hameed went on to be Afghan’s household names, Lehma received death threats and had to go into protection program. You can see how little progress has been made in this country.  (Havana Marking/UK)
2. Anywhere but Here>: I didn’t want to see this film at all because every single documentary about Bosnia is about war or ethnic problem. I used to see every documentary about Bosnia in previous years, but hardly learned anything new. The setting for this film is the war-raged, under-developed Srebrenica, the city where Serb soldiers mass-murdered male Muslims during the war. The city is under jurisdiction of the Republic of Serbia entity and has a dominant Serb population. One of the main characters is the mayor, a Muslims, elected due to votes from absent Muslims. Another one is a Serbian priest who tries to rebuild the church and serves as both spiritual and community leader for Serb inhabitants. Samira, another character, returned from Western Europe, works in a shop to support her family.  (Tamara Milosevic / Germany)
3. Arrival: I remembered being in the exact situations, arriving at the airport, hanging out in such office getting my paperwork looking like deer during the first few months in the USA. France, one of the most popular European destinations for immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. The film’s main characters are two social workers who handle these immigrant cases.  (Claudine Bories, Patrice Chagnard / France)
4. Bassidj: This film is so poorly done I had to walk out for the first time. How the director/editor expect the audience to sit still for 2 hours staring at scenes with people walking back and forth, ranting and repeating the same shit over and over. I was very excite at first to see this film that I picked up three extra tickets for my friends. Thanks god two of them didn’t show up. Ok we got your point, these people are fanatic but do we need to hear them repeating themselves for 30 minutes. This is not a documentary; it’s me taking a video camera to an event and turning it on. (Mehran Tamadon / France, Iran, Switzerland)
5. Country of Dream: Vietnamese laborers are promised paradise in Czech only to realize this paradise is hell. The exact word of one lady was “They put us into death” which was translated as “They caused us trouble.” (Hello?) The Vietnamese come mostly from the countryside and villages in North Vietnam. They sold their lands or borrowed a huge amount of money ($6000-$10000) to Vietnamese-run agencies with promises that they would find good job paying good money in the land of good beer and beautiful girls. They signed deceiving contracts they didn’t understand. Most of them work in factories with low-paying jobs; some don’t even have a job. They are even owed their salary. Their working visa will soon expire which risks the chance they will be deported if caught by the police which means these agency people don’t have to pay them the owed salary. They can’t sue the agencies because they don’t know the Czech laws and also because they are hiding from the police due to their muddy legal status. They pay 4000 czk per month in a shared 4-bed dormitory located among containers in the middle of nowhere. (That means one tiny room costs 16000 czk. For this amount of money, you can get a decent studio in the center of Prague. Jesus!) These Vietnamese are stuck between staying in a foreign country without a job, without money and returning to their homeland with a huge debt. (Martin Ryšavý / Czech)
6. Defamation: I don’t think we will ever stop talking about the Holocaust, the Nazi or discrimination against Jews.  The Jews have every right to continue educate their own people and others about this atrocity befallen upon them. It goes the same for non-Jews. But how do we distinguish between studying history, examining facts and milking it out? If a major crime or a minor offense is committed against me, is it anti-Asian, yellow-phobia or strictly an incident in which the target happens to be Asian? Part of the film follows a group of Israeli students visiting Auswitch in Poland on a field trip. The other part focuses on the opinions of adults who are convinced that anti-Semitism still exists and the others who believe the anti-Semite belief is bogus. [ADL, anti-defamation league] (Yoav Shamir / Austria, Denmark, Israel, USA)
7. *Enemies of the People: Thet Sambath lost his father, mother and brother during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge lynching period from 1975 to 1979 like many other Cambodians.  People who suffered from such dramatic experience cope by boozing, shooting drugs, killing themselves or resolving to eternal hatred.  Thet did some thing unusual. For 10 years from 1980, he tracked down many of these killers, got to know them, gained their trust so that he could make them open up about their reason for killing because “it’s for the history of our country.”  The high-rank Khmer Rouge leader, [Noun Cha] who never said anything talked only to Thet during their “working” relationship spanning many years. According to him, it was the decision to choose either the nation or the individuals who were branded traitors for protesting or detracting from Khmer Rouge’s core ideology. What surprised me the most is not why these killers could be so callous but their openness to talk about their pass killing, even go into the details how they killed their victims, their willingness to help Thet Sambath with his project. Probably their past deed weights heavily in their hearts as they approach old ages, and they need to get it out before they die. Maybe it has something to do with their Buddhist belief as they mentioned it occasionally. Maybe they tell the truth in hope of a nicer reincarnation. I believe they are sincere in their remorse which something you don’t see so often with killers from other genocides. Perhaps there is a huge difference between these Khmer Rouge killers and other killers. These formers are simple peasants who were brainwashed by ideology and went on killing their own people who are similar to them in every aspect. The latter, not only fueled by propaganda, they were incited with hatred for people of different race, religion, nationality, etc… While the Khmer Rouge killers can feel remorse later on life that they killed innocent fellow men, the killers from other genocides believe that they only kill “other people.” (Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath / UK, Cambodia)
8. God Bless Iceland: Iceland was the first country got hit by the financial crisis. It declared bankruptcy in October 2008. The UK passed a law calling Iceland a terrorist state in order to sue them for the money owed to British investors. I was initially very excited to see this film to learn more about the situation and hopefully something about finance. I kept hearing these headlines about “financial crisis,” but crap what does it mean, how did it start blah blah?  The film disappointed me because it shows the things that I’ve already known: the country is in deep shit, people are miserable, protest and blame rotten politicians. But how and why they got into this mess? Which politicians? What did he do to trick the entire nation? The name David something got mentioned a lot but we never find out his role in the mess. One of the traits of the Nordics is conservatism and moderation due to the harsh climate condition. That’s why this reckless behavior in the way they handle finance is baffling. To understand more about Iceland, you should read “Meltdown Iceland.” I only read the summary and got totally hooked but it’s not yet available yet in Czech Republic. (Helgi Felixson / Iceland, Germany, Sweden)
9. Last Train Home: China has a large population of migrant workers who work in big cities in manufacturing factories, thanks to the booming economic development. Many of them return home only once a year during Chinese New Year. The director of this film befriended a middle-aged couple working in such factory and made the same trip home to their family in the country side. Geez! It is not a normal train station, it is sea of people. Good lord! They shouted, pushed each other to get tickets. There was one occasion when there was no electricity resulting in the shutting down of all trains, these people had to wait for days until the train running again. I can see things from many different perspectives alright, but after this film, I swear I deliberately practice being patient while waiting for trams and metros. Being in the Prague, you have on one of the best public transportation in the world, with trains’ interval ranges from a couple of minutes to max half an hour. Yet still you have to see the frustration from people when the trains arrive late.  (Lixin Fan / Canada, China)
10. Men of the City: Four different men: an insurance agent, a street janitor, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a trader tough it out in stressful London. They have different background, personality and circumstance except for one thing: how to survive in this Darwinism existence typical of London.  (Marc Isaacs / UK)
11. Mugabe and the White Africans: If you’re white, can you be African? I never thought of this? You are where you were born? It’s true in USA? But it’s not necessary in places where nationality ties closely to race or religion. Africa is conceived by most people as territory of the blacks. If not why then Americans switched from calling their black citizens “black” to “African-American” even though these blacks were not born in Africa, didn’t know this continent and might never care to know about this continent? Mugabe, current president of Zimbabwe harbors hatred for white, passed laws to take back lands from them while inciting blacks to do the same. This is like South Africa’s reverse-apartheid. The blacks beat up, and kill white farmers, destroyed their property. The main persons in the film are two white Zimbabwe who brought their case to the international court in Zambia. They eventually won the case to remain in their farm, but it was burned down afterward.  (Andrew Thompson, Lucy Bailey / UK)
12. October Country:Whenever you see a documentary about contemporary America, you know it’s about messed-up people. ‘Cause when you don’t have wars, hunger, natural disasters, ethnic problem, you’ll have very psychological screwed people, a new kind of social problem of developed country.  Though I lived there for a while and encountered countless of similar people, I’m still semi-shocked watching this movie. The main family in this film comprises of a psychological-troubled Vietnam war veteran; his wife; his daughter who was abused by men and had kids at an early age; his grand-daughter who followed her mom footsteps into this cycle of abuse with men, had a daughter during her teen, aborted another baby, lost the daughter to her ex-boyfriend; his other rude, spoiled grand-daughter who ironically might be the only one who can break out of this cycle; his crazy sister who wanders in cemeteries and practices witchcraft; his foster son who has been in and out of different foster home and jails.  Problem in most contemporary under-developed country or even in many places in Europe are natural disasters, survival matters, political oppression, the kind of problem beyond one’s influence. However, most problems in US society is man-made; it’s something that they totally can influence and change themselves but they don’t.  I find this very sad.  (Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher / USA)
13. Recipes for Disaster: An Anglo-Finnish family of four embarked on a green journey for one year trying to not use or use as little as possible oil-products. It seems not to be a big deal right if gasoline is the only thing we associate with oil. Well, the task proved to be more difficult than when it was originally thought. (And I realized how ignorant I am when it comes to environmental issues.) In order to achieve this goal, they can’t use anything packed with plastic. You’ll see how painfully difficult, almost impossible, it is to find a work around if you pay attention the next time you make a trip down to the super market’s aisles.  They resolved to make their own toothpastes, hair gel and if the wife had found the shop where she could buy un-wrapped toilet paper, she and the kid would have to follow her husband’s recommendation about the Indians’ innovative use of water and the left-hand.  John, the husband/director, stoic and witty, his lovable but frustrated wife Anu and their adorable, witty boys should have won the Finish family of the year.  The mixing of vintage footage and the underlying messages about teamwork, achieving goals make this film a superb enjoyment. (John Webster / Finland)
14. Russian Lessons: A husband-and-wife team directed this documentary from both sides of the front-line in the recent breakout in South Ossetia. Andrei visited and interviewed the Georgians while Olga the Russians. This is the kind of documentary I’ve always want to see, the kind which attempts to reveal the more general and real situation beneath the headlines. If you read only CNN or BBC, you might get something like “Russian tanks entered South Ossetia” or “The Georgians provoked by attacking the Russians” or something like that. This conflict is not a mere one-time whimsical incident incited by nationalists either Georgians or Russians.  To understand it, you have to understand the volatile relationship between Russia and the Caucasus. Only then you can see the war in Georgia in 2008 is something was bound to happen. The film also brought up the war in Chechnya, the breakup of Soviet Union and the hostage of school children in a small village called Beslan to show how Russia’s kryptonite government is more interested in bullying and intimidating its challengers than protecting the Russians. The film’s title can be understood as “Russia gives you a lesson for messing with us.” But the real reason for the name was during a visit to a burned down building in the Georgian neighborhood, Andrej picked up a school notebook labeled “Russian Lessons.” (Andrei Nekrasov, Olga Konskaya / Norway, Russia)
15. Them, Us, and Skitskoj: This film is part of a trilogy series about the Izhem people from a remote region in North Russia. The village is isolated from civilization by three rivers, one of which has no bridge. They are the remaining Old Believers who observe strict Orthodox religious rules. The Old Believers are those who left the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century to protest the church reform by Nikon who wanted to align Russian and Greek religious texts. In the beginning, the closed old villagers ignored the film crew, but slowly they let them in, opening their houses and sharing their beliefs.  (Zdeněk N. Bričkovský/ Czech)
16. *Unwelcomed: During Communism disable people were put in an institution and isolated from “normal” society. With old footages of these people since when they were small children to their teenage years up until their present days at adults, the film tries to show a complete development cycle of main characters. These people have different kinds of disability: missing hands, fingers, legs, can’t walk or troubled speech. The film doesn’t distort reality by showing all these characters go on to have normal life, but some do manage to integrate nicely into society: living on their own and even have healthy and beautiful children. One character jokes that after he won the custody of his daughter, the government took away his disable ID card because he was independent. After seeing this film, I’m just too “scared” to complain about practically anything.  This film won the Audience award. (Tomáš Škrdlant / Czech Republic)
17. Videocracy: To answer his friends’ question about politics and media in his home country of Italy, Erik set out to make a film about it because to him, it was an easier task than mere words. The film is cleverly edited with catchy music and sound, funny characters (most Italians are animated and passionate; you probably don’t get the same effect if the film is about other Europeans). We are introduced to a media-crazed country where people are obsessed with images, fame and celebrities. (Does Gucchi, Versace or Dolce Gabana ring any bell?) Why do you think the current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continues to be elected again despite all the scandals and allegations? God forbids he was on trial for corruption. He is accused of link to the mafia. He changed the law to give himself immunity while in office. He appointed a TV show girl to a governmental minister post. Of course, he gets away with everything because he is admired for his self-made wealth by common Italians. Of course it’s possible to hypnotize the entire nation when you own 90% of the media. The plot of the film builds around Ricky, a cross between Bruce Lee and Ricky Martin. He auditions for talent competition, practices karate to build his body while waiting for a day he becomes a celebrity. The other character in the film is Corona, a modern “revolutionary” Italian Robin Hood whose exact words are “I steal from the rich and keep it for myself.” He used to work for the most influential entertainment guru (personal friend of Berlusconi), thus knows all of its secrecy. He runs an underground business taking photos of celebrities and sells them to the victims, for which he was put in jail for a few months. After he got out of jail, he became an overnight sensation with his rebellious streak and “revolutionary” ideology. He sells Tshirt, CD and charges thousands of euro to appear in clubs. His dreamy former boss, the TV mogul, openly compares Berlusconi to Mussolini “they have great quality; they are great leaders” while showing a video with Nazi symbol.  (Erik Gandini / Sweden)
18. War and Love in Kabul: They are childhood sweethearts. He ran off to fight with the Taliban, and she was forced to marry a man who has many wives. He returns home paralyzed from the waist down. She has a small child. His mother doesn’t accept the girl because they are from different ethnic groups and also fears the revenge from the woman’s husband. The woman’s family doesn’t approve the relationship because the guy is an invalid, good for nothing. One thing I don’t understand is how she can be able to hang out with him while still being married to her husband though she left the husband and lived with her parents. The film finishes without giving any conclusion. (Helga Reidemeister / Germany)
19. Waiting for the reindeer Yoke:  This film is part of a trilogy series about the Izhem people from a remote region in North Russia. A group of Canadian students and Czech film crew all gather here in the village to learn about their culture: folk music, reindeer-leathered boot making and death ritual. I share the opinion of the director and a Canadian student that in this village, they experience something which completely lost in our Western society: the warmth and groundedness of the people. (Zdeněk N. Bričkovský / Czech)
20. White Terror: The film covers different white extremist groups in Europe and USA. Their labels are different from countries to countries: Neo-Nazi, Skinheads, Neo-KKK, Blood & Honors, Creative Movement, Aryan Nation but they are united under one ideology: reserving and empowering the white race. (Daniel Schweizer / Switzerland, France, German

Documentaries in previous years here.