GUANTANAMO’S CHILD: OMAR KHADR
Patrick Reed, Michelle Shephard
Canada, 2014
80 minutes, Color
In Person: Director Michelle Shephard
Arrested at age 15 in Afghanistan, Canadian-born-and-bred Omar Khadr was Guantanamo’s youngest prisoner and Canada’s terrorism poster boy. As a national security reporter for the Toronto Star, co-director Michelle Shephard followed Khadr’s case from the start and is one of several people whose life he changed. In Guantanamo’s Child, we meet lawyer Dennis Edney, who found Khadr freezing in his cell, chained to the floor, and promised the boy he’d be back; a contrite Bagram Air Base interrogator; and those who maintain Khadr’s guilt in the death of an American soldier. We learn a lot about Guantanamo: its sounds, its smells, and the platform for sadism it provided. Khadr, now 28 and out of prison, has neither bitterness nor simple answers, and those who see the world as black and white come off the worse in this deeply compelling story of a life that is really just beginning.—Judy Bloch (In English and Arabic with English subtitles)
IXCANUL
Jayro Bustamante
France, Guatemala, 2015
91 minutes, Color
María harvests coffee beans with her Mayan family in the mountains of Guatemala. Like many rural teenagers, she longs to go to the city. Promised to the Spanish-speaking foreman, she is instead drawn to a young picker who is destined to leave on the long road north, but not before leaving her pregnant. María will indeed see the city and experience the other side of a country she can’t begin to understand. Jayro Bustamante shot his debut feature entirely in the indigenous Kaqchikel language to bring attention to the struggles of a disappearing people and to its women, who struggle the most. María Mercedes Coroy portrays María on the edge of an emotional volcano in this “dreamlike fusion of documentary and fable,” as the Toronto International Film Festival put it. The film won the Silver Bear in Berlin and was Guatemala’s first official entry to the Oscars®.—Various sources (In Mayan, Spanish, and Kaqchikel with English subtitles)
MOTLEY’S LAW
Nicole Horanyi
Denmark, 2015
90 minutes, Color
In Person: Subject Kimberly Motley
Kimberly Motley doesn’t have to be in Afghanistan, but since 2008 this smart and fearless American defense attorney has been the only foreigner licensed to litigate in that country’s courts. Despite threats to her life, she navigates the new constitutionally established justice system as it intersects (often randomly) with the old, informal one and with Sharia law to gain freedom for clients who range from child brides to accused drug smugglers. Motley went over for the money, but then it became “something else.” Just what keeps her facing down corruption in an increasingly volatile Kabul, away from her North Carolina suburb and the family she loves, we’re not exactly privy to. Motley keeps compassion well hidden behind a kind of badass bravado. “We’re the Justice League,” she tells her frightened assistant. When Afghanistan becomes unlivable Motley will leave, and we watch her explore possibilities in Uganda.—Judy Bloch (In English and Pushto with English subtitles)
FESTIVAL PREVIEW | CINE CUBANO | CIRCLE AWARD | FIRST FEATURE
THE LIGHTER SIDE | RHYTHMS ON AND OFF THE SCREEN | TRUST NO ONE
NOT WITHOUT US
Mark Decena
USA, 2016
90 minutes, Color
In Person: Director Mark Decena
Not Without Us immerses us in the moving, personal journeys of seven grassroots activists from around the world as they prepare and head to Paris to challenge the 21st session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) that took place in Paris last December. Building on the momentum of the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York, the Paris mobilizations were slated to be civil societies’ largest and most urgent show of force yet. The deal made there was acclaimed as a historic success, but the film examines the type of agreement that was adopted and the questions that still remain: Can the COP21 Agreement stop climate change? If it can’t, is it up to us? Filmfest DC’s first screening of Not Without Us coincides with Earth Day and also is the day when the Paris Agreements will be signed at the UN in New York City.—Various sources (In English and French with English subtitles)
REBEL CITIZEN
Pamela Yates
USA, 2015
76 minutes, Color and Black & White
In Person: Director Pamela Yates and producer Paco de Onís
When Haskell Wexler died last December, he was justly remembered for his cinematography on such films as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his transformational Medium Cool, a fiction feature set and shot amid the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But there was another Haskell Wexler: the outspoken citizen and maker of committed documentaries. Wexler went on a journey with Civil Rights demonstrators in 1963, was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, traveled to Brazil to report on torture, and filmed in Nicaragua to document a covert war. Pamela Yates knew that this Haskell Wexler could command the screen with his soft-spoken, analytical presence as his films rolled silently behind him. Rebel Citizen spotlights the man who thoughtfully chronicled two generations. You’ll want to listen up, because sometimes you need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.—Judy Bloch