WATCHERS OF THE SKY (Edet Belzberg, 2014)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts.
Opens Friday, October 17
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
www.watchersofthesky.com
In 1943, Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, determined to stop the mass atrocities that were being committed by governments around the world, came up with a name for what he was lobbying heavily to make an official crime recognized by the international community: genocide. In Watchers of the Sky, director and producer Edet Belzberg (Children Underground) explores Lemkin’s vision through the modern-day work of four people battling against the odds to end genocide and bring those responsible to justice. Inspired by Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Belzberg follows Chad field director Emmanuel Uwurukundo of the UN Refugee Agency as he tries to find humanity among the horrific suffering in Darfur after losing most of his family in Rwanda; Transylvania-born Benjamin Ferencz, the chief U.S. prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case in Nuremberg who today continues to implore the UN to do something about the horrifying crimes of aggression being perpetrated by multiple countries; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court whose job was to gather evidence to arrest and try Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir for war crimes; and Power, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations who uses Lemkin’s activism to attempt to end the inaction of the international community, which sits idly by as mass murder takes place right under its nose.
The inspiring, often shocking words of Raphael Lemkin are at the center of documentary about genocide
“What was amazing about Raphael Lemkin, a rural wunderkind of sorts, was that he saw the universal connection with victims and the universal capacity to carry out harms of great magnitude,” Power says in the film. “And that led him to have great conviction that no one was safe.” Meanwhile, Uwurukundo explains, “You feel this guilt on your heart. . . . This kind of experience you live with, you cannot explain to someone. Sometimes, it’s even, you feel ashamed that you didn’t do anything. But actually, you could not do anything,” echoing the words of Lemkin, who admitted, “How could I explain the pain of millions, the hopes for salvation from death? A tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air. I was shamed by my helplessness.” Belzberg includes haunting animation, archival footage of Lemkin and excerpts from his notebooks, news reports documenting the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Jews, Christians, Rwandans, Darfuris, Bosnians, and others, and scenes of Power, Ferencz, Ocampo-Moreno, and Uwurukundo facing what could have been faith-shattering obstacles as they try to make a difference in a mind-boggling world. “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?” Lemkin asked many years ago, and it’s frightening that such a question still needs to be answered today. Watchers of the Sky should be mandatory viewing for every member of the United Nations, each employee of The Hague, and all world leaders, who then must do something about these unspeakable, never-ending horrors.