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What it Means to Vote in Ghana

2012-01-13T11:36:43Z

An African Election directed by Jarreth Merz

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence, in 1957, and remains, despite its share of turmoil, the standard-bearer for political stability on the African continent. Why Ghana?

An implicit answer is provided by the documentary An African Election, which chronicles the essentially peaceful, if sometimes disruptive, transfer of power that occurred during the 2008 presidential race between leading candidates Nana Akufo-Addo, representing the incumbent NPP (New Patriotic Party) –his mantra is “Are We Going Forward or Are We Going Back?”– and John Atta Mills from the NDC (National Democratic Congress). Simply put, the answer is: Ghanaians ache for democracy. As one interviewee says, “We love our mother Ghana so we want everybody to take part in this election.”

The Swiss-born documentarian Jarreth Merz, who spent seven of his boyhood years in Ghana, initially intended for the film to cover his sentimental journey back to his roots after an absence of 28 years. (He has deep Ghanaian ties on his grandmother’s side). Once in Ghana, however, the impending election took hold, and, good political journalist that he is, Merz recognized a larger story at work. With his brother Kevin acting as co-director and co-cameraman, Merz, who filmed for over three months and shot over 220 hours of film, moves right into the fray, travelling with both political camps, interviewing people in the streets, in the capital city of Accra, and in the outlying regions. He shows up at the polls, where the mix of jubilation (at the democratic process) and wariness (over the fear that that process will be subverted) is palpable.

Politics deeply infuses the lives of Ghanaians. A citizen tells Merz, “Politics is part of the human life, even your day-to-life is politics.” Perhaps only a people who have been deprived of political autonomy for so long could feel so strongly about this. The 2008 election was by no means clear-cut ideologically. The NPP is centrist and right-leaning and caters to the conservative middle class, while the NDC, which like the NPP was formed in 1992, is a left-leaning social democratic party. Yet the appeal of both cuts across class and demographic lines. For the NDC, the election was particularly crucial since a second defeat in the presidential elections, following losses in 2000 and 2004, could effectively end the party. For this reason, looming even larger than Mills in the movie is Jerry Rawlings, the charismatic former NDC president from 1992 through 2000, who is still much beloved by many Ghanaians.

Merz films Rawlings exhorting the cause of his party while, not infrequently, masses of ecstatic Ghanaian admirers crowd into the camera frame. (His counterpart, far less charismatic but certainly statesmanlike, is the NPP’s outgoing president John Kufour). Merz captures the tumult and also the comedy, often inadvertent, in this political circus that nevertheless has entirelyserious consequences for both Ghana and for all of Africa. He shows us a pro-Mills TV spot that has a mother counselling her young daughter to avoid a large cobra (presumably Akufo- Addo), in their midst. Overhanging the election is a larger development: the recent discovery of vast offshore oil reserves that Kufuour says will turn Ghana into an ‘African tiger.’

Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency occurred during the run-up to the 2008 election, and both Ghanaian political parties, especially the NDC, attempt to draw on Obama’s success and sloganeering. (The NDC proudly proclaims that “Change has come.”) However, when the results of the election are too close to call and a run-off is declared, viewers may be thinking less of Obama and more of George W. Bush vs. Al Gore. Both sides declare they have won. Charges of ballot fraud are rampant. Voters stand beside polling stations and loudly count out the ballots as they are tallied. So-called ‘macho men’ appear intimidatingly at polling stations, some of them on motorcycles, a known conveyance for stolen ballot boxes.

In the end, it is up to the constituency of a remote region called Tain to decide the election with their votes in favor of the NDC. Catastrophe, which seemed so imminent, is averted. (Compare this to the ongoing uncertainties about the Arab Spring). Watching this film, what stays with you are the chants of the people in the street crying out “We want peace.” Even more, you will remember what a citizen says about the lack of violence: “We were able to talk to each other.”

Peter Rainer

Wife and Husband

2012-01-13T11:36:21Z

José y Pilar directed by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes

The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, had no family funds to study beyond the 4th grade and only began writing seriously as he approached his 60s. Miguel Goncalves documentary Jose and Pilar follows from 2006 through 2008 the surprisingly hectic life of the famous octogenarian, who died in 2010, and his fifty-something wife Pilar del Rio, a former Spanish journalist whom he married in 1988. The hecticness appears to be entirely the work of Pilar, who functions not only as wife and Spanish translator of his books but also as full-time agent, nurse, party-planner, muse and manager. About her he says, “I have ideas for books but she has ideas for life. I don’t know which is more important.”

Pilar has the guy on the road or in the air seemingly nonstop. No book tour, book signing, rally or writer’s conference is alien to her. (In one particularly funny moment, we see a shot of both Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez dozing off on a writers’ panel). One gets the impression that, were it not for Pilar, whom he clearly adores, Saramago would be quite content to putter about at home and, you know, write. He says in the film that he wishes he could be a tree with roots so deep in the earth no one could move him. If so, he married the wrong arborist.

His writing regimen is simple: two pages per day –no more, no less. Early on, Goncalves shows us the master peering intently into his computer and then typing. We think he must be composing his new novel only to have the camera swivel around to show us that, in fact, Saramago is playing online solitaire. Saramago and Pilar decamped in 1992 to the Canary Islands when Portugal’s conservative government censured his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and the sting of selfimposed exile is particularly felt by Pilar. Jose and Pilar attempts to portray Saramago as both an atheist-Communist firebrand and a crochety yet kindly senior citizen. He answers fan mail screened by Pilar. (One letter writer sends him a recipe for cod au gratin). He dutifully signs books for interminable lines of fans and even accedes, not altogether happily, to requests for a kiss on the cheek.

But he is also given to issuing pronouncements that have the ring of finality. One of his more upbeat bon mots: “To feel that the end of each day is an irreparable loss, that’s probably what old age is all about.” The best thing he can say about religion is, “The history of mankind is the history of misunderstandings with God. He doesn’t understand us, we don’t understand him.” More typical is this: “Once sin had been invented, the guy who invented it had a fantastic weapon he could use to dominate the other people –and that’s what the church did. It’s just a fake, a tragic farce.”

One subject that doesn’t rear its ugly head in Jose and Pilar is the controversy that erupted over Saramago’s statement in 2003, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, that “Jews no longer deserve sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust.” The insertion of those sentiments would have considerably altered the homespun man-of-wisdom image Goncalves strives to maintain for Saramago. It also would have made for a more bracing and less sentimental movie.

Peter Rainer

A Soldier’s Life

2011-11-02T13:37:06Z

Hell and Back Again.

Directed by Danfung Dennis.

The harrowing images of war that have come back to us from Iraq and Afghanistan have been matched, in many U.S. documentaries, by equally upsetting images of soldiers, many of them injured, attempting to adjust to the new normalcy of the homefront. Hell and Back Again was directed by Danfung Dennis, a photojournalist who was embedded with the Marines from Echo Company in their 2009 incursion into southern Afghanistan. The film’s focus is on 25-year-old Sgt. Nathan Harris, who returns home to North Carolina with a shattered hip and leg.

Harris is not exactly a model rehabilation patient. Large crowds unnerve him, he is all too willing to show off his wounds, and he has a disturbing fondness for using his pistol as a plaything. His steadfast wife Ashley is by his side, but a halcyon future for them is by no means guaranteed. Dennis, who overdoes the cutting back and forth between images of battlefield and homefront, keeps political bias to a minimum. But in selecting Harris as his subject, he implicitly asks whether the cause Harris fought for was worth his sacrifice. The film also upends the conquering hero myth all too prevalent in wartime culture.

—Peter Rainer

Psyche and Psychoanalysis: The Talking Cure

2011-11-02T13:26:37Z

A Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein

directed by David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg has developed a reputation over many years as a director specializing in the artfully gruesome. From The Brood and Dead Ringers to The Fly and Crash, he has luxuriated in movies about the rending of the flesh. So it comes as something of a surprise that his latest film, A Dangerous Method, about the early friendship between the young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), is bloodless – in more ways than one. It’s about the rending of the psyche, not the flesh. Screenwriter Christopher Hampton adapted his play The Talking Cure, which is itself adapted from John Kerr’s non-fiction book, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Spielrein, played in the film by Keira Knightley, was a Russian-Jewish woman originally under the care of Jung in 1904 at the Burgholzi mental hospital outside Zurich.

Her seizures and hysteria were severe but Jung, using Freud’s methods, was able to rehabilitate her. Their relationship, however, was not exactly standard: although married, Jung entered into an affair with Spielrein, who wanted to lose her viginity to him. Eventually feeling spurned by Jung, she became a patient of Freud’s, ultimately becoming a prominent psychoanalyst in her own right.

This material is rich but the treatment is stodgy. Too many scenes play out as talkfests in closed quarters and the talk is never quite as scintillating as intended. Knightley’s performance, at least in her hysteria phase, is so overscaled that she seems in danger of turning herself inside out. Fassbender is creditable enough. Mortensen, rarely without a cigar, gives a sly rendition of Freud’s low-key superciliousness. At one point, when the two men are about to arrive by ocean liner in New York to attend a conference, Freud chuckles: “Do you think they know we’re on our way, bringing them the plague?” Dramatizing intellectual ideas is always a challenge, even when, as here, the ideas are so closely aligned with heavy-duty emotion. Perhaps this is why Cronenberg cast Fassbender and Mortensen, two actors who exude physicality. A Dangerous Method is far from a disgrace, but it rarelystirs the passions. It’s a high-toned waxworksdisplay.

—Peter Rainer

Boxing Brothers

2011-11-02T13:19:17Z

Klitschko

directed by Sebastian Dehnhardt

Vitali Klitschko and his younger brother Wladimir are the first siblings to hold world champion boxing titles at the same time. Each around six foot six inches tall, nearly identical in looks and build, they are a fearsome, intimidating duo. Their detractors call them “robots,” but, as Sebastian Dehnhardt’s fine documentary Klitschko demonstrates, they are anything but.

Although their life stories don’t have the heart-warming underdog aspects of a “Rocky” movie, the Ukrainian Klitschkos didn’t exactly have it easy growing up. Their father, a military officer and a Communist, was a first responder to the Chernobyl disaster and eventually contracted cancer, although he survived. The family lived at the time in a two-room shack not far from the nuclear meltdown. In the movie, the boys revisit the house, now rotting and empty. Wladimir describes how he played with paper boats in radioactive puddles.

Both boys had an avid early interest in boxing but Wladimir says Vitali was born a fighter while he had to become one. They worshipped western athletes and martial artists although such idolatry was off limits in Russia. Vitali eventually became kickbox champion of the Soviet Union. Traveling with his team, he visited the United States for the first time. He describes the experience as like landing on the moon. “I went to a supermarket,” he remembers, “and there were a hundred kinds of cheese. I only knew of one kind of cheese – it was called ‘cheese.’ ” Rising in the heavyweight ranks, the brothers attracted the attention of Don King, the notorious boxing promoter whose handling of such fighters as Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson was often accompanied by scandal and controversy. Wladimir recounts the meeting he and Vitali had with King, in King’s palatial compound. Attempting to impress the boxers as a cultivated man, the promoter sat down at his piano to play a classical sonata. Very impressive – except the boys noticed that the piano was actually a player piano. The brothers didn’t sign with King. “He was a dishonest man,” says Wladimir, smiling.

Vitali supervised his younger brother’s boxing career for many years. “My parents told me to look after Wladimir when we were young,” he says. “They’ve never told me to stop.” But after some severe setbacks in the ring, Wladimir replaced Vitali’s team with his own and forbade his brother from visiting his training camp. He turned his career around. No one was happier than Vitali, who always cheers his brother on from the sidelines, and vice versa. Vitali explains that when a boxer fights either brother, it’s as if he is fighting “both of us.”

Vitali had his own setbacks. It’s difficult to watch footage from his championship fight with Lennox Lewis, where the cut above Vitali’s eye went so deep that blood gushed and the fight had to be stopped. For a time Vitali stayed out of boxing, going into politics. But he too, like his brother, staged a successful comeback.

The obvious question, of course, is: Will the brothers ever fight each other and unify the various heavyweight titles in a single belt? Vanessa and Serena Williams, top tennis stars, regularly play each other. Boxing is different, though. Competition is one thing; inflicting violence is another. In any case, the brothers’ smiley mother, Nadeshda, who is interviewed frequently throughout the film, makes it clear that early on she extracted an unbreakable promise from her boys never to box each other. The only fighting they do is on the chessboard.

At one point in the film, an ex-boxer wonders why the Klitschkos went into boxing at all. Boxing has traditionally been a way for poor, uneducated kids to work their way out of crime and poverty. But the brothers are highly educated and speak four languages. (They speak German to the film’s German director and live part time in Germany). They seem to have taken up boxing because, given their physiques and their temperament, they had no other choice. For them, boxing is a form of self-vindication, a way of continually proving themselves. If Vitali and Wladimir are indeed “robots,” they are the most advanced models.

—Peter Rainer

The China Question

2011-09-16T18:38:57Z

There is probably no more pertinent global question right now than the China question. Adding his voice to the chorus of queries is American director Brook Silva-Braga, whose documentary The China Question trots out an impressive roster of talking heads to grapple with the issue, including Harvard economist and historian Niall Ferguson, Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s U.S.-China Center, Barry Naughton, author of The Chinese Economy, Wu Jianmin, former Chinese ambassador to the U.N., and Cui Zhiyuan, a leading member of China’s New Left. Gaining rare Western access to the inner workings of Chinese factories, Silva-Braga lays out the implications, specifically for Americans, of China’s economic ascendancy. Silva-Braga’s mother declares early on that, for moral reasons, she will never buy any Chinese-made goods. This proves to be rather difficult, since, it seems, just about everything, including American flags and the popular American Girl doll, is made in China. In a larger sense, the film asks what it means for Americans, and by extension many other democratic countries, to contribute to China’s rise, given its suppression of free speech and history of jailing dissidents. We are told that every day China sells a billion dollars of goods just to the United States, which is four times as much as the U.S. sells daily to China. Alan Tonelson, of the U.S. Business and Advisory Council, says that “there is no doubt that the biggest and only beneficiaries from the current U.S. and China relationship have been the the big, focused, outsourcing multinational companies who have recognized that producing in a very low cost, very lightly regulated country like China for a pricey market like the U.S. is a great way to expand your margins and profits. It’s a no-brainer.” To make this system work, China needs to create 25 million new jobs every year just to keep pace. And to create jobs China must remain the world’s work force, which means it must keep winning on price –which means low wages. Chinese factory workers, many of whom are migrants from the countryside, make on average $200 a month. That’s still higher than the $50-60 a month they would likely make as farmers. Niall Ferguson sums up: “I’m constantly struck by how much thought the Chinese leadership gives to the United States. In Washington I see no such long-term thinking.”

—Peter Rainer

Available on DVD
from Earthchild Productions:
http://thechinaquestion.com

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Sex Trafficking: A Movie, a Book, a Global Issue

2011-07-11T12:12:07Z

Kathryn Bolkovac was a good cop. Back in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, the athletic Ms. Bolkovac once wrestled a fleeing criminal to the ground and disarmed him. Kathryn Bolkovac was just as thorough about her paperwork, documenting and recording ever scrap of relevant information. A good police officer, she says, is one who can build a case. When she decided to take a job in 1999 with the private security contractor DynCorp International, Kathryn Bolkovac brought both her zeal and her diligence to her new job on the International Police Task Force in Bosnia. But when she was assigned to investigate the trafficking of girls and women, Bolkovac soon discovered that she was going to have to wrestle with a lot more than one fleeing criminal. Not only was she up against organized crime in Bosnia and the Eastern European mafia that was supplying that market with trafficked women, she would also have to contend with hostility from DynCorp colleagues and even members of the UN policing mission. Kathryn Bolkovac’s investigation was soon annoying a lot of people.

To read the report, order a copy of the magazine

To read the interview with Kathryn Bolkovac, order a copy of the magazine

To read the film review, order a copy of the magazine

To read the interview with Madeleine Rees, order a copy of the magazine

A Remarkable Women in Light

2011-03-17T17:34:53Z

Documentary tracing the life and career of iconic Muslim leader of Pakistan’s post-Soviet generation.

Bhutto directed by Duan Baughman and Johnny O’Hara

On Dec. 27th, 2007, Benazir Bhutto, the first woman in history to lead a Muslim nation, was assassinated at a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) rally in Rawalpindi. The documentary Bhutto chronicles the decades-long events leading up to that still unsolved killing and its immediate aftermath. It’s a tangled tale, with much that remains murky, but the co-directors Duane Baughman and Johnny O’ Hara have done a fairly good job of elucidating the issues, or at least clarifying the confusions.

It’s fitting that Benazir Bhutto should be the centerpiece of a major movie, since during her lifetime she had the glamorized aura of a movie star. Like a number of other high-profile figures in the political arena –most conspicuously the UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed by a truck bomb in Baghdad in 2003 and was the subject last year of a powerful documentary, Sergio– Benazir Bhutto was both historically significant and personally charismatic.

This is also true of her extended family clan, which has often been referred to as the “Pakistani Kennedys.” The Kennedy reference is double-edged: it summons up not only a vast political legacy but family tragedy as well.

Before the film’s opening credits have even finished, we are already hit with a rapid-fire history of Pakistan dating from the 1947 partition onward. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father, the first democratically elected president of Pakistan, occupies much of the film’s beginning section. His execution in 1979 under the regime of Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, who staged a military coup two years before, sets the stage for Benazir’s ascension as her father’s hand-picked favorite to succeed him. She speaks repeatedly in the movie, through audio and video footage, of how her father’s death vigil prepared her for a political career.

Benazir, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, goes into self-imposed exile in the West in 1984 after years of house arrest. Returning to Pakistan a year later to face down General Zia, she becomes, at 35, prime minister in 1988. (Two years later she gives birth while in office, another first for a female world leader).

Twenty months after her election she is dismissed on corruption charges. In 1993, at a time when the PPP captured most of the parliamentary seats, she returns in triumph for a second term as prime minister. Within three years she is ousted once again on charges of corruption. At the time of the Rawalpindi rally she was moting yet another political comeback.

All of this dizzying back and forth is punctuated by persistent violence, including the killing of two of Benazir’s brothers. In an interview, Fatima, the daughter of one of the brothers, blames Benazir’s husband Alif Zardari, now president of Pakistan, with having engineered her father’s murder.

What are we to make of such charges? Although the film directors make a pretense of even-handedness, the overall tone of Bhutto is somewhat hero-worshippy. (One of the film’s producers, Mark Siegel, was a close friend of Benazir and co-authored her final book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West.) The corruption charges that dogged Benazir’s trail are never deeply delved into, despite the fact that reporters such as the New York Times’s John F. Burns, who wrote extensively on the matter, are interviewed on camera.

What emerges from the film, nonetheless, is a portrait of a remarkable woman who, despite the charges leveled against her, both real and trumped-up, instituted social reforms in Pakistan against great odds. That she became a martyr was surely not her intention and yet, given the entwined history of her family and her country, her martydom seems in retrospect inevitable.

– Peter Rainer

Photo by Lichfield/Getty Images