How much can art and film really advance human rights?
It’s difficult to say, but that doesn’t keep artists and filmmakers from trying. From the performance spaces imagined in the precarious environs of the refugee camp near Calais to a Yale law school symposium on art and human rights to a series of non-profit exhibitions that look to visual art to “end human trafficking,” there’s a drive to manifest change through the arts.
And as no less an authority than Amnesty International has declared, via its Art for Amnesty program, “Artists have a unique power to bring people together and to promote change. More than ever we need creative ways to acknowledge these human stories, to tell the world the truth.”
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which wraps up in Toronto this week, aims to give power to the people through the telling of stories. The festival seems to understand the concerns of visualizing sober political narratives with a film program that purposefully shies away from didacticism, instead turning to more nuanced, ethically challenging and hopeful discussions. It showcases eight films that take storytelling as a mode of survival, offering fictional, documentary and experimental art-house cinema as a means of envisaging the global fight for human rights.
A standout film from the festival (especially for contemporary-art fans) is I Am Sun Mu, which stands at the intersection of visual art, human rights and documentary cinema.
The film follows Sun Mu, a North Korean defector and political pop artist, as he mounts an incredibly risky solo exhibition in China, a country allied with the repressive communist regime of his birth. His story is as enthralling as it is troubling. Sun recalls teaching himself to draw in secret as a child, before being quickly recruited for his talent into the state’s propaganda machine. During the famine of the 1990s (which left untold numbers of people dead from starvation), the artist made his treacherous journey of escape through China, Laos and Thailand to South Korea.
I Am Sun Mu uses art as a lens through which to discover the “other” story of Korea. North Korea seems to be only understood by the West as paradoxically both dangerous and ridiculous; a nuclear threat and a joke–a stereotype which is further perpetuated in mainstream media and Hollywood films such as Team America (2004) and The Interview(2014), all which adopt an orientalist view of “weird” Asia, whilst mocking the hypocrisy and greed at the heart of the ruling Kim family.
In comparison, scant Western media attention is given to the reality of the horrific human rights abuses in North Korea—collective punishment, public executions and political prison camps. The ruling elite of North Korea controls the most basic human rights of freedom of information, movement and speech, and so in this space, any independent art practice is tightly contained or censored.
Sun Mu (a pseudonym that translates as “No Boundaries”) talks freely about his past and the reality of life under the North Korean regime, yet hides his identity in the film for fear of the repercussions his now estranged family might face under the “three generations” rule that sees entire bloodlines punished in labour camps for “crimes” against the state. As a result, the film is loaded with a deep sense of paranoia and unease, which only deepens as the setting of the film moves to China, where mounting an exhibition of contemporary art is a considerably risky venture. As the film reaches its tense and surreal climax, the filmmakers become implicated in the fate of their subject, and the surrealist nature of Sun Mu’s paintings becomes even more pronounced by the reality in which he lives.
American director Adam Sjöberg is not restrained by the challenge of visualizing Sun Mu’s life story, balancing the artist’s interviews with fly-on-the-wall sequences with his family and in his studio, as well as brilliantly subtle animations of Sun’s paintings by Ryan Wehner that bring to life the extraordinary imagination of the film’s protagonist.
Ultimately, I Am Sun Mu succeeds as both a portrait of an artist and as a depiction of a nation-state so ultimately fragile that even painting is considered a threat to its very existence.
The film’s release will likely result in further international attention for Sun Mu (who is already being compared to pseudonymous English artist Banksy and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei), as the artworld is prone, rightly or wrongly, to fetishizing artists of political controversy.
Other highlights from the festival include Palme d’Or-winning fictional film Dheepan: an exceptionally powerful and timely tale of refugeedom that expertly humanizes its flawed characters. Little historical backstory is given to the Tamil Tigers or the civil war in Sri Lanka; instead the film focuses on the act of survival that its three protagonists must undergo as they act out fake family roles and, in their search for refuge, find themselves back in a war zone, this time on a gang-run French estate.
Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s new film The Pearl Button makes comparisons between the recent political violence in his homeland and the decimation of its Indigenous population using the motif of water, with complementing poetic visuals, and with an equally poetic narration and musical composition.
The Uncondemned, a simple but important talking-head documentary, remembers the 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the team of young lawyers who successfully prosecuted rape as a war crime for the first time.
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival closes tonight (April 7) with Almost Holy, a film that considers the ethical complexity of a Ukrainian rehabilitation centre for drug- and alcohol-addicted street children, and of the stalwart yet flawed pastor who runs the operation that forcibly abducts and incarcerates them.
Toronto hosts as many as 75 film festivals in a given year; from the glitz of Toronto International Film Festival to experimental film and video art in Images Festival (opening on April 14) to film festivals with foci ranging across documentary, short-film, and analog, as well as Jewish, Palestinian, Asian, French, Queer and Indigenous experiences.
In this context, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival might seem like just another film category—but its programming, made in collaboration with TIFF, is worthy of serious consideration. Through acts of storytelling, bearing witness, debating and re-evaluating ethics, filmmakers and audiences share a conversation about the role of film and art in human rights, and the festival underlines how important space for such a discussion is.
Benjamin Hunter is the web intern at Canadian Art.
