Here are two outstanding films that deal in very different ways with zones of armed conflict. The first, French filmmaker
Barbet Schroeder's
Terror's Advocate [pictured above], is a documentary; the other, New York-based
Lee Isaac Chung's
Munyurangabo, is a fiction based on the genocide of 1994 that took place in Rwanda, where he shot it.
Pal of
Pol Pot, courthouse defender of
Klaus Barbie, freelance terrorist
Carlos the Jackal, many of the worst African dictators, and even
Milosevic,
Jacques Verges, the subject of
Terror's Advocate, is one of the world’s most enigmatic figures. Born to a Vietnamese mother and a father from Reunion Island, a French possession off the coast of Africa, Verges has a completely gallic persona, but one laced with extreme confidence and pretense. He is a compelling, if intellectually repugnant, figure, not unlike Uganda's
Idi Amin Dada, whom he filmed a couple of decades earlier.
Schroeder peppers the film with a symphonic score. It’s structured in high-energy fashion around interviews with ex-terrorists, witnesses, and experts, as well as clips from
Gillo Pontecorvo’s film
The Battle of Algiers. For Algeria’s war of independence was the starting point of Verges’s bizarre legal career. At the time he was a Communist and anti-colonialist, to the left politically. He even married Algeria’s La Pasionaria,
Djamila Bouhired, whom he saved in court from the death penalty. Then he disappeared for eight years in the 1970s, possibly as a Chinese agent in Cambodia, but no one knows. A Maoist sympathizer, he reinvented himself as counsel to terrorists (
Magdalena Kopp, for example) and the most powerful despots one could imagine. He even worked for the East German Stasi. Even so, he is well-regarded for his legal skills.
Chung’s astonishing debut feature is about reconciliation more than a decade after the Rwandan genocide took 800,000 lives. He shot
Munyurangabo for $40,000 in 11 days with all parts played by non-professional locals, whom he wisely allowed to improvise. Unlike
Hotel Rwanda and
Sometimes in April,
Munyurangabo plays out the horrendous conflict (Hutus massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus) on an intimate scale, without the foreign stars the other films found
de rigeuer.
Two teen boys, a Hutu and a Tutsi who have been living together and earning little in the market in Kigali, venture to a village where the Tutsi plans to kill the Hutu man who had murdered his father in 1994. On the way through the verdant countryside, they stop at the Hutu boy’s family farm, where an older generation’s attitudes cause the two friends to recognize their ethnic difference for the first time. Chung frames his characters with doorways, windows, and slits without it seeming forced. Ultimately the Tutsi boy renounces revenge.
# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/12/2007 08:02:00 PM
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