2002 List and Description of Films

QUESTIONING FAITH
Director: Macky Alston.
A River Films / Mixed Greens Production
2002
Time: 84 min.
In the midst of tragedy, why does one person find religion, while another loses it? Questioning Faith begins when filmmaker and seminary student Macky Alston is faced with the untimely death from AIDS of a seminary classmate. The film follows Alston as he searches for the ways that people find meaning in life, when sometimes nothing seems to make sense. At stake for Alston is whether or not he has the faith to be a minister. Through his searching and questioning, Macky learns about the power of presence, and that whatever we believe, life calls us all to be there for each other, affirming life in the face of tragedy. Alston’s first documentary, Family Name, won the Freedom of Expression Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Premiered on Cinemax, June 2002
The International Lesbian Gay Film Festival, San Francisco
Hot Docs International Film Festival, Toronto
Atlanta Film Festival
Outfest, Los Angeles

WAR AND PEACE
Director and Producer: Anand Patwardhan
First Run/Icarus Films, India
2002
Time: 148 min.
Filmed by award-winning director Anand Patwardhan, and banned in India, War & Peace was made during three tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the U.S. – beginning with nuclear tests in India and Pakistan and culminating in the September 11th attack on the U.S. War & Peace is an epic documentary journey of peace activism in the shadow of threats of nuclear war. Dramatically framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi fifty years ago, the film argues that religious fundamentalism and patriotism are two sides of the same coin. In the war-torn wastelands of the world, memories of Gandhi seem like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace, and our very distance from it. “The film itself is a tour de force, beautifully shot and often darkly funny and riveting.” Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, UK Grand Prize - Earth Vision Film Festival, Tokyo
Best Film and International Jury Award - Mumbai International Film Festival, Bombay
Berlin, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, San Francisco Film Festivals
Hot Docs Film Festival, Toronto

EXHIBIT 13
Blue Man Group
Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink
2002
Time: 5 min.
Time: 5 min. This short, haunting film was created by Blue Man Group in the months following the attack on the World Trade Center. It uses actual paper debris that fell from the Twin Towers and was carried by the wind to a neighborhood in Brooklyn. The handwritten notes, personal calendars, and business memos were retrieved by members of the community from the streets, yards, and rooftops of Brooklyn. Blue Man Group was formed in 1987 in New York City. Their award-winning show opened in New York in 1991 and has since gone on to tour cities around the world.
Hawaii International Film Festival
Williamstown Film Festival

ARAB AND JEW: Return to the Promised Land
Director and Producer: Robert Gardner
Executive Producer, Writer and Narrator: David Shipler
2002
Time: 57 min.
This documentary by Baltimore filmmaker Robert Gardner and Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Middle East correspondent David K. Shipler is an exploration, as well as a measurement, of attitudes over time. It is mostly about ideas – that have been thought through, distilled, and powerfully presented. Arab and Jew examines the power of stories to shape not only historical memory, but the future as well. It’s about two narratives, two sets of stories that refuse to make space for each other. This is a film for audiences who want to understand more about the world in which they live and are willing to hear what people on both sides of a passionately felt issue believe. The ultimate power of the film comes from the ways in which it measures attitudes towards the two narratives across time. In 1988, Shipler and Gardner won a DuPont-Columbia Award for the film Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Lane. The concept behind Return to the Promised Land involved re-interviewing many of the Israelis and Palestinians from the 1988 film, to see how their views have or have not changed. Shipler won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1987 book Arab and Jew, which was extensively revised and updated in 2002.
“Behind the veil of politics in the Middle east are the ordinary people of Israel and the West Bank. Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land moves dramatically away from the political arena of the day and shifts to the psychological mindset of both Arabs and Jews...By allowing both Palestinians and Israelis to explore their own attitudes, the film searches through their minds and emotions for the points of conflict and the regions of accord.” The Jewish Observer, Los Angeles.

FACING THE ENEMY
Director: Paul McGuigan
About Face Media Production for BBC Everyman and BBC Northern Ireland
2001
Time: 66 min.
Does reaching out to the enemy constitute betrayal of your own side? How does an individual make the choice between vengeance or justice or reconciliation or forgiveness? On 12th October 1984, teenager Jo Tufnell awoke to the news that her father, Sir Anthony Berry, MP, was dead – killed by the IRA bomb that destroyed the Grant Hotel in Brighton. For Jo, this was not just an end but a beginning of a seventeen-year journey to heal. In the summer of 2000 her journey brought her face to face with the man who killed her father, Patrick Magee. Magee’s meetings with Jo necessitate his understanding the full impact of his actions. Shortly after Jo met Patrick for the first time, they agreed to let their secret meetings be filmed. While neither knew how these meetings would unfold, each realized the process would be significant. The results were filmed over ten months, during which time both experienced intense emotional ups and downs, and in so doing, confronted painful memories and grief.

KONTUM DAIRY: The Journey Home
Director and Associate Producer: Paul Reed
Producers: Stephen Smith, Phil Sturholm
1996
Time: 57 min.
Vietnam war veteran Paul Reed’s experiences in Vietnam left him with a deep and abiding hatred for the “enemy.” He held onto a diary in the Vietnamese language that he had found on the battlefield. Several decades later, he had the diary translated into English. Thus began his personal journey towards understanding and humanizing the enemy. The Journey Home is the story of Reed’s visit to Vietnam to return the diary to its owner, and of Reed’s successful efforts to bring Nguyen Van Nghia back to the U.S. for an operation. The story takes us from hatred to forgiveness and the healing of deep emotional scars.
English and Vietnamese with subtitles
USA Film Festival, Dallas

Student Film winners

DANCE CAN DO ALL THAT
1st Prize Winner
Director: Tania Trepanier
2002
Time: 25 min.
This is a story about dance and its power to heal and help create a sense of home, and how it can bridge peoples and communities. Tania, the filmmaker, grew up in the diverse cultures of India, Malawi, Trinidad, and Canada. Determined to express her “hybridity,” she created a dance fusion piece for film that explores different cultural dance forms – classical Indian Bharata-Natyam, modern dance, and the vibrant dance of the Caribbean. University of Southern California film student.
Advanced Documentary Screening, Univ. of Southern California School of Cinema-Television
Independents’ Film Festival, The Education Channel, Tampa
First Look Film Festival, Director’s Guild of America

TRANSPARENCY
1st Honorable Mention
Director: Osama Al-Zain
2002
Time: 30 min.
A documentary about the personal experiences of three Muslim women toward the issue of Hijab, women’s dress code in Islam. Transparency unveils the more personal reasons and feelings of women toward wearing head-cover through telling the stories of different Muslim women who live in the United States. One of them involves Merve Kavakci, a member of the Turkish Parliament who left her country after she was not allowed to take her seat in Parliament because she wore a headscarf. American University film student.
First Place Award – Non-narrative Film at Visions Media Festival, Washington, DC

COMPROMISE: A Palestinian Israeli Co-Production of Romeo & Juliet
Director: Anat Even.
Producers: Anat Even, Uri Steinmetz, and The Jerusalem Khan Theater, Israel
2001
Time: 54 min.
Compromise is an extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary event: the first-ever Palestinian Israeli theatrical venture. The co-production of Romeo & Juliet took seven years of planning and the signing of a peace treaty to reach fruition. Searching for solutions to the rivalries that have followed them throughout history, two groups of actors join forces in a determined effort to overcome the conflicts of their competing cultures. As they strive to define their roles both on-stage and off, the fragile partnership of creative comrades begins to erode, and the walls between fact and fiction, stage and life, break away. There is only one answer: compromise. Co-presented by Washington Jewish Film Festival. Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.
Jerusalem Film Festival
Leipzig Film Festival
Washington Jewish Film Festival

STRANGER WITH A CAMERA
Director and Producer: Elizabeth Barret
Appalshop Films and KET, the Kentucky Network
2000
Time: 62 min.
A personal and poetic interrogation of documentary filmmaking. The tragic event about which the film is centered raises troubling questions about responsibility and exploitation by filmmakers of their subjects. Stranger ponders this question with a poignancy that does not flinch from an honest and fair-minded point of view. Immersed in Appalachian place and culture, the film is a far-reaching study about the power of images. Barret, herself a native of Appalachia, leads viewers on a quest for understanding as she examines her own role as both a maker of media and a member of the Appalachian community that she portrays. Stranger with a Camera is an exceptionally moving film about a people and a place often misunderstood by the outside world. Followed by panel discussion about the impact of the media on conflict.
Best Video Award - the American Library Association

WAILING WALLS
Director: Tor Ben-Mayor
Writer: Yehuda Litani
Set Productions/ Amythos Films, Israel
Part I from the Series “Cycles of Enmity”
2002
Time: 49 min.
For the making of Wailing Walls, Israeli director Tor Ben-Mayor and journalist Yehuda Litani journey to someone else’s conflict. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still rages, the conflict in Northern Ireland seems to be ending. Have the warring factions in Northern Ireland understood something that those in the Middle East have so far failed to grasp? Can a conflict between two peoples fighting for their religious, national, and historical rights to the same piece of territory, ever be resolved? In Northern Ireland, people still dream. Catholics dream of a greater united Ireland, while Protestants yearn for continued British rule. Nevertheless, violent conflict has now given way to political negotiations. Wailing Walls is the first part from the series “Cycles of Enmity”, which will be completed in 2003. The subsequent films were made in Israel by an Irish director, in South Africa by a Palestinian director, and in the Palestinian Authority by a South African director. Each film examines and contemplates someone else’s conflict. We plan to screen the entire Cycle of Enmity in the 2003 Common Ground Film Festival.
The Jerusalem Film Festival 2002
Broadcast on RTE Ireland

FAMILY ACROSS THE SEA
Director: Tim Carrier
South Carolina Television.
1991
Time: 56 min.
The film traces the remarkable connections between the Gullah people of South Carolina’s Sea Islands and the people of Sierra Leone, and examines the development of the two cultures over the course of time, through language, culture, folkways, rice-planting methods, basket weaving, and music common to both sides. Family Across the Sea demonstrates how African Americans kept cultural ties with their homeland over centuries of oppression through their speech, songs, and customs. In the 1930s a pioneering black linguist, Lorenzo Turner, discovered over 3000 words of African origin in the Gullah dialect. The film’s conclusion, the moving return of a Gullah delegation to Sierra Leone and the African “family” they hadn’t realized they had, becomes a homecoming for all African Americans.
Cine Golden Eagle Award
Ohio State Award, Top Honors
Gold Award - Houston International Film and Video Festival
First Place Documentary - South Carolina Associated Press Broadcasting Award
First Place Blue Ribbon Award - American Film and Video Association
Silver Apple Award - National Educational Film and Video Festival
CEBA Award of excellence - World Institute of Black Communications

BLACKS AND JEWS
Writers/Directors/Producers: Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Bari Scott
Snitow/Kaufman Productions
1997
Time: 85 min.
Made collaboratively by Jewish and Black filmmakers, this deeply felt exploration of relations between old allies and new adversaries challenges complacency on all sides, re-examining the relationship between Jews and Blacks. Built around five riveting stories of rage, courage, and hope, the film lets us see race reality through multiple, radically different lenses. An uncompromising look at a conflict in which we are all enlisted, Blacks and Jews cuts through the sensationalized media coverage and the stereotypes to reexamine key conflicts from the point of view of activists on both sides. As one participant in the film says, “It is possible to see things simultaneously, yet differently. And seeing simultaneously, yet differently, is more easily done by two people than by one. But one person can get the hang of it, with time and with effort.”
Lindheim Award - Jewish Video Competition
Cross Cultural Award - International Black Independent Film and Video Competition
Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New York
Sundance Film Festival
Washington Jewish Film Festival
The Basic Trust Film Festival in Tel Aviv and Ramallah

DOTTIE: The Little Girl with the Big Voice
Writer and Director: Dawn Westlake
Ron de Caña Production
2002
Time: 11 min.
What would you say if you could change the world – just by speaking up? Dottie Atherton is a five-year-old girl who seems quite ordinary, except that she does have a very special power: she is able to positively impact the world around her using her “quite large, very giant and incredibly humongous” VOICE. Using humor and thought-provoking circumstances, Dottie’s story encourages children to speak up for what they believe in, and reminds each of us that we can make a difference in our world when we reach out with caring and tolerance.
Special Jury Prize - Fano International Film Festival, Italy

FAITH AND DOUBT AT GROUND ZERO
Director and Producer: Helen Whitney
2002
Time: 115 min.
It has been over one year since the attacks on the World Trade Center and on The Pentagon, and still the questions linger – including perhaps the ultimate question: Where was God on September 11th? Faith and Doubt explores how the spiritual lives of both believers and nonbelievers have been challenged in the aftermath by difficult questions of good and evil, God’s culpability, and the potential for darkness within religion itself – through the reflections of a cross-section of Americans impacted by the attacks: from priests, rabbis, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists. Organized around three central themes – the face of God, the face of evil, and the face of religion – the director comments that “there are times, and September 11th was one of them, when questioning is overrated and that the leap of faith, which cannot be willed, is truly a gift. And it is in those moments that I wonder whether my flickering faith, this ‘whistling in the dark,’ is as good as it gets – and possibly, in its own way, the real thing.”
Premiered on Frontline/PBS on September 11th, 2002.

PICTURE ME AN ENEMY
Director: Nathalie Applewhite
Producers: Nathalie Applewhite and Rene Lego
Vis à Vis Productions
2002
Time: 30 min.
Shot over the past six years in the U.S. and the former Yugoslavia, the film is told through the intimate stories of Natasa, a Serbo-Croat from Croatia, and Tahija, a Bosnian Muslim from Bosnia and Herzegovina. These two young women, from opposite sides, have survived the war and defy the definition of enemy. “When the war started, we thought it was simply impossible. Am I supposed to expect my neighbor to come and kill me? Oh, come on, it’s not possible! But it was possible, and it happened,” said Tahija. With candid and revealing perspectives, these women provide insight into an often-misunderstood conflict and reach beyond their national identities to address universal questions of conflict, hate, and forgiveness.

THE SOUND OF THE VIOLIN IN MY LAI
Director and Producer Tran Van Thuy
The My Lai Peace Park Project - Roy M. Boehm, Chairman
1998
Time: 32 min.
The premier of this film was held in Hanoi, Vietnam to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the My Lai massacre. This is the story of what happened at My Lai, the rescue of Vietnamese by American helicopter pilots, and the reunion of former enemies thirty years later. As one Vietnamese man said after seeing the film, “This is a film that both Vietnamese and Americans can watch with emotion, but without being divided. This can unite us in looking forward to a future where such things are never repeated.” Vietnam war veteran Roy Mike Boehm is the chairman of the My Lai Peace Park project in Vietnam. The sound of Mike’s violin as he played at the park’s dedication is filled with both sorrow and with hope. “I look into the eyes of the enemy, and I see myself. To kill him would be suicide. To love him is my salvation.”
Best Short Film - Asia Pacific Film Festival

NAMUAMITABUL CHRISTMAS
Director: Kwan-Ho Park
2002
Time: 15 min.
With Christmas Day approaching, a young Buddhist student monk is invited to church by his friend for Christmas mass. The film looks at religious tolerance though the eyes of two innocent children, who are from different faiths. The two older monks in the film are not actors, but are practicing Buddhist monks.
Dankook University film student.
In Korean with English subtitles.
Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, Korea

ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE
Director: Amir Feldman.
Producer: Amit Breuer, Amythos Films, Israel
1995
Time: 45 min.
Every night when 13-year-old Raz goes to sleep, he is afraid. Fourteen-year-old Roy says he will never ride on a bus again. One year after a car bomb blew up at a bus stop in a northern Israeli town, the survivors and the family members of the victims are still dealing with the physical and emotional pain. The Arab and Jewish Israeli children that survived the bombing of a bus talk about their fears and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film explores the complex responses to fear caused by traumatic events, which leads some to have violent feelings of racism and prejudice, and others to expressions of tolerance. The survivors’ point of view is presented through the fast-cutting rhythm and the arrangement of interviews is in the musical form of a canon, enhancing and deepening the feelings poignantly expressed by both Arabs and Jews.
Hebrew & Arabic with English subtitles.
Human Rights Watch Festival
San Jose Jewish Film Festival
Marseilles Film Festival
Broadcasts: The Passionate Eye on CBC Canada; Swiss DRTV; Finland YLE, Israel 3ICP

THE LANGUAGE YOU CRY IN
Director and Producer: Alvar Toepke and Angel Serrano
1998
52 min.
This is a story of memory and of a song. How the memory of a family was pieced together through a song with legendary powers to connect those who sang it with their roots. Echoes of Alex Haley’s Roots resonate through The Language You Cry In as it looks at how an anthropologist, an ethnomusicologist, and a linguist traced a song back to its origins in Sierra Leone, linking Africa and America, past and present, in a compelling story that helps us to examine violence and redemption, then and now. The title is from a proverb from the Mende people in Sierra Leone, “You know who a person really is by the language they cry in,” which is told by Nabi Jah, a blind 90-year-old Mende chief.
Jury Award – Film Fest New Haven, 1999
Audience Award – Film Fest New Haven, 1999
Best Documentary Award – New York International Independent Film and Video Festival 1998
Silver Award – Houston Worldfest, 1998
Community Choice Award – Prized Pieces Film and Video Competition, Columbus, 1998

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