HRW ’18: The Distant Barking of Dogs

During our Civil War, spectators would pack a lunch to watch the battles. These days, war is a far riskier viewing experience. Oleg Afanasyev should know. He lives in the small village of Hnutove, which is so close to front line errant shells seem just as likely to overshoot it as well. Daily life is a challenge there, but it is the only home he and his guardian grandmother have ever known. Afanasyev must deal with the common byproducts of war, including fear and boredom, in Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary The Distant Barking of Dogs (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

Neither Afanasyev or his grandmother has much to say about politics, but from what we gather, they are Russian-speakers, who identify as Ukrainian. His mother died during his infancy and his father is never mentioned. However, he has a single aunt and a cousin, with whom he is close, in a mischievous boy kind of way, but her lover will take them deeper into Ukraine once he is discharged from the army.

Distant Barking is an immersive, observational film. It never really says anything about Russian military adventurism in Ukraine, because it doesn’t need to. The audience can see the resulting wreckage in nearly every frame. Hnutove, pop. 700 and dropping, is fast-becoming a ghost-town, but Afanasyev and his grandmother are not going anywhere. Partly, it is because they have no place else to go. Language is also an issue, as his cousin learns. Yet, they also feel tied to the land.

This is a film of somber beauty that gives the audience a direct, experiential sense of what it is like to live a literal stone’s throw from a war zone. The word that best describes the scarred environment is probably “ghostly.” Serving as his own director of photography, Wilmont vividly captures the surreal nature of the locale, but his lens also seems to pick up every troubled thought that travels through the open-faced Afanasyev’s mind. Nobody physically dies on-screen, but we can see the protracted death of his innocence happening over the course of two years’ time.

Clearly, Wilmont is well-intentioned, but sometimes he feels too much like a bystander. He seems to accept the cover story that Ukrainian separatists are the ones doing the fighting in the Donetsk region, whereas the truth is they are mostly ununiformed Russian military and mercenaries from Serbia and other nations within the Russian sphere of influence. However, we can certainly see what they have wrought. Recommended for those who appreciate extremely personal documentary portraits, The Distant Barking of Dogs screens tomorrow night (6/18) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Tuesday night (6/19) at the IFC Center, as part of the 2018 HRW Film Festival in New York.

HRW ’18: Angkar

Khonsaly Hay does not like to use the term “Khmer Rouge,” because it implies the entire Khmer people are guilty of genocide. He simply calls those who murdered his first family “Communists” or Angkar, meaning “The Organization.”  He has a good point and more than sufficient standing to make it. After forty years living quietly in France, he has finally returned to his homeland. His filmmaker-daughter Neary Adeline Hay will document his homecoming and the living ghosts he confronts in Hay’s Angkar (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

Hay never thought he would return to Cambodia. In fact, he only recently started telling his daughter about his experiences during the genocide. He has a few teary reunions, but most of his original family was massacred by the Communists. Yet, in a colossally weird irony, his daughter owes her existence to the chaos of the late 70’s, because it was the Communists who forced her father to marry her mother (then a complete stranger) in bizarre mass-shotgun wedding.

The Cambodian landscape brings back a cascade of memories for Khonsaly Hay. Frankly, the past is very much present in the rural villages they visit, especially because the men most responsible for the execution of his family are still living there, in prominent positions of community leadership. He will face them all, but it is hard to tell if he gets what he wants from the experience. They all blame Angkar for excessive zeal but do their best to avoid personal responsibility.

Rather counter-intuitively, the Communist genocide has inspired a number of stylistically adventurous, or even downright experimental documentaries, such as Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, Davy Chou’s exceptional Golden Slumbers, and Alexandre Liebert’s short doc, Scars of Cambodia (all of them are excellent). Angkar follows in this tradition with its meditative passages and immersive tracking shots. At times, you can feel the humidity and smell the musky air.

Even though it runs just over an hour, Hay’s film is quite effective as an expose, memory play, and family history. One point comes through crystal clear—without some semblance of justice, there will never be any healing. That is not likely to happen when perpetrators continue to live openly in the communities they terrorized and the political system continues to be monopolized by one party. It is a sensitive, evocative film that personalizes Cambodia’s tragic history. Highly recommended, Angkar screens this Saturday (6/16) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Sunday (6/17) at the IFC Center, as part of the 2018 HRW Film Festival in New York.

HRW ’18: Women of the Venezuelan Chaos

According to any economist to the left of J.M. Keynes, Venezuela should be an economic powerhouse. It has vast oil reserves and has strictly implemented socialism. Instead, it is a nightmare of privation, where the people face overwhelming shortages of basic foodstuffs and medicine. Anyone who challenges the government’s denials is likely to face arrest and torture, if not worse. Yet, even silent suffering will not guarantee the government’s OLP storm troopers will not come crashing through your door. Several mothers who this lesson the hard way give their devastating testimony in Margarita Cardenas’s exceptional documentary, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

Kim is a pediatric nurse who is about to immigrate with her immediate family, hoping to find a more stable life elsewhere. She leaves behind her patients, but frankly there is very little she can do for them. Medical shortages are currently so severe, prospective patients are expected to bring their own bed linens, saline solution, and even basic medicines with them when they check in. Viewers watch as she scrambles from ward to ward in search of a working syringe for a young patient.

In all honesty, the apparently connected María José is the least interesting of the film’s five subjects, but she too is increasingly concerned about rationing and the surge in street crime (we learn in the post-script her father-in-law was recently kidnapped). In contrast, Eva is technically unemployed, but she is too busy standing in food queues to hold down a job. The state harshly punishes any outlet that disseminates images of rationing lines, but it is a bitter fact of life for Eva. Unfortunately, it also puts her harms way, by forcing her to be on the streets before sunrise.

The experiences of Kim and Eva are certainly damning, but they pale in comparison to what Luisa and Olga have gone through. Luisa and her husband raised their grandson as their own son, but on the eve of his graduation he was arrested without charge and held for several years. It is a bitter irony for the elderly woman, because as a retired police officer, she understands better than anyone how egregiously the government has violated due process.

At least her grand/son is still alive. Olga had to watch helplessly as OLP thugs executed her son Mafia-style in front of her eyes, only to realize after the fact they were in the wrong apartment. The impunity enjoyed by his murderers is especially galling to her, because she was a former Chavist, who once bought into the regime’s propaganda.

Wisely, Cardenas does not let anything stand between the viewer and the power of the women’s indictments. She is sensitive in her treatment of her subjects, but her unsparing journalistic eye never blinks. However, in between she includes long, immersive tracking shots that capture Venezuela’s squalid housing, crumbling infrastructure, and ever-present queues in vivid, visceral terms.

Cardenas’s record of the suffering caused by the Chavist regime is beyond convincing and compelling. It is absolutely damning. Many people are justifiably upset at signs of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, but the same people stood by silently when former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy did Hugo Chavez’s propaganda bidding by pimping free Venezuelan heating oil. He has a lot to answer for, from Kim, Eva, Luisa, and Olga. As a work of documentary cinema, Chaos is deceptively quiet, but every second is absolutely riveting and desperately infuriating. Very highly recommended, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos screens this Friday night (6/15) at the IFC Center and Saturday afternoon (6/16) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, as part of the 2018 HRW Film Festival in New York.