Human Rights Watch 2016 Offers Powerful, Topical Films On Women's Rights, LGBT Issues, More

HOOLIGAN SPARROW (Nanfu Wang) *OPENING NIGHT FILM

Ye Haiyan, nicknamed “Hooligan Sparrow,” is a women’s rights activist in China, remarkable both for her courage and passion as well as her confrontational activist style and media savvy. She’s probably best known for infiltrating a brothel and offering herself as a free sex worker to expose the poor working conditions faced by many sex workers.

Wang’s film follows Hooligan Sparrow as she travels to Hainan Province in southern China to protest the case of a school principal who had sex with six of his underage students in a hotel. Incredibly, it was argued that it was a case of child prostitution instead of sex abuse because the principal claimed to have given the girls money. Sparrow brings along some of her activist friends, including human rights lawyer Wang Yu, to stage public protests calling national attention to the case.

As can be imagined, given the Chinese government’s past responses to protest movements, the authorities don’t take kindly to these actions, and begin a campaign of surveillance, intimidation, and outright violent attacks against Sparrow and her friends. Wang herself, as she documents all this, becomes a target as well; as she resorts to using hidden cameras, she reveals all sorts of hidden surveillance hidden in plain sight, as they’re watched on the street and all their movements are being tracked by authorities.

Hooligan Sparrow often takes the form of a real-life surveillance thriller, along the lines of the Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR. In many ways, Sparrow had it much worse than Snowden; Snowden at least was able to evade his would-be captors, and he didn’t have thugs sent to his house to assault him, as happened to Sparrow. Chilling and inspiring in equal measure, Hooligan Sparrow is a remarkable achievement of both filmmaking and courageous activism.

SONITA (Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami) *CLOSING NIGHT FILM

Sonita, the titular subject of this film, is an 18-year-old aspiring rapper, as well as an undocumented Afghan immigrant living in Iran. Living and working in a refugee NGO facility, she puts posters on her wall of her musical idol Rihanna and dreams of a way to escape. She struggles to find a place to even record her rhymes, as there is a legal prohibition against women singing solo in public, and most studios charge exorbitant fees to take on the risk of flouting the law.

Against all odds, she manages to record a song and a music video about her experiences, and especially the difficulty of being a young woman under these circumstances. But her family has different plans for her: they want Sonita to improve their destitution by essentially selling her to another family as a bride with a $9,000 dowry.

And here is where the documentary gets into ethically dicey areas. Maghami, already far from simply a fly-on-the-wall observer up to this point – the filmmaker and subject are clearly already on intimately friendly terms – becomes personally involved in the outcome of the story.

What I’m about to write from here on constitute major spoilers (so be forewarned), but there’s really no meaningful way to discuss this film without mentioning Maghami’s personal investment and influence – some would say interference – and how this colors and disturbs the ultimate impact of this film. Maghami essentially bribes Sonita’s mother to get her out of the marriage, whereupon she escapes to the US, where she meets some nice white folks who’ll help her stay there and study (music, presumably).

It does make for a nice, happy ending, and film fest audiences have responded heartily, especially at Sundance, where it won the grand jury and audience awards for world documentary; this, despite the film breaking no new ground whatsoever stylistically. To use appropriately musical metaphors, the lyrics may be slightly different, but the beats are very familiar; it’s an uplifting story of an underdog beating the odds. All well and good for Sonita, but what of the many other young women in similar or worse circumstances who don’t get films made about them or lots of folks helping them out, because they don’t happen to have a sick flow on the mic? It’s one thing to advocate for a cause – there’s a venerable tradition of activist documentary – but to advocate on behalf of an individual is quite another. All this leaves Sonita as a would-be inspirational tale with a disquieting aftertaste.

(June 19, 7pm; IFC)

INSIDE THE CHINESE CLOSET (Sophia Luvara)

The title of this intimate and revealing documentary doesn’t mean exactly what one would think. It’s only very recently that in China one wasn’t put in prison or sent to a psychiatric institution simply for being gay; the film is set in Shanghai, which today by all appearances is a fully, modern cosmopolitan city where gay men and lesbians can live their lives more or less openly without much fear from the authorities. But as is depicted here with humor and poignancy, old traditions, as well as the legacy of China’s one child policy, still has a stranglehold on the lives of young people, and especially LGBT folk.

We alternate between the stories of Andy, a gay man, and Cherry, a lesbian, both Shanghai residents under great pressure from their parents to conform their expectations of marriage and children despite their sexual orientation. The film’s key line comes from another gay man at one gathering of fellow LGBT people: “Our parents go into the closet when we come out.” Andy and Cherry’s experiences seem, on the evidence presented here, similar to that of other young gay people in China; they’re pretty much out to their parents, but their parents pressure their children to marry and have children just like heterosexuals to keep up appearances for the benefit of the parent’s neighbors.

This gives rise to the curious phenomenon of “fake marriage markets,” where gay men and lesbians enter into arrangements where they’re married for public purposes while they live separate intimate lives. The arrangements are sadly and unfortunately necessary in a country that doesn’t have legal same-sex marriage, and that lacks a reliable social welfare system for seniors, so that they mostly depend on their children to care for them in their old age.

Andy and Cherry’s stories vividly illustrate the emotional turmoil caused by their parents’ expectations. Andy’s frequent phone calls to his father reveal that he’s under enormous pressure to find a woman that he can marry and who will bear his child; his father is well aware his son is gay, and that Andy will be marrying a lesbian. But none of his father’s friends and neighbors know that, and his father would like to keep it that way. Even worse, his father has exacting standards for a suitable wife; she must be the right age, have the right education, and so on. Andy tries to remain cheerful, and genuinely wishes to please his father, but the strain of the hoops he must go through is clearly evident.

Cherry is married to a gay man, but the pressure is on from her mother to have a child. Whether she bears one herself (out of the question for Cherry), adopts one, buys one, or steals one, it doesn’t seem to matter, as long as her mother can have a grandchild. Cherry wants to please her parents to, just as Andy does, but she begins to chafe under these pressures, and becomes more and more resentful of her mother’s incessant insistence on her having a child.

Inside the Chinese Closet offers a nuanced and often visually striking depiction of the struggles of LGBT people in China to navigate societal and family expectations while trying to live in a way that allows them to be who they truly are. The songs of love and marriage on the soundtrack form an ironic aural counterpoint to the difficult experiences of the people in the film.

(June 17, 9:30pm, IFC; June 18, 9pm, FSLC)

STARLESS DREAMS (Mehrdad Oskouei)

“The pain drips from the walls.” So says one of the subjects of Starless Dreams, one of the most emotionally moving and visually accomplished films I’ve seen recently. Set in a young women’s juvenile detention center on the outskirts of Teheran, Iran, Oskouei has created a film with elegant simplicity and great power. Much of this power comes from simply listening to the harrowing stories the women tell on camera, gently prodded by the filmmaker’s off-camera queries.

The young women have been placed here for the same kinds of crimes that you’d hear of in any prison in the world: prostitution, drug use, armed robbery, carjacking, murder. But what’s heartbreaking about these particular women’s stories, is how abuse from their families, and society’s failure to protect them from this abuse, has placed them where they are now. The euphemism “bothered” comes up frequently in Oskouei’s questioning, as in “Has anyone bothered you?” This refers to sexual abuse, which many of the young women testify to, always at the hands of family members. Besides rape, they’ve been burned, forced to sell drugs on the street, beaten, chained, endured having parents addicted to drugs, and many other degradations. It’s no wonder that one of these young women, feeling cast off and abandoned by those who should have cared for her, and by society at large, refers to herself as “Nobody.”

But it’s not all a simple litany of misery. The camaraderie and the bonding between the young women, who laugh and cry with each other, play games together, and are generally supportive of each other, come through as strongly as their pain. They’re still able to laugh and joke with other, and even with the filmmaker, as they mock being interviewed by him. This prison also functions as a shelter from terrible families and a hostile society, so being released and being forced to go back to the circumstances that placed them there in the first place, is not often a happy prospect.

The film is set in winter, close to New Year’s; the ice and snow form an appropriate visual backdrop to the desolation of these women’s lives. However, this extraordinary and deeply compassionate film leavens their sad existences by giving them a voice, and allowing them to express their pain, a right which so many around them have denied them.

(June 11, 9pm; FSLC)