Homeward bind Prisons and asylum from the Human Rights Watch BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival At the Museum of Fine Arts and the Coolidge Corner Theatre January 27 through February 3.

It’s one of the world’s oldest stories. Torn from home by war and other disasters, the wanderer struggles to return. Ten years it took Odysseus; for many in the films of this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, the return has taken much longer. For some, there will be no homecoming, only the hope of asylum or a new life in another country. Others will have no home at all, no rights, no state, no future. Refugees and prisoners, the despised and forgotten, they are given voice and dignity here.

Who cares about North Korean spies caught in the South and locked up for decades? Fanatic supporters of a lunatic regime, they aren’t prime candidates for our sympathy. South Korean documentary filmmaker Kim Dong-won had a chance to meet some of these incorrigibles in 1992, when they were released to live in his home town. As he records in his two-and-a-half-hour Repatriation (January 30 at 2:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre), he was struck by their ordinariness and their humanity, a far cry from the demonized image of villainy created by propaganda and pop culture. One of the men, Cho Chang-son, he liked especially. Captured in 1962, Cho had endured 30 years of abuse in jail while refusing to be "converted" — i.e., to renounce Communism and embrace South Korean capitalism.

Why had Cho and others maintained their faith in a discredited ideology despite incarceration (one of the "unconverted" set the Guinness record for longest prison sentence) and torture? Another question Kim might have asked is why his country was so adamant in getting the prisoners to "convert." The film is a diary and a meditation (Kim has a weakness for voiceovers) recording his relationship with Cho and the others over a 10-year period. During that time, a crusade to gain them repatriation to the North suffers ups and downs as the two regimes jockey for advantage and undergo their own internal changes. But the faith of the "unconverted" remains steadfast. That, perhaps, is their secret: not ideology but identity, a dogged insistence on individual dignity and unconditional resistance to its being taken away

In Sabiha Sumar’s incisive Silent Waters (2003; January 28 at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts), the theme of repatriation takes a darker twist. In a sleepy village in Pakistan in 1979, the widow Ayesha refuses to draw water from the local well. As black-and-white flashbacks show us, it was the site back in the Partition of 1947 where the Sikhs in the village slaughtered their wives and daughters rather than let the Muslims "abduct" them. Otherwise, Ayesha has adapted well to her community, taking pride in her son Saleem, a happy-go-lucky youth with a flute who’s in love with a local girl. But fundamentalist agitators working for the ultra-nationalist government seduce Saleem and other youths into their movement, directing their hate and intolerance at the Sikh pilgrimage soon to arrive in town. Sumar’s film combines subtly executed melodrama with rueful insight into the repetitions of history (a coda set in 2002 confirms the persistence of folly), the contradictions of family and community loyalties, and the insidious tactics of al-Qaeda-like organizations.

Few regions have endured the whims of politics and history as much as the Middle East. So Lebanese director Randa Chahal Sabbag’s The Kite (2003; January 28 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts) takes a whimsical approach to undermining the artificial boundaries that history and politics have imposed. Sixteen-year-old Lamia lives in a Lebanese village divided by the Israeli occupation. Watch towers, guards, and land mines separate the village’s people, and they communicate by shouting through bullhorns. As way of reuniting the family, Lamia is promised in marriage to her cousin on the other side of the border. She, however, has fallen in love with a young Israeli soldier who himself is a Druze Muslim and newly nationalized Israeli citizen. Chahal Sabbag negotiates this labyrinth of loyalties and boundaries with a kite-like impressionism, drifting about iconic images (barbed wire, and, of course, kites) to an irresistible soundtrack but with insufficient regard for dramatic clarity.

While some corners of the world suffer from too many of national identities, others have none at all. Europe has become a holding cell of displaced persons without passports or homelands, and Jon Nealon’s documentary Goodbye Hungaria (2003; January 29 at 1 and 3 p.m., with Nealon present, and February 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) is a look at one of them, a former Soviet barracks in a Hungarian backwater housing hundreds of mostly Third World refugees. The camp has its own Florence Nightingale, though: Charu, a young woman from York, Pennsylvania, who has taken these lost souls as her personal project. Until, that is, Abed, a bright young Palestinian refugee, wins her heart. This is a tough but feel-good film with a bittersweet ending. Shot pre–September 11, it finds one of the subjects fulfilling his dream by taking in the view from the observation platform of the World Trade Center.

What would have become of Charu and Abed had they met after the fall of the Twin Towers? Alison Maclean & Tobias Perse’s documentary Persons of Interest (2003; January 28 at 6 p.m. and January 29 at 9 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) offers a clue. Filmed at a meeting of Arab-American families who have suffered because of the Justice Department’s post–September 11 crackdown, it presents damning testimony. Innocent people tossed into jail for months and years without charges. Families broken up. Lives ruined. Some victims maintain their faith in America; others say that this is the kind of tyranny they came to America to escape. So much for the land of the free.

Rivaling suspected terrorists as personae non gratae are juvenile offenders. Surely the country grows safer when underage offenders are tried, convicted, and sentenced as adults for major felonies? Not only is that untrue, argues documentarian Leslie Neale in Juvies (2004; January 29 at 5 and 7 p.m., January 30 at 8 p.m., and February 1 at 9 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with filmmakers Leslie Neale and Traci Odom present at the January 29 and 30 screenings), but this get-tough system has resulted in grotesque injustices. With voiceover narration from former juvie Mark Wahlberg, the film intercuts the fates of a handful of youths undergoing trial and sentencing with observations from experts and officials. Sixteen-year-old Duc, for example, was driving a car when a passenger in it shot at someone. No one was hurt, yet with no prior record and no gang ties, Duc got 35 years hard time. His case is typical. "It is a slow genocide," one spokesman concludes.

That remark could apply equally to the situation described in Katy Chevigny & Kirsten Johnson’s documentary Deadline (2003; January 30 at 12:30 and 6 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre). Back in 2002, outgoing Illinois governor George Ryan, a conservative Republican, shocked the country by ordering an investigation into his state’s capital punishment system. The inequities and errors uncovered moved him to order a blanket commutation of all death-row cases to life imprisonment. The filmmakers chronicle the anguish and the soul searching behind Ryan’s decision, and they give equal time to the harrowing testimony of victims’ families and the tales of narrow escapes and ruined lives of those wrongly sentenced to death. They put this raw material in the context of the recent history of capital punishment and commentary mostly by anti-death-penalty spokespersons. The conclusion? The death penalty kills innocent people, demoralizes the justice system, and provides no deterrent. "Let’s offer victims something other than revenge," says Ryan as he makes the final commutation official. Fat chance that other pols might follow in his footsteps. Ryan was, after all, leaving office the same day. And as Deadline reminds us, in 1992, Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton executed a retarded man so as not to appear soft on crime.

After watching all these movies about corruption and injustice in our own system, we might hope to be reminded that other countries are much worse off. Instead, Peruvian director Francisco J. Lombardi’s Ojos que no ven/What the Eye Doesn’t See (2003; January 29 at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts and February 3 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre) offers a nightmarish scenario of what America might yet become. In the 1990s, President Alberto Fujimori ran a rotten regime of bribing, extortion, and murder. When a treasure trove of incriminating videos comes to light, the regime gets desperate. The effect on a disparate group of people ranging from a blood-stained colonel to the flutist granddaughter of a bed-ridden old activist provides the filmmaker with a somewhat contrived but always fascinating framework within which to examine the pathology of power. What does the eye not see? For one, the videos and the news reports fail to show the pathetic sexual and romantic motives underlying both the basest and the noblest deeds.

David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999; January 31 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre), the only significant movie made about the Gulf War, is reprised here for a special showing. What underlies power at first seems to be mere greed and calculation, with George Clooney’s band of Desert Storm mavericks going after Kuwaiti gold. But their rapacity melts before the plight of the hapless refugees whose lives end up in their hands.

The opposite seems to be the case in Russell’s short documentary "Soldiers Pay" (2004), which screens after Three Kings. Commissioned for inclusion on the fifth-anniversary DVD release of Kings, it was aborted for being too "political." Russell interviews several veterans of the latest Iraq War, Kurdish-Iraqi actors from his earlier film, and expert military and political commentators. All agree, whether they were in favor of the war or not, that the aftermath has been botched. No news flash there, but what makes Soldiers Pay fascinating is the story of a handful of mavericks, much like those in Three Kings, who try to make off with a couple of a million from Saddam’s war chest. The alleged ringleader says he was told that the money would go to the "reconstruction of Iraq." In other words, Russell suggests, to Dick Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton: Dick may be dedicated to Homeland Security and the rebuilding of Iraq, but not at the expense of the security of his own little nest egg.