Movie rights This year's Human Rights Watch Film Fest hits close to home, at SPACE BY BETH BROGAN
	HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress Street, Portland, (207) 828-5600. Afghanistan Year 1380, screens at 7 p.m. on Sun., March 2, and at 2:30 p.m. on Mon. March 3. Gaza Strip, screens at 7 p.m. on Mon., March 3, and at 2:30 p.m. on Tues., March 4. Justifiable Homicide, screens at 7 p.m. on Sat., March 8 and 2:30 p.m. on Sun., March 9. The Last Just Man, screens at 7 p.m. on Thurs., March 6, and 2:30 p.m. on Fri., March 7. Presumed Guilty, screens at 7 p.m. on Tues., March 4, and at 2:30 p.m. on Wed., March 5. Seven Days in Tehran, screens at 7 p.m. on Wed., March 5, and at 2:30 p.m. on Thurs., March 6. War Photographer, screens at 7 p.m. on Fri., March 7, and at 2:30 p.m. on Sat., March 8.

Each year, Human Rights Watch, the largest US-based human-rights organization, publishes the results of investigations into human rights abuses around the world in hope of bringing public attention to the plight of citizens in countries like Rwanda and Afghanistan. A noble goal, but what the average person knows of human-rights violations — aside from whatever CNN serves up — is largely the result of documentary films. The best of these — as well as fiction and animated films devoted to the subject of human rights — are currently touring the world as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which stops at Portland’s SPACE gallery beginning March 2.

Films featured in this year’s festival explore atrocities in Kosovo and Palestine, but also the United States, the setting of perhaps the most notable of this year’s offerings, Justifiable Homicide (2001) by Oscar-nominee director Jonathan Stack (Angola Prison Rodeo, The Farm) and filmmaker Jon Osman.

Justifiable Homicide follows the transformation of Margarita Rosario, whose son and nephew were shot to death in 1995 by New York Police Department detectives, into a fierce activist who demands an independent investigation of the crime and founds an organization for parents of children murdered by the police.

Rosario contacted the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), whose subsequent investigation exposed a large-scale cover-up including a police investigation riddled with holes, an altered pathology report, and witnesses who were " warned " by members of the NYPD to keep silent about the shootings

Some of the most incriminating footage is of CCRB investigators discovering bullets at the crime scene that were never accounted for during the official investigation, and an interview with an independent pathologist who declares that Antonio Rosario and Hilton Vega were shot in the back and that the original report could only have been the result of a " gross deliberate misrepresentation. "

The two police detectives responsible for the murders — one a former bodyguard to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — declined to be interviewed for the documentary, but their actions are defended by the president of the NYPD detectives union as well as the now-idolized former mayor who, in an especially effective segment of the film, responds to a call from Rosario during a radio program by accusing her of distorting facts and suggesting, " Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up in your family. "

In the end, despite a CCRB recommendation, the investigation into the deaths of Rosario and Vega was closed and, according to the lead investigator, most of the CCRB investigatory team was subsequently fired.

With blue and white NYPD caps on every other head around the country for the past 18 months, it’s easy to forget there was a time when cases like that of Amidou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant shot 41 times by New York cops in 1999, weren’t as shocking as they should be. But Rosario hasn’t forgotten her son and nephew were murdered. When she leads a protest of thousands, including members of Parents Against Brutality, into a wall of club-carrying NYPD officers, the despair this film could have inflicted becomes determination to hold even the irreproachable New York City Police Department accountable to the rules of the game.

On the other side of the United States, 80 attorneys in the San Francisco Public Defenders Office are busy defending the rights of the down and out.

Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates’s Presumed Guilty (2002) tells the stories of four of these lawyers and the clients they lead through the justice system.

The San Francisco public-defender’s office handles about 90 percent of people arrested in that city each year — about 19,000 clients who confront poverty, drug abuse, and domestic violence outside the courtroom, and often face equally formidable obstacles within the judicial system.

Seemingly endless videotape of trials in which elderly white judges shut down impassioned young public defenders and police bribe witnesses to testify against defendants makes you wonder why anyone would want this job. Will Maas, one of the four lawyers profiled in Presumed Guilty, examines his life’s work in an almost unbearably personal video diary in which he describes how his experiences in Vietnam and his sobriety of 12 and a half years compel him to advocate so passionately for these defendants.

" We take this person and we show him to the jury, and we try to bring out the best in him, " Adachi says of his client, a handsome 17 year-old Vietnamese man charged with murder. When the young man accepts a plea bargain in order to serve a lesser sentence of 16 years, Adachi is visibly heartbroken.

While the exhausting schedules and discouraging success rate may prompt fledgling lawyers to head for the corporate ladder, the public defenders know they play a critical role in keeping the justice system just.

" You’ve got the government going out and swooping people up on the street, " says one public defender. " Hey, you better be careful. Don’t get up too early, don’t be drowsy in the morning walking down the street or Officer Whatever-his-name-is is going to pick you up and you’re going to be sitting right here. "

War Photographer (2001), an Academy Award-nominated documentary, turns the camera around to profile James Nachtwey, whose more-than-20-year-career has been dedicated to delivering accurate portraits of suffering around the world.

For two years, director Christian Frei followed the award-winning photographer through the devastated streets of Kosovo and dodged bullets with him in South Africa and Palestine, exploring more of the " why " than the " how " of Nachtwey’s art.

In voiceovers, Nachtwey reveals that as a younger man in Vietnam, he realized photos appearing in the mainstream media didn’t reflect what he saw each day, but instead were manipulated by political and military leaders. This veiling of the realities of war inspired Nachtwey to expose to the mass-media-coddled world " what happens to ordinary people in the course of history. "

By some technical ingenuity, much of War Photographer appears to have been filmed as if the camera is embedded in Nachtwey’s eyes, and we look out over the lens of his camera to watch his finger press the button.

Frei films Nachtwey as he photographs a grieving, kerchief-clad mother in Kosovo from a distance of only a few feet. Nachtwey appears intrusive, and acknowledges to the camera that while this behavior would be inexcusable in " normal life, " his breach of decorum is permitted by his subjects because they understand that he will reveal their suffering to the world. He also answers the question that at one time or another is probably posed to all war photographers: how can they just stand there and take pictures as the suffering goes on around them? The photographs of starving children, Nachtwey explains, are almost always taken at feeding centers after the rescue effort has begun.

In interviews, colleagues, including CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Hans-Hermann Klare of the German magazine Stern, marvel that despite Nachtwey’s " own library of suffering in his head, " he has not succumbed to cynicism.

What he has taken from his unique perspective on such horrors as the Rwandan massacres ( " It was like taking the express elevator to hell, " Nachtwey recalls) is a sense of its importance and a realization of the responsibility he has assumed.

" If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war, " he says. " And if it’s used well, it can be a powerful ingredient to the antidote to war. "

The Human Rights Watch festival will run at SPACE, 538 Congress Street, Portland, March 2 through 9.

Beth Brogan can be reached at Elizabethsbrogan@aol.com