The Dark Side

Exploring the genocidal side of humanity:

TIMBUKTU (A-minus) - So what is it like to live under Sharia rule? Abderrahmane Sissako (who also explored the theme of justice in 2006's "Bamako") takes a shot with this slow, affecting drama about the takeover of the famed city in Mali.

For convenience, here's an efficient plot summary from IMdB: "Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, proud cattle herder Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed aka Pino) lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), his daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and Issan (Mehdi Ag Mohamed), their twelve-year-old shepherd. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. The women have become shadows but resist with dignity. Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences. Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes abruptly."

Rather than depict the new leaders as hooded radical monsters, Sassako portrays them as almost bumbling yokels who just happen to be in charge. Violence is not always apparent. Some of the leaders are -- no surprise -- revealed to be hypocrites when it comes to complying with Sharia law.

After a dispute with a fisherman, Kidane ends up in the arms of the Islamist justice system. He is consigned to his fate, but there is hope that he might be forgiven and spared a harsh penalty.

Sissako finds beauty both in nature and in some tender human interactions amid the crackdown by the extremists. A long shot of Kidane slowly crossing a shallow stream is breathtaking as it wordlessly unfolds.

This is not as relentlessly bleak as "Osama (2003)," which was unflinching in its portrayal of the misogynistic horrors inflicted in Afghanistan by the Taliban. "Timbuktu" veers more toward the banality of evil. And it is both lovely and compelling in its storytelling.

WATCHERS OF THE SKY (A-minus) - Director Edet Belzberg's primer on genocide is contemplative and beautifully told through profiles of the leading voices for international justice of the past century.

The main character is Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" after fleeing Poland during the Nazi invasion and who fought diligently during and just after the war to have the crime recognized by world leaders, succeeding before the United Nations in 1948. (He had previously failed to have the crime of barbarity recognized by the League of Nations.) Belzberg employs Lemkin's journals to haunting effect, though the constant stream of words on the screen (both in his handwriting and typed out) can be a burden on the viewer who also has to navigate a lot of subtitles. Lemkin throughout is both heroic and pathetic; he lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, and he died neglected at age 59. His voice haunts throughout. A diary entry from Poland reads: "How strange that I was among the mourners and the dead. To feel the body alive while the soul was being carried to the grave." He explains his mission in simple terms: "I said to myself, being a lawyer I'm going to do something about it."

We also get to know Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor at Nuremburg. Ferencz is determined but amiable. His touching monologue at the end of the film explains the title. (The Hungarian is apparently still alive at age 95.) Belzberg also hangs with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who fought against the deadly Argentine government in the 1970s and most recently was lead prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. The ostensible narrator for much of the film is Samantha Power, who was  a journalist in the former Yugoslavia, won a Pulitzer for her treatise on genocide and now serves as President Obama's ambassador to the United Nations at age 44.

Belzberg bookends her narrative with the story of Emmanuel Uwurukundo, a survivor of the incomprehensible slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s. Uwurukundo watched family members get hacked to death. (Up to a million people, about a fifth of the nation's population, were killed in just a three-month period in 1994, as the Hutus sought to wipe out the Tutsis.)

Belzberg takes her time (a full two hours) depicting the absolute horrors of human civilization while quietly celebrating the dignity with which these journalists and lawyers and victims strive for a recognition of human dignity. She digs deep into the video archives; not only do we see Lemkin on a TV talk show in the '40s and Ferencz arguing to the court at Nuremburg, but there's Ratko Mladic, apparently captured by a friendly camcorder, waltzing into Srebrenica with his thugs, separating out the women and girls and then executing the men and boys.

There is no dearth of material for this topic, starting with the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I, and continuing a century later with the present-day atrocities in Darfur (Sudan) and Syria, both of whose leaders remain in power. In the battle for human existence, the dark side still seems to be winning. This film is mournful and melancholy but not without a glimmer of light, which is one reason to look up to the sky for succor.