16. INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WATCH DOCS
AU NOM DE L'ORDRE ET DE LA MORALE (IN THE NAME OF MORALS AND ORDER)
Recommended. Coercion into sterilisation, nuns torturing children and priests raping them, forced child labour don't sound like... Switzerland, do they? A hard-hitting film about how all of this was either inevitable or even desirable in the society of a few decades ago.
CURUMIM
Recommended. The whole film is pleasing to watch. The main protagonist is a very nice guy whose life was so fascinating it could be easily made into a Hollywood blockbuster: drug-dealing while paragliding, a spectacular escape, an Indonesian prison onto which venomous snakes are thrown from the air daily. The ending in the form of notes informing you of the latest fate of the portrayed people comes as a shock.
DESTRUCTION OF MEMORY
Recommended. Scenes of world-famous monuments of culture being blown up are thrown in the midst of the discussion so abruptly they startle you. It's a scientific fact that genocide is always preceded by the demolition of the ethnic or religious group's material culture. The film chronicles such devastation from World War Two Dresden and Warsaw, through former Yugoslavia, to ISIS destroying Timbuktu and Syria. Owing to the demolition of cultural artefacts having been recognised as a war crime, counteraction is being taken in Syria. Nearly a military operation in itself.
A157
Watchable. Nothing really new about ISIS enslaving Yazidi teenage girls. I learnt about dots round the neck of one of the opressors with words "open here" and people making a living of looking for relatives of those in the refugee camps. Other than that it's just the slow routine of life in a muddy camp.
#MYESCAPE
Recommended. The subject of recent refugee migration has been all over mass media for a couple of years now so I thought I had seen it all. But here you get ordinarily looking people, including some really hot guys, who have been to hell and back: have spent thousands of dollars, trekked through a dessert, travelled in nearly air-locked carriages, struggled not to fall asleep to be able to keep balance on a dinghy brimming with people and done most of that at gunpoint. Recorded with their own candid cellphones. Makes impression.
The film is available for free online. The makers didn't put it on Youtube but someone did and the producers don't mind.
SCOPE 100
LA TORTUE ROUGE (THE RED TURTLE)
Watchable. Very good beginning. Thirst you hear music similar to sea waves, then you see the castaway. Later on the animation with few colours but of numerous shades is the main attraction. The film is slow but in a calm manner so it's quite relaxing. What perplexed me was its nonsense natural geography: as far as I'm aware, the only seals living in the tropics are those off the coast of California where the cold current runs. But such a current wouldn't be favoured by sea turtles.
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