The film Very Young Girls introduces us to the cold hard facts of child sexual exploitation in the United states.  The director, David Schisgall and his team, follow the women who work at GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Services) and the girls who use their services.  The reality is that girls as young as thirteen are trapped in the cycle of sexual abuse at the hands of their pimps.

After the screening, Schisgall was joined by his co-directors, a social worker from GEMS and one of the girls in the film, Shaquana.  Someone asked what it is that makes this girls stay in such a volatile, violent environment.  Shaquana put in plainly,"We're not dumb... it's that we do not love ourselves enough and we connect with this person (pimp)...like a father figure."  It is because they are so young that they fall prey to men who are out to exploit and abuse them.  Any sign of attention is misinterpreted as a sign of affection. The social worker added that people need to be educated about these issues in their immediate communities.

There was no doubt that the audience was moved by the film.  The film is dealing with an issue that is close to home, so to speak, since sexual exploitation is often shown to occur in very distant places.  Perhaps films like this one will add to the dialogue to help these young girl get out of prostitution and have successful adult lives.

The credits rolled on the world premiere of Shake Hands With the Devil,  and there was a brief silence when the applause would usually begin.  Perhaps the audience was too stunned to react immediately.  I started clapping.  So there?s another feather in my cap.  I was the first person to put my hands together for what will surely be one of the most important films of the year.  Of course that applause grew exponentially from there, and reached a crescendo when Senator Romeo Dallaire himself made his way to the stage.  A packed Elgin Theatre stood and applauded Dallaire until the humble Canadian hero asked them to stop.

 

Dallaire gave a brief, but impressive speech:  ?Are all humans human or are some more human than others?  Do some humans actually count more than others?  Have we not since the end of the cold war prioritized humanity and decided that our lives are more important than theirs and in so doing established a pecking order in humanity?  And although we believe in human rights we are still able to believe that the lives of one of us is more significant than the lives of others.  And in so doing we have established that the lowest priority of humanity for which we will not want to sacrifice, both cash and effort of political will, but also the blood of our own; the lowest priority is the sub-Saharan black African.  And we have entered an era that I consider more evil than even the colonial era.  This movie is part of the campaign to not let the Rwandan genocide die.  And Roger and his cast have done a great job.?

 

Dallaire wasn?t the only dignitary on hand.  The Canadian Ambassador to Rwanda was in the audience, as well as four Canadian soldiers who served during the Rwandan genocide.  The cast stood on stage briefly, but unlike other premieres where the presence of a major Canadian star like Roy Dupuis would be the lead of this blog, here his demeanor was sober and he said nothing. 

 

Seeing Dupuis in jeans, a plaid work-shirt, and leather jacket with a handsome scruffy beard brought home how amazing his transformation into Romeo Dallaire truly is.  If you were impressed at how Dupuis channeled Maurice Richard in The Rocket, you haven?t seen anything yet.

 

Most of you have probably read Dallaire?s book, or seen Peter Raymont?s documentary, both also titled Shake Hands With the Devil.  Perhaps you even wonder if a feature film is necessary.  First, you should understand how faithful the film is to the source material.  Director Roger Spotiswoode spoke with Dallaire before undertaking the challenging story.  Dallaire had three requirements.  1) Tell the truth.  2) Make it about the Rwandan people.  3) Don?t make me look like a hero.

 

Spotiswoode says he failed Dallaire.  Because in telling the story it was impossible not to make Dallaire and his men look like heroes.  These relatively few soldiers were responsible for saving over 30,000 lives.  Also because Dallaire and his men never gave up on the Rwandan people, even when the rest of the world did.

 

This is an amazing film that should do big things, both in the world of awards, box office tallies and publicity, but also in terms of raising awareness about the Rwandan genocide by making it accessible to the largest possible audience.

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"He was pretty much the last person I hugged before leaving for Rwanda," said Dupuis, whose leather jacket and lumberjack shirt yesterday played sartorial counterpoint to Dallaire's suit and tie.

Read More of Peter Howell's fascinating portrait of Roy Dupuis and Romeo Dallaire's meeting yesterday here -http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/254779

 

There was hardly a dry eye in the Scotiabank Theatre for Saturday?s world premiere of A Promise to the Dead:  The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman.  I could never do justice to the wisdom of the renowned author and scholar in this humble blog, so below is a transcription of a Q and A with Dorfman and director Peter Raymont.  But first my reaction to the film:

 

Veteran Canadian filmmaker Raymont has crafted a doc many will call his crowning achievement.  After tackling Romeo Dallaire?s story in Shake Hands with the Devil, Raymont seemed hard-pressed to ever find a subject as fascinating.  Then Ariel Dorfman came along.

 

Widely known as the author of Death and the Maiden, Dorfman is a life-long supporter of social justice in Chile.  From his days as a young idealist working for President Allende?s vision of human rights; to the climactic moment when military dictator Augusto Pinochet is democratically ousted from power; to the current climate in Chile where Pinochet?s bloody legacy leaves families unable to mourn the missing remains of loved ones, Dorfman struggles to reinforce a history that has eroded.  He travels back to Chile and shares both giddy reunions and painful memories with old friends.  As much suffering as he recalls on screen, it is his charm and warmth that carry the film.

 

Many Latin Americans in the audience were understandably moved to tears, but a young woman I met after proved how broad the film?s appeal will be.  ?I wasn?t sure what this movie was about when I got my ticket.  To be honest I didn?t know a lot about the history of Chile the film depicted.  But this is one of the most important documentaries I?ve ever seen.? Her eyes, like so many others, were red.        

 

Without further adieu, the eloquent words of Ariel Dorfman, director Peter Raymont and programmer Marguerite Pigott:

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Marguerite: Throughout the movie you were looking outward, at the effect of your exile on your past.  I?m curious to know at the end of this, what was the effect upon you of this journey?

 

Ariel: There are a few things that I think came out of it.  The first is there are things that I did because of this film that I never would have done.  We went back to one of the same houses where I?d lived, I met a woman who had saved my life.  The other is, I?m now starting to write the second volume of my memoirs, which go from the moment when I go into exile until the point where I began making the film.  In some ways it?s the end of my exile.  So it was a very important thing to go through. I thank Peter so much for being so subtle and so true to the complications.  I?m a very complex person and it was a complex journey.  He?s done a very, very fine job. 

 

Audience member:  How did you get the historical footage used in the film?  Was it hard to find or difficult to come by?

 

Peter:  An incredible job of gathering all this stuff by White Pines fiction.  The largest amount of footage is from this wonderful film ?The Battle of Chile? it?s great that he was filming on the streets during the coup on the day of the coup.  But there were many other sources from Latin America and Europe and many photographs.  And Ariel?s family, his wife that?s here dug up all these old photographs.  People were very generous.  Lots of people really worked hard to try and make this film work.

 

Audience member:  Ariel what would you hope this film accomplishes when it?s shown in Chile?

 

Ariel:   It?s a haunting memory, being true to that memory, no matter how hard it is to remember the deaths inflicted over the course of time, it?s absolutely necessary in order to move forward.  This is just one story, there are thousands of people?s stories in Chile. Each has to deal with coming to terms with what we did or did not do.  So perhaps they will see how I?m struggling with that truth. I would hope that it?s a contribution to not just Chile but other countries around the world.

 

Audience Member:  Was Pinochet exiled to the U.S.?

 

Ariel: No he wasn?t.   He was never exiled. What happened was Pinochet made the mistake of going to London for an operation and to visit his friend Margaret Thatcher.  We kept asking the U.S. government to extradite Pinochet for the murder of a U.S. citizen under his orders, which was proven.  He wouldn?t have gone to exile, he would have gone to club fed.  Which is much worse than club Chile.

 

Audience Member:  There are many in Chile still wandering the streets that were part of the Pinochet regime, how can they ever be brought to justice?

 

Ariel:  You cannot judge every single person.  I?m not worried about the health of Pinochet, I?m worried about the health of this country.  And the country comes together by recognizing that, and if people could only understand, look ?I did this, maybe because I was scared,' or whatever reason, then we would be better off.  But the fact that we go through the streets of Chile and you do not know if you are beside the person who killed your husband, that poisons the atmosphere.  It?s perverse.  Perhaps that?s why my novels are so perverse, because I?ve lived through that myself.  The difference is that I look at that.  I think that?s what a writer does.  I think that?s part of what art does.  Any form of telling the truth no matter how painful is important.  I don?t care if all the people are brought to justice.  I just hope it never happens again.  And that?s only done by a very deep look inside ourselves.  

 

Audience Member: I?m from the United States and I wonder if you see any parallels between Pinochet?s regime and the U.S. right now?

 

Peter:  I?ll let Ariel take this one.  (laughs)

 

Ariel: This film is about resistance.  You cannot suppress the people forever.  If you could we?re in a lot of trouble.  But I don?t think so.  I think there?s a wellspring of hope everywhere constantly.  If there is one thing we need to defeat it is fear.  Because fear paralyzes us, fear separates us.  It is fear that does not allow us to meet the challenges of understanding the U.S. is part of the world, not the emperor of the world. 

 

Peter:  I would like to say that fear and the exploitation of fear after 9/11 is something we all must be aware of.

 

Ariel: The truth is, that a government can only do what people allow them to do.  In Chile, people voted openly to get rid of a dictator who was still in power.  Do you know what that means?  Can we be so afraid to make changes in the world?  I don?t believe it.  There?s an example here, so join us please.    

By my count there are three films in this year's Real to Reel that have their roots in my trip to Iraq after the invasion in 2003. At the time, I had basically given up trying to make feature docs and   was focussing on making socially positive doc episodes for television. I went to Iraq to make two shows for MTV:  True Life: I'm in Iraq, a verite and interview hour about American and Iraqi young people in the post-war period, and Gideon's Diary in Iraq, a half hour hosted by correspondent Gideon Yago. For Gideon's diary, we shot a profile of the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda, and later Gideon wrote a piece about them for Vice Magazine. These, I'm told, were the seeds of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti's Heavy Metal in Baghdad . I haven't seen it -- I'm dying to -- but I'm told you can hear my voice in the film on some of the early footage of the band in Baghdad that I shot.

Muthana Mudher was a friend of the Acrassicauda's, and a young film student, whose story of trying to get a film education in the rubble of the city I told in the True Life.  Liev Shreiver saw the show on TV, and wanted to help Muthana with his film education by bringing him from Baghdad to intern on the set of his next film, and wanted me to make a doc about it.  It would be a film about a filmmaker reaching out to a filmmaker while making a film -- perfect material to direct for Nina Davenport, whose wonderful first person films are always, in my view, about a filmmaker, Nina herself, in a collision between the palliative dreams of story and the messy demands of the real world.    The result is Operation Filmmaker, in my view -- and I am biased as I produced -- it is Nina's best work to date.

MTV liked our Iraq shows, and a previous show I had done for them on Israel/Palestine, so they asked Gideon and me to create a series about young people in war zones.  We brought on Priya Swaminathan and Nina Alvarez to help make the pilot, about young people caught up in the civil war in Colombia.   The pilot wasn't picked up-- it was always a longshot for MTV to devote a half hour weekly to young people in war zones -- but in the course of researching more episodes for the series, we looked into international sex trafficking, and found that trafficking in young girls was going on not just in Cambodia, but just a few blocks north of our office in New York City, right under the eyes of the police, and the media, and the city. We found that if a woman is coerced into prostitution and brought to New York City from the Ukraine, and she is caught, the US will give her housing, and legal help, and help getting home.  But if she is trafficked to New York City from Yonkers, and she is caught, she will go to jail.  Likewise, if a forty year old man in Utah has sex with a fourteen year old girl and gets caught, he's going to jail and the girl is getting treatment.   But if the man has sex with the girl in the Bronx and gives the girl sixty dollars, and they are caught, then the girl is going to jail and the man is going free.  This is how we met Rachel Lloyd and began to make Very Young Girls.

Rachel survived sexual exploitation as a teenager, and as an adult  began working to help young girls find their way out of "the life." Rachel is a healer, and she brings out the amazing and immense potential of the beautiful, traumatized girls in her care.  She helps them through empathy and therapy to overcome their victimization, return to a normal life, and come to a place where they can talk about what happened to them in the bracingly brave, honest, and insightful way they do in the film. I had interviewed young people who had survived trauma in war zones around the world and I had never heard anyone with such powerful voices and stories as these young women of New York City. I modeled my working relationship with Rachel on how I observed, as a young assistant, my old boss Errol Morris work with physicist Stephen Hawking during the making of A Brief History of Time.  Both films would be a profile of a great innovator with an amazing human story, and an explanation of that leader's complex and counterintuitive insights.  So, like Stephen, Rachel would be a key creative collaborator in all phases of the work, from pre-production to score.  I did not worry about empowering Rachel, as she had the intelligence and wisdom to step into our medium armed with great authority and to make the choices that would lead to a powerful, honest, unsparing film that has the possibility of changing the way people see commercial sexual exploitation in our society today. It's remarkable to me, and sobering, that my journey to Baghdad, with all its horrors, would lead back to the more or less unnoticed, but equally terrible horrors on the streets of my own city.

Pictured: Rachel Lloyd tries to talk Ebony out of returning to "the life" in 
Very Young Girls.

Mukhtaran Mai (left, background) made a surprise visit at the screening Shame, a work in progress which documents her remarkable story as an illiterate rape victim who has become an international spokesperson for the empowerment of women.

A few years ago, while living in her home of Meerwala, Pakistan, Mai?s brother was accused of having an affair with a woman. As a so-called "honour for honour" punishment, Mukhtaran was sentenced to be raped and then paraded around the town. Mai filed a police report and eventually took her case to the Supreme Court, garnering international attention and reparation offer of 500,000 rupees from the Pakistani government, which she used to build a school for girls. This amazing story is told through the lens of talented young director Mohammed Naqvi (left) who is planning to show the film in Pakistan when it is finished. Showtime will air the film on television in the U.S. The film looks at Mai?s family and the families of the men charged with the rape; men who now have relatives enrolled in Mai?s school.

Mai was encouraged to the stage by a rousing standing ovation where she answered many questions about her struggles and her hopes for the future with interpretation from Naqvi. The crowd did not want to let her go, and Mai stayed in the lobby long after the Q & A to speak with many eager audience members.

If you would like to comment on this extraordinary film, please let the director know what you think by adding to the doc blog.

[TIFF will be showing Shame (left), a documentary about Pakistani activist Mukhtaran Mai, in Real to Reel as a work-in-progress. Here the director takes us behind the scenes - Ed.]

We needed a few crucial pick up shots done and I was in the middle of editing in New York. To get these pick ups, I would have had to go back to Pakistan for a few days. At that point, however, we were nine days away from the Toronto International Film Festival deadline and it wasn?t possible for me to leave the edit with such little time left.

I then began the scramble to find a cameraman and camera in Multan, the closest city to Meerwala, the Punjabi village where most of my film takes place. Now the area surrounding Meerwala is quite treacherous, full of armed highway-men and generally people who don?t take to kindly to ?TV Folk?. In addition, it is about a two and a half hour drive from Multan to Meerwala, most of it on a single lane road with dual carriage traffic- traffic that includes huge petroleum trucks and cow and donkey mobiles.

After a slew of rejections, I managed to convince a local cameraman to take the journey for me. My next challenge was to make him understand my shot list.  I like to think I speak Urdu fluently, but I have no idea how to communicate ?B-Roll?, ?Close-up?, or ?POV shot? in Urdu. I sent him some screen captures and stills to serve as a guide for the types of shots I wanted. The cameraman kept on pacifying me by saying, ?no problem,? repeatedly and by insisting that he knew perfectly well what I was talking about in my shot list. But the few times I tested him about some of the shots I needed, he would pause, and then say, ?What do you mean?? and then end his response with a lackluster ?no problem?, before I had a chance to elaborate.

I was going to need more help in getting this shot list properly communicated. What I needed at this point was an assistant director. But no one else was willing to go to Meerwala. So what I needed specifically, was an assistant director in Meerwala.

Four years ago, Meerwala had no electricity, no paved roads, and a weak water supply system, let alone assistant directors. This was 2006, however, and Meerwala, was now hooked up to the Internet and I was closer to finding my AD. Who ended up being my AD? Two residents of Meerwala: Mukhtaran Mai, the women?s rights icon and gang rape survivor who is the subject of my documentary, and Naseem Akhtar: Mukhtaran?s friend and principal of Mukhtaran Mai?s School for Girls.

I admit it is a bit unorthodox to have the subjects of the documentary assistant direct the pick-up shoot for the film that is about them, but after all these years of shooting them, I felt that they would be the most knowledgeable about what shots I needed.  Neither of them had any AD experience, so I wrote a meticulous shot list for them.

Here is an excerpt of the shot list I e-mailed them:

From the school roof, slowly zoom into the window of Mukhtaran Mai?s bedroom or as close as you can get. Press record (red button). Then, hold your hands very, very still and then zoom out all the way. Once the picture is all the way out so you can see the house and the school. Hold for 25 seconds. Press record (red button).

Press record (red button). Walk inside the house from outside the gate, holding the camera very still. Walk straight down the path towards the guest room. Turn towards the center of the courtyard and walk slowly towards the kitchen. Stop. Hold the shot for 5 seconds. Turn the camera, aimed at the kitchen, and slowly aim it towards the last bedroom door. Walk towards the bedroom and enter it. Have Mukhtaran Mai sitting on the bed cross-legged. Have her face away from the camera looking tired and sad. Make sure she wears dark colors. Go a bit closer to Mukhtaran Mai until most of the room is in the frame. Hold the camera still for 25 seconds.  Press record again.

I got a Fed Ex package four days before the Toronto Deadline containing all the pickups I had gotten done. They came out great!

This year, TIFF is pleased to present an especially strong line-up of  documentaries from South Asia. A Cry in the Dark (left) captures the violent repression of locals in Manipur, India protesting the rape and killing of a young woman under police custody. The film?s director, Haobam Paban Kumar, a native of the Eastern Indian province, captured escalating protests of shocking intensity - including shots of police beating unarmed activists and journalists in open sight. This protest, barely covered by the international press, demonstrates the power of independent documentary makers to bear witness.

Shame, presented as a work-in-progress, portrays a search for justice by Mukhataran Mai, a Pakistani woman who was gang-raped as a tribally sanctioned punishment for a crime allegedly committed by her brother. In the face of trememdous pressure against her, Mai won reparations from the Pakistani government that she used to build local school, where even the children of her attackers attend. Being of Pakistani descent, director Mohammed Naqvi understands the cultural complexities at stake. His telling of the story is full of complexity and nuance.

Office Tigers offers a lighter look into South Asia, as New York filmmaker Liz Mermin penetrates the head office of a vibrant, multinational corporation based in Chennai, India. Two Americans started Office Tiger six years ago. Today it has over thirty-five hundred employees on three continents. The employees in Chennai are members of the generation whose lives are being transformed by the global marketplace. Mermin portrays this intersection between East and West with tremendous wit and humanity. Viewers are left to make up their own minds about the ramifications of our rapidly globalizing economy.

These documentaries join an impressive number of other films from South Asia. Among the highlights will be the Mavericks presentation "The Making of a Bollywood  Blockbuster. The all star line-up of Never Say Goodbye - Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Rani Mukerji - will join director Karan Johar on stage. The conversation will be led by Suketu Mehta, whose book of documentary reportage on India's film capital Mumbai "Maximum City" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

 [Filed by Deryck Ramcharitar]