Look On! Asylum Cases Brought to the Theater

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films and stage productions.)

Playwright Jefferey Solomon has written two exceptional plays based upon real asylum claims and cases brought in United States immigration courts. The first, De Novo, depicts the case of a fourteen-year-old boy named Edgar Chocoy who fled Guatemala City when MS-13, the largest gang in Central America, put a hit on his life. He traveled over 3,000 miles through the desert, and across the borders of three countries in search of his mother who had left him at the age of six months to work in the United States. Detained by the Department of Homeland Security upon his entry, Edgar, normally quiet and timid, spoke clearly and loudly about his fear of being deported: “I’m afraid to go back. They’ll kill me.” A pro bono immigration lawyer helped Edgar argue his asylum case in Denver, but the Immigration Judge ordered Edgar deported to Guatemala. He was murdered seventeen days later. The play weaves together court transcripts, interviews, letters and other documentary sources to reconstruct the gripping and poignant true story of the case whose outcome prompted a national outcry and a fundamental reconsideration about the way in which the government handles the many thousands of unaccompanied minors in immigration custody.
The second play, Tara's Crossing, tells the story of a transgendered asylum seeker from Guyana and her uphill battle to prove her claims of persecution from within the confines of U.S. Immigration Detention. The play, inspired by interviews with asylum seekers from around the world, deals with the hurdles that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered asylum seekers and refugees face in proving that their fears of persecution are well founded particularly when detained.
Solomon’s theater company, Houses on the Moon, based in New York City, aims to educate the public about the perils that vulnerable asylum seekers face navigating US immigration procedures and laws, particularly as most are unrepresented. As IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales has documented in her co-authored pieces on asylum claims, the likelihood that an asylum seeker will be successful when unrepresented by an attorney falls to about 14%.
The Boston premiere of De Novo, presented by New England LawBoston’s Center for Law and Social Responsibility, will take place at the Stuart St. Playhouse on Wednesday February 9th at 6:30 with post play discussion with the artists and law professors to follow. The show is free and open to the public (rsvp to Martha.S.Drane@nesl.edu).

War Don Don on DVD

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Rebecca Richman Cohen, who contributes this guest post)

Just wanted to let IntLawGrrls readers know the latest news regarding War Don Don, the 2010 documentary that I made about the trial of Revolutionary United Front member Issa Sesay before the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

DVDs of the film, about which I contributed this previous post, are now available at our website.

Also available, for free download, is a teacher’s guide to the film.

Hope you find both of interest.

Look On, Read On: Can watching & reading stop a renewal of Sudan's other war?

Yesterday marked the launch of the Satellite Sentinel Project, which aims to use technology to provide early warnings and raise public awareness about violence in Africa's largest country (map credit), and so to try "to deter the resumption of war between North and South Sudan."
Satellite Sentinel's a partnership of Hollywood celebrities (George Clooney et al.), corporate America (Google et al.), nongovernmental organizations (the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative), and intergovernmental organizations (agencies of the United Nations). It promises to provide corroborated information

in near real-time (within 24-36 hours), with the aim of heading off humanitarian disaster and human rights crimes before they occur.

A core objective -- to use this information to prod the public to pressure public officials -- is apparent in the Project's slogan: "The world is watching because you are watching."

Can it work?

At the least, it may make more difficult a full-scale return to Sudan's other war -- not Darfur, the western Sudan (green on the map) turmoil that continues to simmer even as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir continues to evade an International Criminal Court warrant, but rather the civil war that ravaged the southerly regions of Sudan for 20 years before the signing of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. The agreement granted the south some autonomy and provided for a future referendum on full independence from the government in Khartoum (in the orange region on the map). Voting is just around the corner: January 9, 2011, in Southern Sudan (blue) and Abyei (red). Backers of Satellite Sentinel hope that the Project's eyes in the sky -- commercial satellites -- and voices on the ground will help to avoid violence during or after the election.

(Unstated is another potential use of these data. Should proactive efforts fall short, surveillance footage and contemporaneous reports would create a trove of evidence for prosecution of perpetators. To name a possible forum, the International Criminal Court is keenly interested these days in election-related violence. (And see here.)

Missing from the Project mix?

In contrast with Darfur, the history of North-South troubles is largely unknown. This absence of background knowledge may make it harder to push the public to push their officials. But there is much background information available.

In addition to any number of weighty tomes, here are a few mass market treatments that provide contexts for what is to come:
► Emma's War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil--A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan (2002) by Deborah Scroggins, formerly a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The title pretty much says it all: this is the biography of Emma McCune, a Briton whose art history studies led her to Southern Sudan, 1st as an aid worker, then as an independence advocate, and ultimately to marriage with a rebel leader and death, in a Nairobi car crash, at age 30. McCune's trajectory sweeps with it much about the war.

► Acts of Faith (2005) by Philip Caputo, a onetime Chicago Tribune reporter and Pulitzer Prizewinner. Readers of Emma's War will find in this novel a familiar charater -- a lost young woman, American rather than British, who arrives in Sudan as an aid worker and eventually marries a rebel warlord. She's easier to understand than McCune, perhaps because the fictional format allowed the author more free rein. Acts benefits too from other characters and other subplots, all woven around a large and complex story of Western involvement (charitable and otherwise) in the civil war and the warriors' practice of enslaving captives.
► What Is the What (2006) by Dave Eggers. In this book Eggers, the subject of a prior post, writes the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, born in the midst of the civil war. Deng's tragic journeys include a short stint as a child soldier and a much longer one as a "Lost Boy," wandering with other unfortunates in a wilderness that leads 1st to a refugee camp in Kenya and ultimately to a new and strange life in the United States. This is the best written of the 3 books, but the reader will better understand it if informed as well by the other 2.

Look On! The Invisibles

In conjunction with Amnesty International, the Mexican actor and director Gael Garcia Bernal has released on YouTube four short films together entitled The Invisibles. The films are the most powerful effort I've seen, cinematographic or otherwise, to depict the grave human rights abuses suffered by Central American migrants as they pass through Mexico on their way to the United States (prior post). The films are to be lauded for presenting the voices of the migrants themselves describing their motivations for undertaking this risky journey as well as the consequences of the harms they suffer. Readers of this blog might be particularly interested in the film Six Out of Ten, which refers to the ratio of female migrants who are sexually assaulted on their northward journey. The film notes that many women take contraceptive precautions before the trip because they are aware of the horror stories, but still desperate to reach the United States. In their own voices, female migrants explain that they migrate despite the grave risks so that they can provide adequately for their children (prior post). Each of the movies is under ten minutes long, and you don't even have to leave your chair to watch them. What are you waiting for? Look on!

(photo credit)

On October 15

On this day in ...
... 1940 (70 years ago today), more than a year before the attack at Pearl Harbor would draw the United States into World War II, Hollywood released the talking motion picture The Great Dictator, "the only major film of its period to bitterly satirize Nazism and Adolf Hitler." Director and star of the movie was Charlie Chaplin, appearing in his first "talkie" role following a celebrated career in silent films. According to this site:

The film is unusual for its period, as the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Hitler, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis, the latter of whom he excoriates in the film as "machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts".

(Prior October 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Rebecca Richman Cohen

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Rebecca Richman Cohen (left) as today's guest blogger.
After receiving her B.A. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University, Rebecca enrolled at Harvard Law School. (photo credit) While a law student, she served as a legal intern on a defense team in the Special Court for Sierra Leone case involving the rebel Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.
As Rebecca recounts in her guest post below, her experiences in Freetown led her to make War Don Don, a documentary about the Special Court trial of Revolutionary United Front member Issa Sesay. The 86-minute film has won a number of awards, including one at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival. Screened recently at the 4th International Humanitarian Law Dialogs in Chautauqua, New York, War Don Don will be broadcast this Wednesday, September 29, at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times on HBO2, with a repeat airing at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, September 30.
Rebecca's also been as an adjunct member of the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design in Provindence, where she taught Human Rights, Mass Atrocity, and Documentary Film, and at the Human Rights Institute at American University, where she taught Criminal Justice Stories in Film.
Heartfelt welcome!

Look On! War Don Don

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this Look On! guest post about my film, War Don Don)

In the summer of 2006 I sat behind bulletproof glass in Freetown, in the observer gallery of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international war crimes "hybrid tribunal," created jointly by the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone. At the time I was working not as a filmmaker, but as a law student and legal intern for a defense team. I was assigned to work on the case of Alex Tamba Brima, among three members of the rebel Armed Forces Revolutionary Council charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes stemming from the 1990s civil war in that West African country.
Yet I found myself drawn to observe the trial of the leader of a different warring faction.
From my seat in the gallery of the trial involving members of the Revolutionary United Front, I first observed Issa Sesay, a former rebel leader accused of crimes against humanity and a key player in the peace negotiations – and I was fascinated by the range of roles that one man could assume amidst the intensity of such a brutal conflict. I also came to know lawyers on both the prosecution (including prosecuted by Stephen J. Rapp, who since has become the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues) and the defense. They were some of the brightest and most passionate advocates I have ever met.
I became convinced that the story of Sesay's trial needed to reach a larger audience. Combining my legal experience in criminal defense with my background as a filmmaker, I realized that a documentary film could communicate the complexities of Sesay's rise and fall from power – and its implications for a country still reeling from the horrors of civil war.
The result is War Don Don, an 86-minute film that has won awards at festivals and that, as detailed in the post above, will air this this week on HBO2. War Don Don tells the story of Sesay (depicted in the poster above right), whom prosecutors said is a war criminal, guilty of heinous crimes against humanity, and whom defenders said was a reluctant fighter who protected civilians and played a crucial role in bringing peace to Sierra Leone. (poster credit) The film puts international justice on trial, and finds that in some cases the past is not just painful, it is also opaque.
During the process of editing, we frequently made reference to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950); that is, to the ideas that
► Film (and trials) can put multiple narratives in tension;
► Truth can be unsettled;
► Perception influences memory; and
► Historical fact may be hard to prove, particularly in a trial.
On that note, we were also inspired by Andrew Jarecki's film Capturing the Friedmans (2003), which reminded that the idea that truth can be elusive, that people can play many different roles in the same story, and that no human being can be entirely defined by the horrible things that he or she may have done.
I knew we were done editing when different people took away different things from the film, when the film acted like a Rorschach test of sorts. Different audiences will come to their own conclusions – one of the greatest joys of documentary filmmaking is the debate that arises from having to sort through the tensions within and between conflicting stories.
I hope audiences enjoy having some of their assumptions tested and coming to examine their own reactions to controversial issues.

Look On! Suffragists

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

Just finished watching Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. The several-years-old documentary is available on Netflix as well as in DVD.

It's worth watching, though best watched in several segments. By filmmaker Ken Burns, it 1st aired as a documentary series on PBS, which maintains an informational website. As is common in works of the kind, the repetition of static photos (necessary given how little motion picture footage there was back in the day), coupled with folksy-Americana music, can make one a bit drowsy at times.

But stick with it. The story's a good one -- one of which this 'Grrl knew precious little.

Told well are the life journeys of 2 very different persons, at one in their passion for changing the role of women in the United States:

► Elizabeth Cady Stanton (near right), a mother, wife, and writer, loved good food and took care to keep her hair curled.

► Susan B. Anthony (far right) was an austere, cerebral woman who never married.

They met in 1851 in Seneca Falls, New York, where 3 years earlier Stanton had convened the 1st-ever women's rights convention. From then on, the 2 (both IntLawGrrls foremothers) worked tirelessly together for women's rights -- especially, for the enfranchisement of women.

Particularly interesting in Not for Ourselves are the moments when that last, singular goal conflicted with others. The conflict saw the women, who'd been staunch activists on behalf of abolition, oppose post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments because they kept from women what they granted to former slaves. And as the goal of women's suffrage grew nearer, they distanced themselves from African American women in an effort to shore up support in the South. Conflict also arose between the 2 women themselves. The 1890s publication, by an ever-more-radical Stanton, of The Woman's Bible drew censure from the movement she'd started -- a movement that Anthony chose to continue to lead notwithstanding its ouster of her longtime friend and ally. As a result Anthony, alone, appears on the 1st U.S. coin depicting a woman.

Both women would pass away more than a decade before their work took form in the 19th Amendment. This film serves as a reminder of their legacy.

Nexus of Film & Activism in Kampala

(Delighted to welcome back IntLawGrrls alumna and filmmaker Pamela Yates, who contributes this guest post to IntLawGrrls' series on the ICC Kampala Conference)

At Skylight Pictures we (Peter Kinoy, Paco de Onís, and I) spend a lot of time thinking about ways to heighten the impact of our films in order to increase awareness of human rights and justice issues. For over 25 years we’ve been committed to the art of storytelling through the language of cinema – lush cinematography, music woven in to enhance the narrative, thoughtful editing that seamlessly transports the viewer through time and space – in the belief that it will bring audiences to a deeper level of engagement.
In recent years, as social media tools have proliferated, we have adapted many of them to our mission. An example is the international justice Twitter feed on the IJCentral map, about which I blogged in this IntLawGrrls post.
But because much of our outreach work is in developing countries, we also produce lo-tech projects designed to engage audiences on the ground, for whom traveling through cyberspace is not an option.
And that’s the reason that Skylight's at the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, with 1,000 Screening Kits of our film The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (prior IntLawGrrls posts here and here) -- to give out free of charge to civil society organizations, to country delegations, and to the press. (Thanks to generous support from Humanity United and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) The Kits are in English and French, and include:
► The Reckoning (60-minute version)
► ICC and Africa (20-minute film)
► Peace & Justice (20-minute film)
► Screening/Discussion Guide
► Audience Survey Form
► FAQs about the ICC
The impetus to make the Screening Kits came from 180 African civil society organizations that banded together and signed a petition to protest the 2009 declaration (available here) by the African Union (logo at right) of non-cooperation with the ICC with regard to the arrest warrant it issued for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. While the international press focused on the AU declaration and its critique of the ICC, the pushback against impunity coming from the civil society organizations wasn’t getting any attention. The latter organisations were saying that the AU wasn’t offering the victims any justice alternative to the ICC -- that it was effectively declaring Africa an “impunity zone”. They wanted to raise public awareness of how the ICC works and how it operates as a court of last resort.
So we reached out to these organisations to see if we could produce a media tool they could use to increase awareness of the role that the ICC can play in the battle against impunity. In coordination with Pivot Pictures, a media initiative of the International Center for Transitional Justice, we coordinated with the ICTJ country offices in Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, and South Africa to work out what materials and themes to include in the Kit. After a period of exchanging ideas and getting feedback from the civil society organizations on 2 short films that we produced for the project, we arrived at the menu listed above. Now those organisations will receive their Screening Kits and go forth to use them – we’ve created an online Screening Report form for the them to use, so that we may track the use of the Kits and the impact they are having.
The Kampala ICC Review Conference is an extraordinary opportunity to have massive impact with The Reckoning and a range of short films and microdocs we produced about international justice themes. We will be screening all this material non-stop at the RC Media Centre, and we also have several screenings planned at the People’s Space, where civil society organizations from around the world are gathered this 2 weeks in order to discuss the ICC. The Kampala theatrical Premiere of The Reckoning was at Watoto Church yesterday, and there will be a national broadcast on UBC, Ugandan national television, today.
And watch for our video blogs at the RC Media Centre. They'll be posted daily at IJCentral.

Look on! The ICTY on film

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Finally, a dramatic film made especially for Intlawgrrls. If you care about international justice issues, and especially about gender justice, go see Storm.
This German/Dutch film tells the story of a woman prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and her attempts to bring down a war criminal. In the course of doing so, she encounters a victim of one of the rape camps set up during the conflict. Not to give the film’s plot away, suffice to say it touches on a lot of the dilemmas and issues raised by international criminal prosecutions: the difficulty of the tribunals to adequately balance the needs of victims and the demands of successful prosecution (at one point, an exasperated prosecutor exclaims “a prosecution is not therapy!”), the compromises involved in plea bargaining, the continuing power dynamics in the region, the warring desires within victims to bear witness and to start anew. And especially, the tendency of international courts to downplay rape charges, to not recognize the importance of gender-based crimes, especially when it's not expedient to do so.
The film is highly critical of the ICTY, but also sympathetic to the good intentions of the prosecutors. It could perhaps have spent a bit more time establishing the importance of prosecuting the former warlords before digging into the critique of the Tribunal’s actions. But given the usual simplistic narratives of courtroom dramas, the film does an excellent job raising the difficulties and complexities of making justice happen.

Guest Blogger: Regina Austin

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Regina Austin (left) as today's guest blogger. Below, she contributes the 2d post in a 2-part series concerning gender violence in Ciudad Juárez -- a review of films that depict that epidemic of gender violence. Yesterday, in Part 1, guest blogger Caroline Bettinger-López analyzed the recent Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision finding that Mexico's handling of the cases violated international law.
Regina is William A. Schnader Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, from which she also earned her J.D. A leading authority on economic discrimination and minority legal feminism, Regina has focused her scholarship on the overlapping burdens of race, gender, and class oppression. She also serves as Director of the Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law, which holds an annual Visual Legal Advocacy Roundtable for public interest lawyers, hosts screenings of law-genre documentary films throughout the year, and maintains a national repository of dozens of clemency videos as a resource for defense attorneys. In addition to using documentaries in traditional courses, Regina helps students produce their own short nonfiction videos. Among these is Shmul Kaplan, about an elderly Jewish Ukrainian asylum seeker who was forced to sue the government when his SSI benefits gave out while he was in the process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Before entering academia, Regina was a law clerk for Judge Edmund B. Spaeth of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, and an associate at the firm of Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis. In addition to teaching Penn, she's been a Visiting Professor at the Columbia, Brooklyn, Stanford, Harvard, and Fordham law schools.
Heartfelt welcome!

Look On! Films on the Juárez femicides

(In this Look On! post, Part 2 of a 2-part series, guest blogger Regina Austin reviews documentaries concerning the epidemic of violence known as the Juárez femicides. The series' 1st post, by guest blogger Caroline Bettinger-López, is here.)

As detailed in yesterday's post, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled against Mexico in a gender discrimination case involving three young women whose bodies were found in a field across the street from the Association of Maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Their stories as told by their mothers would be familiar to anyone who has seen the most noteworthy documentaries made about the scores of young women who have disappeared or been murdered in Juárez since 1993.
These documentaries are invaluable for illuminating the context surrounding the so-called Juárez femicides. I examine the films in depth in "Women's Unequal Citizenship at the Border: Lessons from Three Nonfiction Films about the Women of Juárez," a chapter in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship (Linda McClain & Joanna L. Grossman eds., 2009) that's available online here and here. As I describe in that chapter, the films take viewers back to the beginning, as it were, back to the time when:
► Social and economic upheaval made the young women of Juárez especially vulnerable to deadly violence;
► Criminal investigations of their murders were botched because of incompetence and corruption at every level of government, without regard to which party was in power; and
► Female relatives of those who had been kidnapped and killed were forced to become human rights activists and civic leaders in the effort to assure that the victims got due respect.
Early on, it was assumed that the victims were targeted because they were workers in the maquiladoras, and that the murders were a response to the upheaval in social and economic relations that globalization and immigration were bringing to the border between the United States and Mexico. Foreign-owned factories were magnets for single young mestizo women from the south of the country. As a result, Juárez experienced tremendous unplanned growth. Housing without adequate municipal services sprang up in the desert. The lack of reliable transportation proved particularly dangerous for young women who went to work early and came home late. While manufactured goods traveled legally from south to north, people did not. Juarez became a staging area for illegal immigration to the United States. As gender relations changed along with the population, bars and clubs catering to the female workers brought them into contact with transients and criminals willing to take advantage of the women's social, economic, and political weaknesses.
This scenario is reflected in Performing the Border (1999), directed by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann (below right), which offers a postmodern take on the physical and metaphysical boundary between Texas and Juárez, Mexico. (credit for above left still from this film) However, the explanatory power of globalism and the exploitative fragmentation of the female body that the director found reflected in factory work and the work of a serial killer does not fully account for the hateful mass violence of the Juárez femicides.
Narcotrafficking and police corruption were most likely the sinister forces at the heart of the waves of murders. The Texas-Mexican border is important in this chronicle of death because it is a gateway to the largest illegal drug market in the world. Americans' insatiable taste for illegal narcotics and the violence and governmental corruption it breeds compromised the rights of women in Mexico and others whose interests were allied with them. This story of the Juárez femicides is complicated in a way that is ideal for documentaries to tell, given their ability to move visually between micro and macro explanations of social phenomena.
Thus, in the hands of Chicana Lourdes Portillo (below left), director of Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001), the dead and disappeared young women cease to be anonymous and fungible victims of not only misogyny but also xenophobia, racism, and classism, at the same time that their female relatives are transformed from mothers, aunts, and sisters into committed civic leaders and political activists before our eyes.
Finally, La Batalla De Las Cruces (Battle of the Crosses) (2005), which is directed by Mexican social scientists Patricio Ravelo Blancas and Rafael Bonilla Pedroza, attempts to list or catalogue the myriad complex intersecting sets of public and private actors who, with massive amounts of private money and political power at their disposal, managed to directly or indirectly violate the human rights of scores of young Mexican women, their families and defenders, falsely accused defendants, their murdered lawyers, and journalists without anyone being held accountable.

Sufferin' suffragettes

There's a tendency to romanticize our foremothers in what's known as the 1st wave of feminism. Back then, sometimes, they were called by the diminutive term "suffragettes"; they're known today, more often, as "suffragists."
We think of them -- indeed, we IntLawGrrls have posted on them -- as hardy women:
► Women who dove under race horses to draw attention. Women who spoke and wrote about their sisters' plight. (Also here, here, here, and here.)
► Women who went to jail rather than accept criminal fines for "disturbing the peace" by pressing their cause. (Also here and here and here and here.)
► Women who marched till they wore down the soles of their high-heeled -- and often high-buttoned -- shoes.
But not all women, it seems. Nor all shoes.
A dispatch entitled WOMEN MUST HIKE OR PAY, published in the January 18, 1913, edition of The New York Times, reported on suffragists' fear that a planned "mandatory" march on Washington would be "a fizzle," for the simple reason that not enough women wanted to march.
Solution?
The wealthy among them were permitted to buy their way out of the long haul. As The Times put it:

Those of the ardent suffragists who talk loud and do little are to be permitted to purchase immunity from the long hike from New York to Washington only by hiring a substitute and paying her expenses.

The decision to allow immunity-purchase was made by "Gen. Rosalie Jones," shown standing in the crossing-the-Delaware caricature at right (credit), at the request of one "Mrs. Travis Cochran, a wealthy woman of this city, who is interested in 'the cause,'" The Times wrote from Philadelphia, the "city" of dispatch. (One suspects the latter part of this item refers to the "well-connected" Mary Peppers Cochran.)
Guess all this oughtn't come as that much of a surprise.
Consider, for example, the unsympathetic portrait of "Mrs. Banks" in the Disney version of Mary Poppins (1964). Perhaps the best line that Mrs. B -- Winifred, that is -- has is this one, part of the rousing musical number in the clip at bottom:

Our daughters' daughters will adore us and they'll sing in grateful chorus, 'Well done, sister suffragettes.'

The script says otherwise, however; the London banker's wife is continually out the door, on her way to a suffrage meeting, leaving wee Jane and Michael in the care of ... whomever.
But let's not judge our 1st-wave foremothers too harshly.
After all, in a similar vein, a lot of Unionist men paid $300 each to buy their way out of service in America's Civil War -- men like Jay Gould, Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, James Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. The choice freed each to become a human engine of America's industrial and financial revolution.
And their Mrs.?

Guest Blogger: Pamela Yates

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Pamela Yates (right) as today's guest blogger.
Pamela's a cofounder of Skylight Pictures, Inc., and the director of Skylight's most recent production: The Reckoning, a feature-length film on the International Criminal Court that's subject of IntLawGrrls posts posted here and here by Lucy Reed and yours truly.
Recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the Director’s Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, Pamela has been involved in many film projects in addition to The Reckoning. Examples: producer, Loss of Innocence, winner of an Emmy; director, When the Mountains Tremble, winner of a Sundance award; Executive Producer, Witness to War, winner of an Academy Award; director, State of Fear (2005) (below left), which relied on findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to depict the counterterrorism campaign that lasted 2 decades in Peru; director, Presumed Guilty, a PBS special about public defenders in San Francisco; producer, director, and co-author, Cause for Murder, about the lives and deaths of 2 young Mexican lawyers; producer and director, Brotherhood of Hate, about violent white supremacy movements; and producer and director with Skylight colleague Peter Kinoy of Living Broke in Boom Times, a trilogy about poor peoples’ movements in America.
In addition to all these achievements, Pamela directed what is thought to be the first music video made in China. No More Disguises, featuring troubajor Ciu Jian, filmed in Tianamen Square at the dawn of the democracy movement, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the 10 best music videos of 1989 and had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival’s opening night.
In her guest post below, Pamela reports on IJCentral, the online global social network on through which she and her colleagues continue to rally their audience 'round the cause of international justice.
Heartfelt welcome!

Social network on international justice

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for this opportunity to guest post on our online efforts to enhance global understanding of human rights)

Making the film The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court wasn’t enough.
There had to be a way to take the members of a general audience, newly introduced to the idea of the International Criminal Court via the emotional journey in the film, and make them part of a growing movement for international justice.
At Skylight Pictures, where we have been making films about human rights and the quest for justice for 25-plus years, this is always part of our thinking while in production:
► What do we want people to do afterwards?
► How can we make our films engage, educate and increase understanding of human rights amongst the public at large and policy makers, contributing to informed decisions on issues of social change and the public good?
The Reckoning film, on which IntLawGrrls posted here and here, is the flagship in a 3-year outreach campaign and educational initiative meant to drive new constituents to the international justice movement. (You can join the 10,000 others who've already taken advantage of free online viewing here, and/or purchase the and DVD here.) As a complement, we've created a place that these new audiences can go to after seeing the film: IJCentral, an information resource and social network for global justice. Depicted at the top of this post, the IJCentral site was launched at the world premiere of The Reckoning during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival this past January. Today the site joins IntLawGrrls' "connections..." list in the column at right.
IJCentral implements a multi-platform citizen engagement strategy, using online mapping technology to visualize a global social network for international justice. It aggregates blogs, videos, SMS text messaging, media modules created from The Reckoning footage, Twitter and Facebook, e-mail listserve groups, news feeds, and photo feeds, taking advantage of a range of Web 2.0 social bookmarking applications available online. Making use of mobile phones, the world’s most widely distributed communications platform, Twitter and FrontlineSMS text-messaging technology is incorporated into the map. This allows activists, victims, educators, students and other members of the network to upload SMS text messages to the map -- already, you can see a global conversation about justice appears as geo-located pop-ups on that map.
IJCentral is a work in progress, with constant improvements in access, reach, and innovation. As it accumulates content from users, IJCentral will become an invaluable resource and database for human rights advocates and international justice activists around the world. An array of strategic stakeholder partners with worldwide reach will be accessible through IJCentral, including the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, the umbrella for 2,500 NGOs non-governmental organizations around the world actively working to achieve universal ratification of the ICC, and the American Society of International Law.
Other aspects of our 3-year outreach campaign, all of which will be available free online:
► Multiple language versions of The Reckoning. We now have English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Depending on our fundraising efforts, Swahili, Arabic, Luo, and Russian are next.
► In-depth educational modules for classroom use, each 10 to 15 minutes in length. The first 3 modules, produced with Facing History and Ourselves are “The Creation of the ICC,” “Peace and Justice” (as played out in Uganda), and “The ICC and Darfur” (the problem of enforcement).
► Micro-docs, 3-minute shorts that bring the role of the victim into places where victims might not be able to go themselves, such as international justice conferences.

Look On! "Mrs. Goundo's Daughter"

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) "Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter,” a new documentary by Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, is a sensitive and galvanizing account of gender discrimination at the intersection of culture and bureaucracy. (View a clip here.)
The filmmakers follow a mother’s struggle to keep her family from being deported to Mali. The documentary focuses on the serious harm caused by female genital mutilation/cutting practices.
I’ve discussed the complexities in a 1995 article, Between Irua and Female Genital Mutilation: Feminist Human Rights Discourse and the Cultural Divide and in a more recent article on “Female Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Cutting” in the Encyclopedia of Human Rights.
Awaken!, an excellent newsletter published by the women’s human rights NGO Equality Now!, tracks developments on the issue in English, French, and Arabic. IntLawGrrls Fiona de Londras and Jaya Ramji-Nogales posted here and here on human rights and gender asylum decisions involving FGM-FGC. This World Health Organisation Bulletin discusses some grassroots eradication efforts in Mali.
FGM-FGC practices violate international human rights norms and are prohibited under instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, and the Maputo Protocol.
The practices cause serious physical injury and death to infants, girls, and women in practicing regions. Yet because FGM-FGC is deeply rooted in community and family traditions (but not required by any formal religion), the practices remain widespread among some ethnic groups. Many countries now outlaw the practices. But the private circumstances under which they occur mean that indigenous community-based education and organizing are important keys to ending FGM-FGC. (On legal and political approaches, see Anika Rahman & Nahid Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation: A Practical Guide to Worldwide Laws and Policies.)
In the film, Mrs. Goundo, who experienced FGM-FGC as a girl, works with an immigrant community leader in Philadelphia, an asylum lawyer, and her husband to prevent her own daughter from returning to Mali. Goundo understands that even if she and her husband object, grandparents, relatives, or other community members might well force the practice on the child.
But there’s another problem. Mrs. Goundo must request legal status for herself under the byzantine U.S. immigration and asylum laws, or else be separated from her U.S.-born daughter and other family members.
Attie and Goldwater provide a nuanced treatment of her predicament. They place Mrs. Goundo and her family in the context of a supportive immigrant community and explore the challenges of navigating the U.S. legal system successfully. They also travel to Mali, where they interview local women’s rights and health advocates who condemn and educate against the practices. They also surface the stereotypes and misinformation that lead some religious and cultural leaders to support them despite the awful consequences.
"Mrs. Goundo's Daughter" is never graphic, but makes the danger and emotional trauma to girls abundantly clear. Students should be prepared in advance with readings on the subject matter and instructors should plan time for discussion after showing the film.
Consultants on the film included leading refugee and gender-asylum expert Deborah Anker and yours truly. The documentary is an effective way to begin discussions about the complex legal, gender, and cultural issues involved. Heartfelt thanks to research assistant Alexis Smith for her help with this post.

Look On! Kids hopping trains to the U.S.

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Everybody's talking about Which Way Home, the documentary about children from Central America who ride alone atop trains in their bid to make it to the United States. Directed and produced by Rebecca Cammisa, the film recently made its television début on HBO. (photo credit)
Many of us have written about unaccompanied minors; among them, IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales, in this post.
The United States has been particularly cognizant of the issue in recent years, inviting testimony before Congress on the perils of unaccompanied minors who were then being placed into adult detention -- that is, prison -- facilities. More recently, Congress addressed the issue within the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which included several provisions directing federal funding and resources to children (most often unaccompanied) who are subjected to various forms of human trafficking.
I have not yet seen the film, but The New York Times article about the movie states that it follows several boys from Honduras, passing through Mexico on trains and hoping to enter the United States to work or meet family members there. Having written and thought a great deal about human trafficking, as have other 'Grrls, such as Janie Chuang, I cannot help but wonder what will befall these children. If they make it to the United States, will they be detained? Will they fall into the hands of traffickers? If they do not make it to the United States, Mexico will most likely deport them. If they are not wanted by their families, or are victims of domestic violence, will Honduras protect them?
Several years ago, my students and I won asylum for a child from Honduras. His case was granted with a rare written opinion, in which the judge accepted the argument that his stepfather's abuse and the Honduran government's unwillingness to protect him constituted persecution. The judge was right. We had argued that Honduras had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in so doing had taken on affirmative obligations, but that Honduras nevertheless had failed to fulfill those obligations, ultimately leeaving our client unprotected. Typically, however, domestic violence claims have been denied in the country.
As IntLawGrrl Amy Senier posted a while back, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided finally to issue regulations on gender-based asylum claims. With this decision, an opportunity presents itself. Unaccompanied minors might avoid detention, find pro bono counsel and apply for special immigrant juvenile status, or even be granted asylum in the United States under the theory that their home country was unwilling or unable to protect them from domestic violence.
I look forward to seeing Which Way Home, but I look forward even more to seeing children like those depicted in this movie receiving some much-needed protection.

Look On! "Reckoning" on the ICC

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Stay home for the national television premiere on Tuesday night, 14 July – or better yet, host a gathering. Or, if you're in Washington, D.C., go to the event sponsored by the American Society of International Law the night before. Whatever you do, do see “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court” on PBS. You can find the details for all these viewing options in Diane's post below. In this post, I'll focus on the film itself.
I’ve just previewed "The Reckoning" on DVD, courtesy of director Pamela Yates (below left) -- who contacted me after seeing my January Look On! post about another Sundance Film Festival selection, Lisa F. Jackson's "The Greatest Silence." So I can vouch for the impact of this new film.
It will have you on the edge of your seat, following two simultaneous dramas – the Court’s first investigations and prosecutions of unspeakable crimes, and the Court’s own struggle to survive. It opens with the unduckable question:

Does humanity have the possibility of doing better than this?

The film then moves back and forth between killing fields, Nuremberg, Rome, The Hague, Uganda, Congo, Colombia, Darfur. Ninety minutes goes very, very quickly.
In her Filmmaker’s Statement, after describing the Court itself as the protagonist in "The Reckoning," Yates tells us:

The title 'The Reckoning' has three meanings: the reckoning of a world trying to bring the worst perpetrators of massive crimes to justice; the reckoning of the International Criminal Court becoming an effective global arbiter of justice; and the reckoning with the international community – do we have the political will to carry out the arrest warrants and fulfill the mandate of this new Court?

You will see many familiar and not-so-familiar faces: Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (on whom I've posted before), Benjamin B. Ferencz of Planethood Foundation (which helps fund the American Society of International Law’s Helton Fellows in human rights), former Bronx prosecutor Christine H. Chung, now back practicing law in the United States, and John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Kudos to the documentary filmmakers – director Yates, Producer Paco de Onís and editor Peter Kinoy, all of Skylight Pictures – as well as cinematographer Melle van Essen.

Look On! View the ICC film "The Reckoning" in D.C. Monday, on television Tuesday

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) No doubt IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed is not the only one of us who's already had the opportunity to view "The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court." This coming week all of us will have the chance to see the documentary reviewed in Lucy's post above:

► On Monday, July 13, the documentary will be shown at 7:30 p.m. at the National Press Club, Murrow Room, 13th Floor, 529 14th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. A number of international law experts then will lead a discussion at this American Society of International Law event. Details and registration here.

► On Tuesday, July 14 (check time in your area here), the documentary will have its national television premiere on the Public Broadcasting Service program P.O.V.

As director Pamela Yates (pictured in Lucy's post above) explains here, she, along with producer Paco de Onís and editor Peter Kinoy, set out to tell the story of the ICC and its efforts. One focus, as described here and as depicted in this trailer, is on events leading to the indictment of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir for atrocities in Darfur.

P.O.V. also includes a link here for watching the film online from this Wednesday, July 15, through August 13. And the DVD can be purchased here.

One way or another, check it out.

Look On! Considering "Bamako"

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Yes, I know. The movie "Bamako" was made back in 2006, times have changes, and I'm 3 years too late in recommending it. However, I had the opportunity to watch and consider "Bamako" for the first time this weekend, and believe that its message(s) continue(s) to be timely.
In the film, global financial and economic institutions are put on trial in a traditional village. The lives of the villagers go on around the litigants. The film's powerful critiques of the global financial institutions continue to resonate today, highlighting as they do the contradictory effects of development "aid" on African countries. Populations of countries wealthy in resources continue to be poor -- in fact, according to the film's witnesses for the prosecution, the countries and their populations are now poorer than they had been 5 decades ago. The two sides clash over, among other questions, the issue of whether the fault lies with the individual countries' internal corruption and/or incompetence. What is the role of the policies stemming from the ministrations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?
Already we are informed that Africa, although not fully integrated into the global economic and financial systems, is suffering the negative effects of the current worldwide crisis. U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has suggested the restructuring and revision of the global economic and financial system. Consensus on this issue is not imminent and, should one emerge, it will be hard fought.
World leaders and negotiators: Consider "Bamako"!