{"id":159,"date":"2008-11-19T23:58:29","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T03:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/?p=159"},"modified":"2010-02-09T13:23:24","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T17:23:24","slug":"an-essential-and-moving-film-about-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/2008\/11\/19\/an-essential-and-moving-film-about-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"An Essential and Moving Film About Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sous_la_cagoule_1\"<\/a>
\nPhoto of Haj Ali, an Iraqi teacher. He was held captive at the Abu Ghraib prison. His left hand is permanently paralyzed due to badly undergone treatments.<\/em><\/p>\n

My friend Patricio Henr\u00edquez<\/strong>, who settled in Canada after he fled Chile due to the coup d’\u00e9tat led by Pinochet, is one of the best documentary filmmakers in the country. His latest film is now out, entitled Under the Hood, a Voyage into the World of Torture<\/strong><\/em> (French title: Sous la Cagoule, un voyage au bout de la torture<\/strong><\/em>). The documentary was produced by Macumba International<\/strong><\/a> in co-production with the NFB<\/a><\/strong>. It premiered at the Festival du Nouveau Cin\u00e9ma<\/strong><\/a>, and is currently showing at the Ex-Centris<\/a><\/strong>. It’s a deeply moving film in terms of testimonies, and is highly accomplished on the aesthetic level as well. It brings up essential issues concerning the U.S. foreign policy agenda and the ‘war against terrorism.’<\/strong> I attended the first screening at Ex-Centris, where Patricio was present and members of the audience were given the chance to say a few words. One of them was Adil Charkaoui<\/strong>, who is originally from Morocco and is presently under the cloud of a ‘security certificate.’ After having been in prison for a long time, he is not allowed to move around freely, and the reasons for these measures are confidential. During the discussion that proceeded the film, some people raised the question of Canada’s complicity in U.S. foreign policy and security tactics. I asked Patricio a few questions.<\/p>\n

What was your thought process for the strategies of making this film? It’s not an easy subject matter!
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Patricio Henr\u00edquez: <\/strong>For this type of film, since it deals with such a vast subject matter within time and History, the approach must bind together a whole array of elements: people, shooting locations, archival sources, information, etc. And even after performing a thorough research, one still doesn’t know everything there is to know when the time comes to start shooting, which limits the possibilities of defining a style. However, it had been clear to me from the beginning that the topic was to be addressed mainly through testimonies. We favoured the shots and the lighting setups that helped to emphasize the personality of the testifiers. We also decided to shoot the interviews with two cameras. One would be in constant movement, very close to the interviewees, thus exploring their corporal expressions to the maximum, while the second one would be set to take medium shots. Inevitably, many decisions regarding the style were taken during the montage, which had an effect on our predilection for orienting the graphical aspect toward the period prints as well as toward images that were mostly impressionistic and which were shot over the course of the montage.<\/p>\n

MI: How do you get people to watch a film about such a heavy subject, like this one? (I made a film about the innocent victims of organized crime; I am not saying my film was as good as yours, but almost nobody came out to see it in the theatre\u2026)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

PH:<\/strong> It\u2019s a very pertinent question, to which I have no answer. In the interviews with the media during the production of the film, I tried to allude to a sense of collective responsibility: torture in today\u2019s world must concern the public opinions of the West since it is in the name of the West and of its values that human beings from other cultures are martyred. The critics, who have been very favourable to our view, can also help us. I think that, indeed, people do not rush out to see these types of documentaries which deal with harsh subjects, maybe because documentaries are not suggestive of a way of evasion, so the spectator is left to her or his own reflections at the end of the film. I believe that the treatment of the same topics in fiction (and there are some that are really excellent) foster the idea that once the final credits appear on the screen, there comes the closure of a chapter which does not exist in reality.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

MI: You chose to release the film now, at the end of the Bush era, even though it had been ready for some time. Why?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

PH:<\/strong> It was the distributor’s decision, who wanted the film to make a number of festivals abroad first, as this seems to work in order to pave the way for a better Quebec release. It was a strategy that sought precisely to get more people to watch the film here. Is it effective? I don’t know. We will see the results later.<\/p>\n

MI: You, along with some of you colleagues, made a short film about Omar Khadr’s case, which circulates mostly on the web. Is it possible to evaluate the impact of a low-budget video with such distribution, as compared to a feature-length film that has taken years to make?
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

PH:<\/strong> It is hard to evaluate such an impact. But we are talking about two different spaces. Nothing will assure us that the same people that frequent the movie theatres also watch web documentary propositions, and viceversa. For us it is a very practical question: we have a seven-hour long document recorded in Guantanamo, a scoop. We could (and should?) act quickly. That was done and it is still available on YouTube. But nothing can prevent the short film from being shown in theatres. In fact, the director of the Festival du Nouveau Cin\u00e9ma, Claude Chamberlain, decided from the first time he saw it to show it at the festival even though it was not part of the official programme. And to see it on the big screen results in a different perception than if it is seen in on a computer screen. One can try to compare the two expressions, the short for the web and the feature for the movie theatre, but one is not obliged to choose one over the other. Both are necessary, I believe, and they end up complementing each other.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Sous_la_cagoule_2\"<\/a>
\nSaid Nabi Sidiqy: an Agent of the current Afghani police who got arrested and was tortured by the Americans at the Bagram prison.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks to Jorge Bustos-Estefan<\/a><\/strong> for help with this blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo of Haj Ali, an Iraqi teacher. He was held captive at the Abu Ghraib prison. His left hand is permanently paralyzed due to badly undergone treatments. My friend Patricio Henr\u00edquez, who settled in Canada after he fled Chile due to the coup d’\u00e9tat led by Pinochet, is one of the best documentary filmmakers in … Continue reading An Essential and Moving Film About Torture<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-festivals","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialdoc.net\/magnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}