BY VANNESSA HEARMAN
With the plethora of reality TV, and thinly disguised corporate marketing, documentaries are bringing people back to cinemas. As the Melbourne Age's Larissa Dubecki wrote on May 11: "Reality TV's malaise might now be judged a terminal illness after The Block and Big Brother were ...last night trounced by an ABC documentary on the rise and mysterious demise of Alexander the Great."
Until now, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine has been the highest grossing, non-IMAX documentary in Australia. Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, will make its Australian debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs from July 21 to August 8. The festival's theme is "Need to know?" and it showcases over 40 documentaries from around the world.
Among the varied offering are some particularly relevant for those campaigning for social justice. In An Injury to One, Travis Wilkerson documents the human cost of copper mining in Butte, Montana, where $25 billion was taken out of the ground and 10,000 miners died making profits for the company bosses. The documentary focuses on the brutal 1917 murder of union organiser Frank Little, whose mangled body was hung from a bridge with a sign around his neck warning off workers who might be tempted to unionise the mining work force.
But not all the documentaries deal with historical events. Egyptian-born, young female director Jehane Noujaim's Control Room goes behind the scenes of Arab TV network Aljazeera in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Those interested in anti-corporate issues will be well-served by the documentaries The Corporation, a Canadian production, and The Yes Men from the US.
The Corporation's co-director, Mark Achbar, is a guest of the festival. The documentary deals with the havoc wreaked by that insidious entity, the corporation. The Yes Men is about the two guys who set up a website mirroring the World Trade Organisation. As they begin to receive invitations to high-level corporate functions, two anti-corporate activists leave a trail of gaping company men in their wake.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is not the only documentary to capture the fear and loathing emanating from the White House. In Persons of Interest, directors Alison McLean and Tobias Perse tell of the rounding up and disappearance of Muslim Americans post-9/11. The US justice department has never released accurate figures of how many were taken away for interrogation or what happened to them. The Party's Over features Phillip Seymour Hoffmann reporting on the stolen election of 2000 and the morally bankrupt political process in the US.
The struggle for justice in Cambodia also hits the big screen in S21, Khmer Rouge Killing Machine in which one of the few survivors of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, a prison codenamed S21 under the Khmer Rouge, returns to it. Van Nath was an artist who sculpted busts of Pol Pot. Through his work as an artist, his life was somehow spared. The film reflects on the role of the prison during that time and what motivated human beings to construct such brutal places of torture and killing.
The Middle East is a region featured heavily in this year's festival under the "Homelands" category. Films include Arna's Children, a documentary on children in the Jenin refugee camp in Palestine, and Wall which, as the title suggests, focuses on the wall being built by Israel to keep out the Palestinians.
Women's lives in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq are a focus in a series of films by emerging Middle Eastern women directors. These include young women such as Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, sisters, and daughters of the brilliant Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar, 2001), who have one film each in the festival, At Five in the Afternoon and The Joy of Madness, both preoccupied with the situation of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Almost There, a film from Israel, documents the lives of two Israeli lesbians who leave Israel for the Greek island of Mykonos.
The festival organisers hope that a focus on the Middle East will help to demystify this region and present its inhabitants as human beings who share some of the same hopes, despairs and aspirations as all of us.
Australia's treatment of refugees has inspired many a documentary film-maker. Macau-born film-maker Clara Law's work, Letters to Ali, was inspired by the plight of children in detention, having read an article written by a doctor tending to sick children in detention.
Law commented: "I was very moved and felt that I had to do something". The work was shot on a video camera and financed by Law and her husband, featuring music by Paul Grabowksy. In their film Anthem, Tahir Cambis and Helen Newman set out to document the "human rights struggles of our times", spanning the US, Australia, Afghanistan and the "war on terror".
Mademoiselle and the Doctor is a film by Janine Hosking, tracing the work of euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke, and his relationship with French academic Mademoiselle Lisette Pigot who wanted to die before the negative aspects of old age set in. Australian director Catriona McKenzie contributes Mr Patterns to the festival, a story of art teacher Geoff Bardon's work in the 1970s encouraging western desert Aborigines to paint in the traditional way, and early attempts to introduce traditional Aboriginal art to the white community.
{For a full program, check out the festival web site <www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 14, 2004.
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