The Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival opened to a full house this weekend with a critically acclaimed, female-empowerment docudrama.

The festival, which featured films with the common thread of social justice, was free, open to the public and showcased five films over the course of three days, beginning Sept. 26. The event was a part of Syracuse Symposium 2013: Listening, and was put on by the SU Humanities Center and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Tula Goenka, an associate television, radio and film professor and a co-organizer of the festival, said she wanted to share stories from other parts of the world and spark dialogue on issues which otherwise remain untouched.

One film shown at the festival was “Rafea: Solar Mama,” directed by Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim. It is an inspirational story of an uneducated Bedouin woman from Jordan who leaves her village, one of the poorest neighborhoods on the Iraqi border. The woman arrives in rural Rajasthan, India to pursue her ambition of becoming a solar engineer at the Village Barefoot College, a voluntary organization that works to educate rural, uneducated people in the region.

Her aspirations are almost shattered when her husband threatens to take her daughters away and demands she return home. She leaves mid-training, but returns a few days later to complete her work. Her keenness to make something of herself and provide for her four daughters drives her back. Barefoot College becomes a utopia where she finds people who share her sorrows and joys without a common language to communicate.

Roger Hallas, an associate professor of English, and Goenka dedicated this year’s festival to Liberian journalist Rodney Sieh and Canadian filmmaker John Greyson. Both exemplify defendants of human rights and social justice.

Sieh has long been associated with Newhouse and wrote for The Post-Standard in 2002 and 2003. He was placed behind bars on Aug. 23, 2013 on charges of libel and his newspaper, FrontPageAfrica, was shut down for its controversial news coverage.

Greyson was arrested during a period of unrest in Cairo on Aug.16, 2013. His film “Rex vs. Singh” draws attention to the complex issues of Asian minorities and immigration, intertwined with homosexuality, in Canada.

Another film shown at the festival was “Off Label” by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri. It discussed how some major pharmaceutical companies endanger the lives of people by conducting illicit drug tests, some of which have repercussions that last a lifetime.

The opening film on the festival’s final day was “The Act of Killing” by Joshua Oppenheimer. The film is an exposé of Indonesian gangsters who were involved in the mass slaughter of a Chinese community in the late 1960s during the military overthrow of the Indonesian government. Tension and hatred toward the communist ideals are considered to be the prime causes of these killings. Through reenacting several incidents that took place at the time, the film examines the psyche of gangsters like Anwar Congo, the prime subject of the film.

For audience member Claudia Klaver, director of graduate studies in the English department, the narrative film “Intersexion” by Grant Lahood was one of the most memorable. The film takes the audience through the lives of several “intersex” people as they talk about everyday trials and tribulations. The stigma attached to being “intersex” and the issues of “difference of embodiment” are explored at length in the film.

“‘Intersexion’ was extremely informative as it engaged with the lives of real people and not just in theory,” said Klaver.

The festival closed with a Bollywood film, “Kai Po Che!” translating to “I have cut the kite.” The Gujarati phrase draws its cultural connotations from the traditional “kite flying” time in India where people engage in an informal and communal kite flying activity. When one cuts the thread of another kite, they say, “Kai Po Che!”

But, the film still explored heavy content, entailing the lives of three young friends who witness communal riots, slaughter and bloodshed of their beloved family and friends.

Published on September 30, 2013 at 1:32 am

Contact Manmeet: mksahni@syr.edu