Trade Off examines the World Trade Organization.

Horror Flicks

Human rights film fest opens window on a disturbing world

By Patrick Sullivan

“EVEN IF I discounted half of what my comrades were telling me, the picture was horrifying,” East Timorese Foreign Minister José Ramos-Horta tells the camera in The Diplomat. “Thousands of people were being slaughtered throughout the country. Napalm was being used. Starvation was setting in.”

No one will ever know the exact number, but an estimated 200,000 East Timorese people were killed when the Indonesian army invaded the tiny country back in 1975. Thousands more died over the next 25 years as Indonesia’s brutal dictator, President Suharto, maintained his iron grip on East Timor through merciless use of terror, torture, and massacre.

Horrific, certainly. But perhaps the truly terrible fact is that the body count in East Timor actually looks like small potatoes compared to the death toll on other killing fields of the late, not-so-great 20th century, that strange era that gave us both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the homicidal horrors that stained the ground in places like Rwanda, Germany, and Cambodia. What distinguishes East Timor from many other such events is the relatively happy ending.

The Diplomat makes good use of that dramatic journey from tragedy to triumph as it traces both the story of East Timor and the strange career of the exiled Horta, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. Indeed, this powerful documentary may be the most compelling of the four films screening Friday and Saturday, Jan. 26 and 27, at the Rafael Film Center as part of the upcoming Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Of course, it’s hard to know just how much credit should go to Tom Zubrychi, the accomplished documentary filmmaker who directed The Diplomat (which screens Jan. 26 at 6:30 p.m.). After all, it’d be hard to make a boring film about Horta.

Short, plump, frequently unshaven, emotionally intense, and prone to bouts of colorful swearing, Horta doesn’t fit the popular image of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Let me tell you one thing,” he fumes in a bad-tempered moment in the back of a taxi as he fumbles with his spectacles. “I hate these fucking glasses. I have to take them off when I read; then I have to put them back on when I finish.”

Departing East Timor just before the Indonesian invasion, Horta spent 25 years traveling the world trying to gather international support to end the brutal occupation. The Diplomat focuses mainly on the whirlwind of events in 1998 and 1999 that unexpectedly forced Indonesia to withdraw. But the film also makes clear that Horta’s previous decades of exile were often lonely and desperate. His marriage to his wife, Ana, who stayed behind, fell apart–though Horta offers his typical honesty in explaining why the relationship ended.

“Distance was a good excuse for me,” he explains. “She was very loyal, dedicated, and serious, while I was having other romantic liaisons going on in New York.”

Despite his very human failings, Horta proved a tireless champion of his beleaguered country. In 1999, his efforts paid off. With the end of the Cold War, the anti-communist Suharto grew less important to the United States, and our government’s previously unwavering support waned. International pressure grew, and Indonesia at last ended its occupation of its tiny neighbor–though not without a final round of bloodshed. Some of The Diplomat’s most horrifying scenes focus on the rampages of the Indonesian-backed militias who rampaged through East Timor just before withdrawal.

“One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin is alleged to have once remarked. The power of The Diplomat lies in its ability to put a very human face on the statistics of mass murder.

LESS SUCCESSFUL yet still interesting are two other festival documentaries screening at the Rafael.

More like an art film than a documentary, Pripyat (which screens Jan. 26 at 9 p.m.) explores the strange world of the small Ukrainian village of the same name that lies near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where the No. 3 reactor suffered a famously disastrous accident in 1986.

Despite the dangerous radiation, two kinds of people still remain in the area. One group is composed of soldiers and scientists, who monitor and guard the radioactive ruins, as well as workers who run the other reactor, which was still operating at the time Pripyat was made. Then there are the former residents of the village, who have returned because they can’t bear their exile: “We come from here,” explains one elderly man. “We were born here. And we want to live here a little bit longer.”

The black-and-white film loves these elderly faces and the crumbling ruins they inhabit. From the decay of the area around Chernobyl, Pripyat picks out images of startling beauty. But the film suffers from excessive artiness. There’s too much use of the pregnant pause, which slows progress down to a crawl at times. And the film also leaves us begging for answers about just how much danger the people it profiles are actually in. Concrete answers may have been hard to come by, but surely filmmakers could have done a bit better than this.

Last and least of the documentaries on the Rafael schedule is Trade Off, a film about the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

It’s hard to know how anyone could make a tedious film about the dramatic events of that week late last fall, when a coalition of unions and environmental and human rights activists came together to shut down one of the world’s most powerful (and undemocratic) international organizations. But the makers of Trade Off–which screens Jan. 27 at 2 p.m.–found a way.

Too long, too slow, and too full of talking heads, Trade Off does not do justice to the important event it tries to explore. To be fair, viewers will learn interesting facts about both the WTO and the police brutality inflicted on largely peaceful protesters. But Trade Off represents a lost opportunity to make these issues accessible to a mainstream audience.

Finally, on Jan. 27 at 7 p.m., the Rafael screens The Widow of St. Pierre, a feature film about the tension between mercy and capital punishment from French filmmaker Patrice LeConte. A screening tape was not available, but the film stars the highly watchable Juliette Binoche, so it ought to be worth a look.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival screens films on Friday-Saturday, Jan. 26-27, at the Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. For details, call 415/454-1222.

From the January 25-31, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Thirteen Days.

Nuclear Reaction

Atom-savvy trio talks nuclear porn and ’13 Days’

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of art, alternative ideas, and popular culture.

“FOR YEARS and years, we lived under this constant threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat so enormous and so devastating, it made it hard to seriously bank on ever having a future. It made it hard to plan for long-term goals. Then the Cold War ended.”

Ken Sitz–clutching a steaming hotdog in one hand, all but bouncing in his wooden chair–delivers these verbal bon mots in a wistful tone of voice that just barely conceals a sharp, nostalgic longing. “When you walk around believing the world might end tomorrow, it makes life interesting. Everything becomes precious, if a little futile. I really don’t think we should easily give that up. I think we should try to hold on to a little bit of that.”

Facing Sitz across his cozy Los Angeles Hills living room are Bill Geerhart and Curtis Samson, similarly armed with frankfurters, similarly nostalgic for those bad old, scary-ass Cold War days. This mood has been heightened by the new film Thirteen Days, which we’ve all just returned from seeing.

An impressive though critically nuked Kevin Costner drama, 13 Days relives the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, that special moment in American history when the Kennedy administration came about a hair’s handshake from a bomb-chucking contest with the Soviet Union. Costner plays Special Adviser Kenneth O’Donnell to Bruce Greenwood’s JFK.

The movie’s posters all show Soviet missiles sailing over American landmarks–Mount Rushmore, the Seattle space needle, the famous Hollywood sign–and tease with the words “You’ll Never Believe How Close We Came.”

Sitz, Geerhart, and Samson all liked the posters–but they loved the movie.

“It’s right up our alley,” Samson says laughingly.

It’s true. Since April of 1999, these three gentlemen have calmly and quietly built Conelrad.com, a very cool, very eerie website that is keenly devoted to “all things atomic.” The site takes its name from the old national Emergency Broadcasting System outlet that operated during the early parts of the Cold War and would have spread the word should our corner of the planet have come under nuclear attack.

The website is as packed with kitschy facts and images as a well-stocked fallout shelter, with reviews of the top bomb-themed movies–the Conelrad 100–and Cold War record albums. Then there are the eye-opening reports on the proper way to “duck and cover” and the effects of radiation on real-life witnesses of U.S. nuclear tests.

Sitz, a Web producer for Lazerfish.com, is a pop-music historian whose collection was explored in RE/Search Publications’ Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. 2. Geerhart is an L.A.-based documentarian, and Samson–a retired Air Force captain and the trio’s only actual Cold War military veteran–is an avid collector of nuclear-pulp novels.

For the record, Sitz and Samson were in elementary school during the actual Cuban Missile Crisis. Geerhart wasn’t born yet.

“I remember it pretty well,” says Samson. “I was at school, and they sent us home. It was like the world’s spookiest holiday.”

“I remember going outside to the playground,” adds Sitz, “trying to imagine the playground gone, wiped out by a bomb. I was overwhelmed at the thought that something as big as the playground could be wiped away.”

“During the credits of 13 Days,” I say to Sitz, “you seemed to recognize the person credited with nuclear effects.”

“Peter Kuran!” intone all three.

“The nuclear-porn guy. He’s famous for his footage of nuclear tests,” explains Sitz. “Years ago, he somehow cornered the market on all this footage that was being kept in a secret bunker in the Hollywood Hills. Now whenever a producer needs an atomic bomb explosion, they go to Kuran. He’s built quite a market for it.”

“The guy has archived and processed all this footage,” adds Samson. “He’s even released a few compilation tapes of random atomic tests.”

“But none of them are ever done in any meaningful contexts,” says Sitz, “so it’s a lot like nuclear pornography. Just a bunch of big bombs going off.”

“Some of the images are pretty striking, though,” remarks Geerhart. “Remember that bizarre Chinese test, where they have gas masks on all the horses?” Everyone nods. “Now, there’s an image that sticks with you.”

In regard to the movie’s description of events during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Conelrad boys admit they were, literally, on the edge of their seats at times.

“I liked that the crisis was told entirely from the U.S. point of view,” Sitz tells us. “It never showed what the Russians were doing or thinking, which is precisely the way to tell this story, since the whole crisis escalated, in part, because we were operating under a severe lack of information. It was almost catastrophic.”

“Over 10 years ago,” he continues, “after the Berlin Wall came down, there was a big summit with a lot of the U.S. and Russian people who’d been directly involved in the Cuban crisis. They got together in Washington and talked about what had happened, comparing notes, putting the pieces together, realizing how paranoia and misinformation fueled the escalation. At one point they were all sitting there going, ‘Shit! It was even closer than we’d thought.’ ”

“The world really had been on the brink of destruction.”

A long pause follows. Everyone sits silently, reveling in the tasty terror of that last thought.

“People ask us why we’re so into atomic culture,” says Geerhart at last. “I think the appeal is, everyone likes a secret, and the Cold War era was chock full of really bizarre secrets that are only now coming to light.”

“I thinks it’s deeper,” concludes Sitz. “I think we know we’re too complacent, that our security is illusory. So when we dig into this stuff, or see a movie like 13 Days, we can look up at the sky and say, ‘Wow. We are so lucky to be alive.’ ”

From the January 18-24, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.