INTOLERANCE

In an exception to our practice of screening only feature films, Osian’s-Cinefan has put together this year a special section comprising three moving documentaries that reflect the intolerance of our times. The films span the 20th and the first years of the 21st centuries, a time which has proved to be – notwithstanding the spread of education and international law - both intolerant and chillingly violent. From the killing fields of Cambodia where Pol Pot hounded, tortured and massacred hundreds upon thousands of his countrymen in the name of an ideology; to Iraq (a far cry from the Baghdad of today) where Jews had lived in harmony with Muslims and Christians for centuries, and then, overnight, following pogroms and anti-Zionist propaganda, had to run for their lives to Israel; to the recent killings in Gujarat where neighbour betrayed and butchered long-time neighbour, and crowds looted and burned while television cameras followed the carnage and brought us ‘live’ action. In all the cases these documentaries deal with an implacable wheel of hatred that was set in motion.

For those who survived, the memories of the dark days of their lives have continued to haunt them, in some cases decades after the atrocities they suffered. These films unlock the past, unsuture the wounds - old or recent; the ‘victims’ discuss, argue, reason, try to understand the motivations of the perpetrators. In one film, ‘victim’ and torturer have been brought face to face for the first time; in another, the recollections are sharp, half a century after the tragedy occurred; in the third, the scars are still fresh. These thoughtful films are an effort to understand the workings of memory in the lives of people who were, at one time, stripped of all human dignity, and to not allow us to forget that to remain silent in the face of horror is to become a party to it.

Click here to read about the films screened at the festival in this section.