An international jury was headed by the well-known U.S. film director Joel Schumacher, know for such works as A Time to Kill, Batman and Robin, and Phone Booth. “I have a special affinity for the Okinawan Movie festival,” Schumacher said, “because of its strong community angle. This concept makes the festival a place for building peace and cultural understanding between people and is an important message from Okinawa. ”
The jury at the Okinawa International Movie Festival. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi
This year`s festival attracted nearly 450,000 people, mostly from Okinawa, who milled around the Convention Center in Ginowan City to watch films and catch a glimpse of the stars gracing the red carpet and speaking to the audience following their film’s screening.
Special audience programs included workshops on film and acting for school children who were on spring vacation.
“I am so glad I came to the festival this year for the second time,” said 15-year-old Rika Daimon, who came with her friends from Naha. “The festival gives Okinawa, which is usually behind other big cities in Japan, an international standing and people like us a valuable opportunity to meet important movie stars.”
The film festival, originally inaugurated in March 2009, runs on the central theme of Laughter and Peace, which is linked to Okinawan traditional wisdom that laughter is the celebration of life.
The festival is the brainchild of Yoshimoto Kogyo Company, Japan`s leading entertainment enterprise, which works closely with the Okinawan prefectural government to hold the event. “Bringing the film festival to Okinawa is important to make the island a hub for Asian entertainment,” said Hiroshi Osaki, chairman of Yoshimoto Kogyo Company.
Apart from the galaxy of well-known Japanese and Asian films that were featured during the week-long festival, this year included a new category called “the local origination project,” which screened community-based movies. “Okinawan Language,” a documentary film on life in Chatan-cho, in the central part of Okinawan island, emerged as am audience favorite in the new category. Talking to the gathered viewers, director Rinken Teruya explained the film’s intention to highlights the need to protect the fast-disappearing Okinawan language that represents the unique culture of the Riyukyu islands of Okinawa prefecture.
This year, the highly competitive peace award was extended to Taiwanese film director Tien-Yu Fu for her film “The Happy Life of Debbie.” The movie features the lives of Southeast Asian wives who marry Taiwanese men and start a new life in their host country. Fu, delighted to have won, said the Okinawa film festival is a gateway to Asia. “I am so glad my film was chosen in Okinawa. The festival brings Asian culture to the world,” she said.
As Japan`s most southern prefecture, close to Taiwan, Okinawa is home to two thirds of the U.S.’ military bases in the country and had most recently been in the news for its increasingly strained relationship with army personnel on the islands.
With its celebration of local and regional culture, the rapidly growing film festival may be striking just the right cord for local audiences, while simultaneously giving a good polish to Okinawa’s international image.
* Suvendrini Kakuchi is a Sri Lankan journalist based in Tokyo and writes for IPS news agency.
]]>
Ranging from sassy dialogue to black humour, these are one-minute comedies with a smart punchline. The Mother from Hell and the Spoiled Brat skits have [...]]]>
Make safe sex fun. By M. Sayagues
Ranging from sassy dialogue to black humour, these are one-minute comedies with a smart punchline. The Mother from Hell and the Spoiled Brat skits have a Borat-like humour. And who would have thought a condom ad from India would depict anal sex?
Click on the ad from Argentina even if you don’t speak Spanish. Everybody who has been a teenager will chuckle about these teens, their parents and their predicament. (Watch it here)
Laughing got me thinking about how seldom one sees humorous ads about condoms in English-speaking Southern Africa. I have seen some cool ads in Mozambique, though – I think there were Brazilian advisors involved. Where is the fun?
Most ads about condoms in Southern Africa are earnest, even boring, stressing safe sex, HIV prevention, responsibility. Few treat sex as an activity filled with desire, romance, anticipation, indecision, ambiguity, and pleasure.
Yes, for man, sex may be forced, violent, unwanted, unpleasant, too quick, too slow, or too risky.
A pretty condom carrying box. By M. Sayagues
But for many others, it is not. Ads should target different segments. If we want to attract the attention of the young instead of totally turning them off, ads must be cool.
It is a fine balancing act. About three years ago, the South African anti-AIDS campaign LoveLife published a monthly insert in major newspapers, called Uncut that tried so hard to be blasé it was borderline pornographic.
There is a distance from acknowledging that young people have sex to portraying teens dressed like hookers in positions suggesting group oral sex. Many parents threw Uncut straight away. My daughter, aged 14 then and no prude, thought it cheapened girls.
After many complaints and public debate, Uncut changed. It went overboard. Now it reads like a church teen newsletter, wholesome and boring.
It may be that the terrifying scale of the AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa inhibits ad campaign planners and donors from portraying safe sex as fun. Maybe it is fear of offending churches, politicians and parents. And talking about sex has traditionally been taboo.
Yet, to get young people to practice safe sex, condoms must become part of their sexual paraphernalia and discourse. A bit of humour helps.
So have a laugh and tell us which is your favourite!
Ad selection courtesy of Chris Well, a designer and sexual rights activist at Conversations for a Better World. Check out his website for teens and reproductive health: www.15andcounting
Have you seen the Italian documentary Il corpo delle donne (available with English subtitles)?
It is horrifying, like a horror movie.
“Women –real women— are an endangered species on television, one that is being replaced by a grotesque, vulgar and humiliating representation,” says an introduction to the documentary [...]]]>
Have you seen the Italian documentary Il corpo delle donne (available with English subtitles)?
It is horrifying, like a horror movie.
“Women –real women— are an endangered species on television, one that is being replaced by a grotesque, vulgar and humiliating representation,” says an introduction to the documentary by Lorella Zanardo.
This picture shows a woman hanged from the ceiling, like a ham, surrounded by legs of ham. This and other images, taken from real TV shows, speak for themselves.
Il corpo delle donne is a 25-minute terrifying documentary that undresses the degradation of women in Italian television.
“This led us to select television images that share a common manipulative exploitation of the woman’s body, to let people know what is happening –not only people who never watch television, but especially those who watch it but ‘don’t see’,” says the introduction.
Why aren’t women, and men, rallying against this treatment?
Link with Il Corpo delle Donne in Facebook.
]]>The other day I saw Star Trek. What an uncreative film. Listen, women: in the year 2387, men will still wear the pants and command the ship, while leggy women are busy being ornamental in mini skirts.
I don’t expect films to campaign for human rights, [...]]]>
So 1960s...Star Trek masters and commanders are all men.
The other day I saw Star Trek. What an uncreative film. Listen, women: in the year 2387, men will still wear the pants and command the ship, while leggy women are busy being ornamental in mini skirts.
I don’t expect films to campaign for human rights, especially films of this nature. Space odysseys just have to be entertaining, surprising, ingenious. But Star Trek was just unimaginative, reproducing the social prejudices of the sixties, when the TV series on which this film is based started. As if nothing had changed…
Now that I think of it, that part was indeed surprising. Some things have changed since the sixties but we are reaching a plateau of stagnation where films like this do not arise any objections or comments.
Where Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi can treat his fellow female citizens as if they were just meat, no brains, and cause no outrage. Where the woman South Africa President Jacob Zuma allegedly raped was put on trial by the media, her sexual history exposed.
Where we don’t expect improvements, like Elisa Muñoz, coordinator of the Global Report on Women in the News Media due in 2010, told me recently in an interview: “I believe that we will find more women in the journalism profession around the world. However, we will likely continue to find that women are underrepresented at higher levels of management.”
Where there is an eternal, unfathomable economic and political gap of inequality between men and women.
Maybe I should not get all worked up by a film. You tell me.
]]>What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?
This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the [...]]]>
Remembering in Rwanda. Courtesy Anne Aghion
What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?
This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the Human Rights Watch film festival, follows a gacaca or community court during five years.
Rwanda has set up some 12, 000 gacaca where killers face the relatives of those they killed during the genocide in 1994. (Read an interview with Aghion here).
A world and an age away, the same questions emerge in “Katyn”, the magnificent, sombre and sober epic movie made in 2008 by Polish director Andrzej Wajda about the Soviet massacre of 20,000 Poles during World War 2. During the ensuing five decades of occupation of Poland, the Soviets falsified history in a web of institutional lies and blamed the Nazis for the mass murders.
Both films are meditations on memory and history and their distortions, on loss, cruelty and forgiving, on imperfect justice, atonement and healing.
Women are central to both films – they are witness to horror and keepers of memory.
Think of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo haunting the Argentine junta with the photographs of their disappeared sons and daughters in the 1980s.
Gendering truth, gendering abuse
At truth and reconciliation commissions across the world, the bulk of testimonies by women dwell more on their loved ones and less on their own sufferings.
This is changing, as truth commissions become more gender-aware and seek gendered narratives. Earlier commissions, such as Argentina and Chile, were gender-neutral (some say gender-blind). South Africa was gender-neutral in its mandate but had special hearings for women. Peru’ commission had a gender unit. Later ones, like Haiti, Sierra Leone and Timor Leste, have looked specifically at sexual violence.
And more: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have ruled that mass rape, sexual assault, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced abortion and forced pregnancy may be crimes against humanity, torture and genocide.
A third film that I saw recently is “Persepolis”, Marjane Satrapi’s wildly popular graphic novel turned animated movie, about her life growing up as a girl who likes Michael Jackson and punk music under the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1980s.
Protesting in Tehran. Photo: M. Avazbeigi
Its charming animation overlays a dreadful national and family history of imprisonment, torture, disappearances, failed revolutions, dashed political hopes, war and Shariah.
The movie conveys a poignant description of another form of gender abuse: the repression of women’s freedom to dress, move about, work, study, divorce, inherit, love and have fun.
Repressed, but not cowed into submission: as I write, on the streets across Iran, women are protesting, being beaten up, arrested and killed, challenging theocracy, demanding their rights.
(Read about women protesters in Iran and about dismantling a culture of impunity in Guatemala, Peru and Democratic Republic of Congo)
]]>