UN Chronicle | Passing By: New York Screening Days Encourage Policy Dialogue

Passing By: New York Screening Days Encourage Policy Dialogue
By Horst Rutsch for the Chronicle

Article

For nearly two decades, the International Film and Television Exchange has organized annual screening conferences in New York to encourage dialogue between policy makers and the media on a range of themes relevant to United Nations work. The week-long conferences feature expert seminars and screenings of documentaries and fiction films. Panels of senior officials and established experts in the field present different perspectives and tie the screenings to questions of policy and action. Claus Mueller, head of the non-profit organization, says the conferences serve to "generate a more realistic assessment of the issues involved and to facilitate better policies by communicating their complexity and identifying possible action strategies".


Italian film poster of No Man's Land

"Crimes of War … and Consequences" was the theme of the most recent conference and focused on the prosecution of war crimes and the internationalization of justice. Its programme, organized in collaboration with the Goethe Institute/German Cultural Center and Hunter College of the City University of New York, featured a number of case studies, such as the role of the United Nations in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and screened films, such as "Srebenica: A Cry from the Grave" and "Forsaken Cries-The Story of Rwanda". It also revisited historical controversies surrounding the Japanese invasion of China and Korea, showing a film on the 1937 "Rape of Nanking", in which 300,000 civilians were slaughtered in six weeks, and interviews with Korean "comfort women". Another screening focused on the Middle East conflict, documenting targeted assassinations by the Israeli services and the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese militia in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Others documented massive human rights violations during civil wars in Argentina, Burma and Mozambique.

The Conference opened with a panel on the multilateral legal framework, held at the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations and moderated by Ruth Wedgewood, a law professor at Yale University and Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. The conflicting perspectives of the panellists on the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) illustrated the complexity of the subject. UN Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs Hans Corell presented arguments in favour of the ICC and was supported by most panellists. The General Counsel of the United States Mission to the UN, Nicholas Rostow, presented the legal principles behind his country's opposition to the Court.

One highlight of the conference was "No Man's Land", directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, which won the special jury prize for best screenplay at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2002. It is an anti-war satire on the fate of two Serbian and Bosnian soldiers trapped together in a trench between opposing lines. It also criticizes the bureaucratic failure of UN peacekeeping forces and the sensationalistic manipulation of the event by the media. After the screening, a panel on the role of the media in the articulation of war crimes was moderated by Horst Rutsch of the UN Chronicle. Drawing from their experiences, the panellists-Oscar-nominated documentary film director Christine Choy, Professor of health and human rights at Harvard University Stephen P. Marks, and award-winning television documentary producer Martin Smith-highlighted the paradoxes of being observers and participants when reporting on human rights abuses and war crimes. Following documentaries on the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of Guatemala and South Africa, the Conference closed with a panel discussion on the question of reconciliation.

Initially founded in 1986 as a forum for films and videos from developing countries or on development issues, the New York Screening Days have presented some 80 distinguished speakers and nearly 500 documentaries and feature films. In recent years, they have also involved briefings to members of the United States Congress by influential personages, such as Patricia Wald, former Judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

The next screening conference, scheduled for April 2003 under the theme "The Terror of AIDS in Africa-Destroying the Future", will address the consequences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the African continent and the failure of developed countries to respond to the regional crisis. It will cover the threat to political stability in the countries concerned, the impact on specific institutional areas, the social consequences for family and children, socio-cultural contexts, gender issues and repercussion for development strategies. Of particular interest will be new health-care strategies, promising interventions, private sector initiatives and the role of non-governmental organizations.

For submissions and programme information, contact Claus Mueller (cmueller@hunter.cuny.edu) or the International Film and Television Exchange at 420 East 64th Street, Suite W2H, New York, NY 10021, USA; Phone: 212-935 6419 ; Fax: 212- 772 4011.

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