|
|
This festival will leave you completely sober |
Posted by Zildjian on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 11:08 PM
|
on Human Rights Film Festival
BILL BROWNSTEIN, The Gazette
Published: Friday, March 23, 2007
The Montreal Human Rights Film Festival is unlike any other in the city - which is really saying something in light of the plethora of film fests in this city.
Beginning tonight and running until Thursday at the Cinema du Parc, the second edition of this festival, like the first, is almost entirely devoid of glitz and glamour. That's because there's nothing remotely sexy about the fest's 115 films, which touch on everything from homelessness and hunger to children's rights and health care, from racism and intolerance to war and genocide. Essentially, this festival's focus is on jolting and sensitizing viewers to some of the inequities of life on Earth.
Fittingly, the fest kicks off with a bang - thematically and sonically - tonight with the Quebec premiere of Screamers. This stirring documentary chronicles the efforts of the heavy-metal, Grammy Award-winning band System of a Down, while on international tour, to raise awareness of the Armenian genocide of 1915 in Turkey among those still in a state of denial. And, sadly, there are many in that state.
The mission is intensely personal for the boys in the band: they are of Armenian ancestry and they all lost too many family members in the genocide.
But what the band members just can't comprehend is why, among others, U.S. and British political leaders, unlike those in Canada, find it so difficult to simply recognize a well-documented genocide that took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. The Armenian people were nearly annihilated. But the musicians, like many others, soon come to the realization that partisan politics so often trumps common sense.
Band members interview aged relatives who somehow survived the massacres. The commentary is particularly chilling as they recall watching family members, including small children and their own parents, slaughtered for no other reason than their people were perceived as a threat to the Turks.
One witness recounts a conversation between a family member and a Turkish official who had come to take him away. The Armenian asked what his destination was. The candid response: "Nothingness."
The boys also come to the stark realization that if the perpetrators of this genocide over 90 years ago had been made accountable for their crimes against humanity, perhaps future genocides could have been avoided. They make mention of this ominous quote: "After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?"
The speaker is Adolf Hitler. The line was uttered in 1939. The reference was likely to the coming Holocaust of 6 million Jews as well as scores more people whom Hitler didn't see as fitting into his lunatic idea of Utopia.
Along with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Samantha Power and others, the band members also probe similar mass ethnic cleansings and the resulting death tolls over the last few decades around an often indifferent world. They estimate 2 million died as a consequence of genocide in Cambodia; 200,000 in Bosnia; 800,000 in Rwanda; 400,000, and counting, in Darfur.
Staggering stats. Consensus is that "we should all be screaming." Hence, the title of this doc.
The second Montreal Human Rights Film Festival begins tonight and runs until Thursday at the Cinema du Parc, 3575 Park Ave. Screamers is presented tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. Tickets for all screenings are $5 and are available at the Cinema du Parc box office or at www.cinemaduparc.com. For more information, call 514-842-7127 or go to www.ffdpm.com.
bbrownst@thegazette.canwest.com
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
|
Comments
Holysong
24.03.07, 10:29
|
HAHA!
|
Holysong
24.03.07, 10:33
|
Dont you ever cry babi
|
tiffanyevett
24.03.07, 16:40
|
tear for all them paople, i feel for then all, man,
|
blini_soad
24.03.07, 16:41
|
i think i'm gonna go tonight to see it
|
ToxicityOFAdown
28.03.07, 03:01
|
oh, i so wish i could go. that would be amazing to see.
|
zyrae
28.03.07, 15:04
|
Its sad to think that 115 films can be made about the horrific things going on in this world. Very sad.
|
|
|
|
