Josephat Torner is traveling across Tanzania to stop the dismemberment and killing of albinos for profit
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SUN (Harry Freeland, 2012)
Saturday, June 15, 9:15, IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, June 16, 6:00, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Festival runs June 13-23
212-875-5601
www.intheshadowofthesun.org
www.ff.hrw.org
One of the themes of the twenty-fourth edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is Traditional Values and Human Rights, and it is exemplified by the frightening yet inspiring documentary In the Shadow of the Sun. In January 2007, Josephat Torner, one of an estimated 170,000 albinos living in Tanzania, told his wife and kids that he was setting off for two months to travel the country to educate local communities about albinism in the wake of a series of dismemberments and killings brought on by witch doctors claiming that the body parts of albinos will bring people wealth and success. “This is what our lives have become,” Torner tells director, producer, editor, and cameraman Harry Freeland at the beginning of the film. “One of the many things we have had to learn is to live in danger.” Two months turned into years as Torner battled Tanzanians’ fears that albinos were white ghosts or demons, forcing them to live in camps or hiding them from public view. Freeland also focuses on Vedastus Chinese Zangule, a teenager who wants to go to school to become an electrician, but his efforts to get an education are continually thwarted by red tape and discrimination. Torner becomes a mentor to the open and honest Vedastus, trying to help him achieve his goals against the odds. The documentary, which features beautiful vistas in Tanzania, particularly on Ukerewe Island, where a community of albinos live as if in exile from the mainland, is narrated by Torner and Vedastus, both of whom are determined not to give up. Torner continually risks his life, going into the neighborhoods where maimings and killings have taken place, trying to prove to the men, women, and children who live there that albinos are just people, not monsters to be exploited as good-luck charms. Meanwhile, more albinos are murdered as Torner continues his journey.
Documentary examines the public misperception of albinism in Tanzania
In the Shadow of the Sun is a powerful, shattering examination of discrimination and racism in the twenty-first century as well as a testament to the strength and determination of the individual spirit; Freeland (Waiting for Change) lets these two extraordinary figures, Torner and Vedastus, tell their intermingling stories with both grace and a kind of poetry while sharing the many faces of albinism, showing both the inherent cruelty and beauty of humanity as well as the importance of education. In the Shadow of the Sun is screening June 15 at the IFC Center and June 16 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, followed by Q&As with Freeland. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs June 13-23, comprising nineteen narrative and nonfiction works that examine such themes as Women’s Rights, LGBT Rights, Journalism, Human Rights in the United States, and Crises and Migration, including the New York and/or U.S. premiere of such films as Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance, Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann’s Born This Way, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.
Gus Van Sant’s Milk is a solid if surprisingly standard biopic focusing on the last eight years in the life of Harvey Milk, the gay activist and politician who was assassinated in 1978. Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Good Will Hunting) follows the eventual unofficial Mayor of Castro Street (Sean Penn) as he moves to San Francisco with his much younger partner, Scottie Smith (James Franco), and sets up a camera shop that soon becomes an important meeting ground for the local gay community, fighting for equal rights and supporting Milk as he continually campaigns for public office. The battle hits its high point in 1978 when Milk takes on John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) and the Briggs Initiative, also known as Proposition 6, which sought to take away existing employment rights from gays and lesbians in the California public school system, eerily reminiscent of the recent battle over Proposition 8 there. Although Milk was a rallying figure — his opening mantra was always “My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!” — the film never quite takes off the way it wants to, instead becoming too reverential and melodramatic. Penn, who won an Oscar for his portrayal, is good but subdued in the lead role; the best performance comes from Josh Brolin as Dan White, Milk’s main adversary among the SF supervisors. Milk is screening June 9 & 10 at MoMA as part of the series “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” which pays tribute to the fashion photographer and cinematographer who died in October 2012 at the age of fifty-five; the festival includes a wide range of works on which he served as director of photography, including Noah Baumbach’s underrated Greenberg, Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, James Gray’s The Yards, David Fincher’s Zodiac, and John Turturro’s Illuminata, with Baumbach, Coppola, Fincher, and Turturro on hand to introduce various screenings.
