Look Into My Eyes
A Film by Naftaly Gliksberg
2008, 80 minutes.
Click here for screening times.
To deny something is to admit to its existence; at least that’s what the word has come to mean in the media. When an official ‘denies’ the allegations, the cards are already stacked against her; far better to ‘vehemently disagree’ than to ‘deny’. For if she has denied the allegations then we all know (us, the listeners) that she probably damn well did it. Denial implies that we are ignoring a truth beneath, and we use the word all the time. It is a loaded term.
Naftaly Gliksberg’s film Look into My Eyes shows us how much anti-Semitism is denied today. And that, seething beneath this denial, the truth is more terrifying and insidious than we may have imagined.
Gliksberg, a former Rabbi from Israel, travels through Europe and the U.S. to speak with people about anti-Semitism. But he doesn’t want to find it. There is an optimism and kindness in his demeanor that suggests he would rather not discover anti-Semitism at all. Sadly, he not only identifies it, but unearths prejudice against Jews in everyone from altar boys to comedians.
Read the full review here.
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival kicks off on June 11, 2009 in New York. There will be a number of exciting films from around the world.
Owing to the generosity of HRW, this year I’ve been given a sneak peak.
Check back here in the next few days for reviews of some of the best films to watch.
–Deji Olukotun
Notes for a War Story
by Gipi
Translated from the Italian by Spectrum
First Second Books, 2007. 125 pages.
This gripping coming-of-age graphic novel warns us that the experience of mass trauma can erupt anywhere, anytime. The cause of this war isn’t revenge, however, it’s patriotism with its attendant voraciousness. And you don’t know how you’ll act until it finds you.
Notes for a War Story follows three teenage boys through a fictional war torn country that looks and sounds a lot like Italy.
San Donato. San Giuliano. San Martino. Where we’re from, all the villages had saints’ names. When they bombed a village it felt like they had really hurt somebody. Not a village but a town, an individual person.
Giuliano is a runaway from a middle class family who joins up with two street kids, Christian and Little Killer. Together they scratch out a simple existence in bombed out buildings until they meet the gang lord Felix. Felix is a local tough who peddles illegal goods on the black market (we never learn what the mysterious items are.) The allure of easy money draws the boys deeper and deeper into Felix’s schemes. Soon the three friends must pit themselves against the Russian mafia, and eventually, the guns of war.
Read the full review here.
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
by Emmanuel Guibert (drawings), Didier Lefèvre (photographs), Frédéric Lemercier (layout / design)
Translated from the French by Alexis Siegel
FirstSecond Books, 2009. 267 pages.
After reading The Photographer you will want to become one of two things: (1) a doctor; or (2) a pacifist. You will not, in all likelihood, wish to become a photographer.
The Photographer chronicles the harrowing journey of a photojournalist who accompanies a group of doctors into Afghanistan. It is the mid-1980s, and the Soviet Union is engaged in a protracted war against Afghani resistance fighters in a hot zone of the Cold War. The U.S. is covertly funding the mujahideen to weaken the Soviet Union’s military. Humanitarian missions can only travel at their own risk.
Doctors Without Borders — then relatively unknown in the U.S. — hires photographer Didier Lefèvre to document the organization’s mission to establish field hospitals in the remote hamlets of Teshkan and Yeftal. To succeed, they must climb mountain passes teeming with wolves, hike through valleys controlled by drug runners, and navigate the fractious politics of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Somehow Lefèvre survives, and leaves yearning to do it all over again.
Read the full review here.
I am pleased to announce that I have published an article in ACCORD: the African Journal of Conflict Resolution (Vol. 9 No. 1, 2009).
The article is entitled The spirit of the National Peace Accord: The past and future of conflict resolution in South Africa. A condensed version of my research as a Rotary scholar in South Africa, the article examines the groundbreaking initiative called the National Peace Accord, which helped shepherd South Africa away form apartheid. It goes on to look at the government’s new attempt to incorporate traditional justice systems into the state.
One of the central challenges of conflict resolution is measurement: how do you measure the prevention of conflict? It is easier to measure a war than its absence. But for conflict resolution to have a purpose, you have to know when it’s working.
I hope you enjoy the article.
Click here to download the article from the African Journal on Conflict Resolution.
Click here to download an unedited copy of the article directly from my personal website, www.returnofthedeji.com.
