OF THE world's 100 largest economies, fifty-one are now corporations and forty-nine are countries. As corporations now have so much power, they often have the same legal rights and privileges as living people, this documentary examines what kind of a person the corporation is. This thoroughly researched and painstakingly examined answer is that the corporation is a raving psychopath without any sense of responsibility, ethics, or consideration for others.

Example: Fox News investigative journalists Jane Akre and Steve Wilson produce a television report that shows how Monsanto hormones are damaging the cows they're used on and (surprise) coming out in people's milk. Monsanto has a lot of lawyers and their products buy a lot of advertising time. Fox censors the story, fires the journalists, and sues THEM!

It's not really news to me, or I think most people who go to film festivals, that large corporations are absolutely pathological in their pursuit of profit, but rarely has a film put the case in such an articulate and accessible manner.

There's something I can't figure out about the film, its tone and way of going about things, and it's not until the end that I realize THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL FILM. In the classic sense. Like the ones I watched in school. And it strikes me that it's been that long since I saw something like this – a film whose purpose is to tell a story by conveying thoroughly-researched facts and information – elements that have been all but absent from television in the past few decades.

Just as much as it clearly demonstrates the anti-democratic, anti-human rights, anti-human behaviour of corporations, The Corporation defies the idea so ingrained in my head at school that educational films without star-power presenters or slapstick hijinks must be deadly boring. This one's among the most startling and entertaining wake-up calls of recent decades and everyone should see it.





Persons of Interest (2003)
Alison Maclean, Tobias Perse | USA | 63 min | Featuring: Muhamed Abushhaker, Syed Ali, Khadrah Ali, Nabil Ayesh.

FOLLOWING the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, 5000 Muslim and Arab-Americans were rounded up and (like NZ's own Ahmed Zaoui), imprisoned without any indication of why or when they would be released. Some are still residing in Guantanamo Bay, but in Persons of Interest, twelve of their stories are finally made public for the world to see.

Well, for the part of the world who sees this documentary co-directed by Kiwi Alison Maclean and Tobias Pearse. But I fear the audience will be painfully small.

The entire film hardly leaves one empty room where the subjects stand in front of the camera and testify. The institutional setting is probably a decent replication of their incarceration and after watching for an hour I feel like I've been locked up myself.

I leave with a terrible sense of frustration at what a wasted opportunity this is. The atrocities of Homeland Insecurity are powerful stories that must be told, but the film presents them in such a bland manner that I cannot remember a single anecdote from it. And John Ashcroft couldn't have done a better job himself at maintaining the illusion of freedom of the press and information by making a film like this, yet effectively censoring it by ensuring it was so boring that no one would watch it.





Checkpoint (2003)
Yoav Shamir | Israel | 80 min

THE STATE of Israel holds Palestinians captive in their own land, forcing them to pass through checkpoints to travel from place to place – when they are allowed to pass at all. This fly-on-the-wall documentary presents their stories of humiliation and frustration as well as those of the nineteen-year-old Israeli soldiers whose whims determine their fate.

It's not a well-shot film, basically point and shoot handheld auto-focus, but the access it has to the situation makes it remarkable. It seems to me inconceivable that any other Western military institution would open itself up to this kind of public scrutiny, out of a well founded fear that it might be accurately portrayed (You guys want to come film what we're doing in Guantanamo Bay? Sure! Come on in!)

What is perhaps even more remarkable about this film is that it its Israeli director Yoav Shamir is able to bring out the humanity in this most degrading institution. Long, straight takes make you internalise the experiences of children, parents and grandparents whose access to the hospital, their schools and families can be granted or denied based on the mood swings of teenagers with machine guns.

The best scene of the film, though, is a snowball fight between the guards and the Palestinians where all involved are obviously having a riot of a time, yet the Palestinians are screaming, "This is the Intifada!" Thousands of years of tensions can come out in a way they just can't when you're looking down the barrel of a gun.

On the Israeli side, the film also portrays the humanity of the young guards, who are also forced to stand out in the wind and rain and snow, and at times seem as much victims of the system as their victims are.

It's not just spin doctors and marketing departments who keep films like this from being made, but also film funding bodies and broadcasters whose rules and regulations both implicitly and explicitly censor out documentary like this, and spend taxpayer money on 'factual programming' like New Zealand Idol.


SÁNDOR LAU is a writer, filmmaker, journalist and Aotearoa's only Chinese/Hungarian-American. Watch his shorts on www.nzshortfilm.com or contact him at: sandor_lau@yahoo.com

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See also: Post-fest Wrap 2004

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