by Jared Bloch

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Cinéma Verité Film Festival has, since 2007, pushed audiences to explore the connection between socially conscious filmmaking and social action. The foundation behind the festival offers a combination of documentary and feature film screening and public debate.The 6-8 October screenings this year, held in Geneva and in Paris, included a cross-section of films from around the world that were used to highlight the eight Millennium Development Goals embraced by the United Nations in 2000.

The screenings took place from Tuesday to Thursday at Geneva’s Arditi Wilsdorf theater. Genevalunch sampled four of the documentary presentations:

L’Appel de Diégoune, directed by Marc Decosse and Eric Dagostino, tells the story of a campaign to end the practice of female genital cutting in Senegal, and one village’s decision to abandon this tradition.

The 39-minute documentary consists of testimonies from an array of village members, from mothers and fathers to the local physician and the village chief, explaining why they have decided to take this decision. The movie, screened in support of the Millenium Goal of improving maternal health, was overwhelmingly hopeful in its message of improving lives through education (in this case around the negative effects of female cutting, or female genital mutilation-FGM) and in portraying the success of this campaign.

Over 90 villages announced they were abandoning FGM following the campaign undertaken in 2008 by an organization named “Tostan” or Breakthrough, in the Wolof language. A breakthrough indeed. The short film, which was focused on individual testimonies, did not address the hard work that such an educational program must entail. However, a representative from Tostan was on hand to answer questions during the post-movie discussion.

Nilafoor writer and producer, Sabine El Gamayel discussing her film

Niloofar – This beautifully shot feature length film fictionalizes the coming of age of a young Iraqi-Kurdish girl as she is promised in marriage, and the social confines placed on her by her family and her community. GenevaLunch spoke with filmmaker Sabine El Gemayel about her inspiration for the film. “Tradition can be an obstacle to positive change in the roles of men and women in family life.” However, according to El Gemayel, men are also victims of this tradition. “In my work, I don’t tend to limit myself to women characters, the men also have to be involved in social change,” she says.

El Gemayel characterized her film as a humanist one, which transcends themes of women’s rights or oppression, and which looks to the human relations of the protagonists to explain the plight of a family trapped by simple notions of honour and duty. El Gamayel, of French-Lebanese origin, notes that it was important to her that the movie not be anti-Arab in nature, but to focus on the intricacies of human emotion. El Gemayel has worked extensively in film in Hollywood. Cinéma Verité was an eye-opener for her, she says, and she looks forward to producing more socially conscious films.

Los Herederos – This 90-minute documentary by Eugenio Polgovsky offers a sometimes painful look at the lives of working children in several locations in Mexico. The unembellished cinematography expertly captures the reality of impoverished children forced to partake in the daily toil of survival. The image of one young girl nonchalantly feeding a cooking fire with a broken plastic basin is literally noxious. What is striking is not only the back-breaking work these sometimes pre-school workers are undertaking, but the world-weary expressions and gestures on these otherwise young faces, juxtaposed with shots of elderly family members bearing similar expressions of resignation. The movie, whose running time could probably be cut in half with the same effect, begs the question of children’s rights worldwide.

Cinéma Verité Secretary-General Gustavo Montero and film producer Thomas Lennon advocating for film that is pragmatic, strategic and has impact (Photo, Jared Bloch)

The Blood of Yingzhou District - Ruby Yang’s 39-minute documentary about the orphaned children of Aids victims in China’s Yingzhou District looks at their double abandonment, by their parents and then by the communities which have ostracized them. Ignorance of the illness and how it is contracted accounts for much of the fear, compounded by poor families’ lack of resources to provide necessary medical care for the children.

The film offers hope through profiling a local organization devoted to providing temporary care and foster family arrangements for these children. However, any official involvement by the state is amazingly absent and the charity’s efforts appear as a mere band-aid in the face of a pandemic; the foster organization’s founder notes that the health of one of the HIV infected children in the film improves thanks to medicine donated by an American sponsor.

Thomas Lennon, the film’s producer, participated in an audience discussion following the screening. “The challenge is making socially conscious film that is strategic, pragmatic, and has impact,” he stated. “Why not take three-minute clips from a movie like Herrederos and put them in supermarkets with a message on free trade?”

Why not indeed.

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