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Geneva Human Rights Film Festival

by Jared Bloch

GenevaLunch (Geneva) – In a perverse twist of humanitarian imperative, modern conflicts are specifically targeting the most vulnerable community members as a war strategy. This disturbing trend was highlighted in three films screened at the Human Rights Film Festival, which closed its 8th edition on Sunday 14 March.

“Weapon of War”, as the name implies, provides a graphic illustration of how sexual violence has been used by armed factions in the Congolese conflict to destabilize and demoralize communities.

The 60-minute film by Dutch sisters Femke and Ilse van Velzen consists of a series of graphic interviews with confessed rapists and, oddly, with a single rape survivor.

Confessed rapist, army chaplain and community educator on sexual violence (Photo, reproduced with permission from Weapon of War website)

The film’s power is delivered through the blunt and almost clinical depictions of the combatants’ systematic targeting of girls and women in conflict zones.

But while this confessional may be a necessary part of the  reconciliation process, the film’s near exclusive focus on the  perpetrators’ experiences was an uncomfortable fit.

“Les Disparu du Kivu” by Swiss film-maker François Cesalli, is a no-frills accounting of the human toll suffered by families in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo as a result of 15 years of war. Cessalli’s camera follows characters ranging from the regional director for ICRC’s Family Tracing programme to the director of a programme that assists the abandoned elderly, to a mother who lost her four children during the fighting – only to find them two years later.

Closing night at the festival

The film-maker lets the individuals speak for themselves, describing in simple but painful language the forced separation of children from parents, siblings from each other and grandparents from their support networks. One elderly woman who has lost all of her immediate relatives tells the camera, “I pray for my family and hope they pray for me. What more can I do?”

Bryan Single’s “Children of War” has already taken prizes at two other film festivals, and with good reason. His 2009 film is the product of three years of filming landscapes and former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. “Children of War” tracks the lives of children, abducted sometimes as young as five years old and forced to fight and kill for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The film captures them as they undergo rehabilitation in a church-based programme.

The children have all been rescued by the Ugandan Army while in combat, thus the premise of the film: how do communities and societies reintegrate children who have committed often terrible acts, albeit under duress?

In fact, the children themselves are their own harshest critics, and come to see themselves as victims only through the help of the rehabilitation center. Religion, the power to exorcise and to heal, are keys to the programme curriculum, which seems at first like an odd counterpart to rights education and self-empowerment. Single deftly captures in rich black and white imagery how the centre uses contemporary therapy alongside traditional to deliver these children from their past. Following an exorcism ceremony, one particularly haunted boy soldier says, “I can say that my spirit is free” but living free is not easy.