PRESUMED GUILTY closes the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival with the harrowing story of Toño Zuniga
PRESUMED GUILTY (Roberto Hernández & Geoffrey Smith, Mexico, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, June 24, 7:00
212-875-5601
www.hrw.org
www.filmlinc.com
Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith’s harrowingly frustrating documentary is precisely the type of true story that explains why the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the Human Rights Watch organization itself, unfortunately needs to exist. Part of the Accountability and Justice section of the festival and chosen as the closing night film, PRESUMED GUILTY details the plight of Toño Zuniga, a young man arrested in Mexico City in December 2005 for a murder he did not commit and, despite all the evidence supporting his innocence — and even more important, no evidence proving his guilt — remains locked up, facing a long sentence. PRESUMED GUILTY is a maddening indictment of Mexico’s corrupt legal system, from cops who are paid by the arrest, to prosecutors who need to present nothing at trials, to judges who refuse to listen to the truth. Lawyers Hernández and Layda Negrete, along with documentarian Geoffrey Smith (THE ENGLISH SURGEON), are given remarkable access to Zuniga, following him in prison and ultimately filming his ever-more-ridiculous retrial, which he watches from a tiny barred area behind the judge. Zuniga himself is a fascinating character who is somehow able to hold back any anger as the inequities just keep piling on, but viewers won’t be able to temper their anger as the frustration builds to impossible heights. Smith and Hernández will participate in a postscreening discussion and reception that will bring the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival to its conclusion, until next year, when another series of politically based dramas and documentaries expose other frightening tragedies occurring all over the world.
Selected as the centerpiece of the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Raoul Peck’s MOLOCH TROPICAL follows the sad decline of democratically elected Haitian president Jean de Dieu (Zinedine Soualem) as power corrupts and overwhelms him. A combination of nineteenth-century Haitian leader Henri Christophe, twentieth-century president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, any of several Shakespearean kings, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Nazi drama MOLOKH, and General Vargas from Woody Allen’s BANANAS, de Dieu lives in a mountain fortress where he takes advantage of the female servants, gets all excited when a Hollywood film crew shows up to meet him, and tries to prevent his mother from visiting because he is ashamed of the poverty he came from. In the beginning of the film, he steps on a piece of broken glass, so he limps through the rest of the movie, symbolic of his shaky regime. Although the film does suffer from an overabundance of clichés, it’s still a compelling portrait of the downfall of a powerful man. The Haitian-born Peck (LUMUMBA), who received the festival’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking in 1994 (this year’s winners are Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, who made ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, about the Khmer Rouge siege of Cambodia), will participate in a postscreening Q&A with Kent Jones following the June 20 screening.
In a small Texas town, Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) has been charged with kicking out local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), but something happens to him when he meets her, leading to a violent sexual affair. The soft-spoken, easygoing cop suddenly goes bad, jeopardizing his relationship with girlfriend Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson), his job, and just about everything and everyone he comes into contact with. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp noir classic that Stanley Kubrick called “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered” (Thompson worked with Kubrick on the scripts for THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY), Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of THE KILLER INSIDE is cold and heartless, a lurid, exploitative film that captures little of what made the book so special. Despite staying close to Thompson’s narrative and including voice-overs taken straight from the book, Winterbottom (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO) concentrates too much on making the characters realistic and believable, inserting his impressive documentary skills and taking the book far too literally. It’s one thing to have Ford describe a brutal beating in the novel; it’s quite another to show him pulverizing a woman’s face into a bloody pulp. Also, whereas in the book Ford talks about “the sickness” inside him developed from childhood abuse, the film tries to hide that, burying it in a handful of brief flashbacks that add nothing but confusion. This new version of THE KILLER INSIDE ME, which was previously filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy with Stacy Keach, Susan Tyrrell, Tisha Sterling, and Keenan Wynn, is a major disappointment.
From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and opens at the IFC Center on June 25, but you can catch it before then at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center; Hetherington will be present at all three screenings as well as for a reception and Q&A with Junger following the June 20 show.
The 1970s was a crazy time in New York City: President Ford told the Big Apple to drop dead, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz went around shooting strangers, a blackout led to looting and rioting, and a powerful CEO fought to bring the foreign game of soccer to the New World. The vastly entertaining documentary ONCE IN A LIFETIME details the story of Warner Bros. chairman Steve Ross’s determined, desperate attempt to make soccer a major sport in America. And he did it the old-fashioned way: with a lot of cash. Backed by music moguls and big-time soccer fans Ahmet and Nehui Ertegun, Ross put together the New York Cosmos, one of the greatest teams to ever play the world’s most popular game. As the name says, he filled the Cosmos with international stars that would have made Carl Sagan proud: Giorgio Chinaglia, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto, Steve Hunt, and, of course, the magical Pelé, who was signed to a multimillion-dollar deal at a time when such numbers were unheard of even for baseball. When the Cosmopolitans started winning, the city adopted them, following their exploits from the green AstroTurf of Giants Stadium to the silver disco ball at Studio 54.