human rights Tagged Articles at Cinematical

SPOILER ALERT: If you don't want to know anything about the film Borat: Cultural Learnings on America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (God, I'm sick of typing that lengthy title), don't read this article.

While some people may not be aware of just who Borat is and why he has a movie, over in Germany they're plenty aware -- and plenty unhappy about Borat describing himself as a "former gypsy catcher." That's not going over too well in Germany, where a human rights group called the European Centre for Antiziganism Research has filed a complaint alleging the film violates Germany's anti-discrimination laws by slandering the Sinti and Roma gypsy tribes and inciting violence against them. The film's distributor, 20th Century Fox, pulled ads in Germany that talked tongue-in-cheek about running gypsies over with a Hummer. Germany has strict laws about speech that could be seen as defaming minorities.

Here's what I find really interesting, though: We have a German human rights group lambasting Borat for defaming the gypsies -- but what about the Jews? Given Germany's history, and given that Germany's anti-defamation laws were put in place especially to protect those groups persecuted by the Nazis, I kind of wonder why no one has stepped up over there to complain about the "Running of the Jews" sequence in the film -- which, if you're going to be offended by the film, is one of its more potentially offensive moments. The "Running of the Jews" bit -- a play, of course, on Spain's running of the bulls -- has a person with a giant green papier-maché head with an enormous nose and devil horns being chased by a crowd as they throw fake money to appease him. Then another person with a female head -- referred to as a "Jewess" -- comes along and lays a giant egg, and the children in the crowd are encouraged to kick, hit, and destroy the Jew egg before it hatches.

So this begs the question: Why the German hooplah over the gypsy slander, but not a peep about the Jewish sequence, which (for me at least) is far more cringe-inducing? I realize this is a complaint brought by a human rights group, not the German government, but it's just odd that the Jew routine wouldn't have someone over there filling out reams of paperwork at the state prosecutor's office.

[ via Movie City News ]

When you think of Chechnya, what comes to mind? The long-standing civil war between Chechen separatists and the Russian government? Armed terrorists storming a parliamentary meeting? The 2004 assassination of Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, killed when a landmine was detonated underneath his VIP platform during a World War Two memorial parade? Chechen terrorists, often women, committing suicide bombings? Chechen rebels taking a school full of children hostage in Beslan? The actions of the rebels, under the stewardship of Shamil Basayev, make it difficult for many people to view the Chechen conflict with much sympathy for the Chechen side.

Coca: the Dove from Chechnya, being shown as a part of the traveling Amnesty International Film Festival, aims to show the world a different side of the bloody and violent conflict, through the lens of another kind of weapon - the video cameras of a group of Chechen women. The film highlights footage collected since 1994 by Chechen activist Zainap Gashaeva, (nicknamed Coca, which means "dove") founder of a group called Echoes of War, a group of Chechen women documenting the atrocities the Russian government has committed against the Chechen people in their war on terror. Gashaeva is well-known in the international community for her tireless campaign to draw attention to the suffering of the Chechen people at the hands of the Russian government.