Lydia Cacho: If only the chest-beaters at Padang could hear this woman. Mexican born to a French-feminist-psychologist mother, she is among the world’s foremost investigative journalists, as well as a staunch advocate of women’s rights and, well, kind of hot (when interviewed by an American journalist once she was asked why she hadn’t become a model. She bristled with indignation in the form of trademark latino hand gestures). In 1998, Cacho was also the victim of a rape. Well, not exactly a victim, she says. That would mean she allowed the incident to “colonize her soul,” which she says is definitely not the case. The attack is believed to have been motivated by a story she’d written implicating a leading Mexican business and a Mexican governor in corruption, but you think it deterred her? A few years later, she exposed an international child prostitution ring implicating some of Mexico’s most influential investors and politicians–a story that required her to go undercover as a prostitute with the Yakuza, among many other gnarly scenarios that I wouldn’t stick my little toe near. The book sold 1.3 million copies and became a handbook for the judge prosecuting the ringleaders. The head of the ring got 130 years and to this day, Lydia and her family are the target of death threats. How does she keep it together, you ask? “Yoga and meditation for the last 20 years, I like tequila, I like to salsa and I love life!” she says.
The Act of Killing: New York director Joshua Oppenheimer’s eight year masterpiece on the massacre of left-leaning PKI party members in Indonesia in the late 1960s is, for sure, the most twisted piece of cinema I’ve ever seen. The story of a politically-charged slaughter in a far off land is an often-told one, but where this one gets going is that the perpetrators were also big-time Hollywood film fans. And…? you say. Well, before becoming the heads of an infamous Indonesian paramilitary group, they’d worked as gangsters who ran theaters that screened banned American films, as well as the more traditional pursuits of drug-running, prostitution and illegal gambling. When they were given the job by the heads of the Suharto-backed paramilitary group and told to go out and slaughter the opponents (the names of which were given to them by the CIA), they did it using the techniques they’d learned from their favorite American film heroes–we’re talking Dirty Harry, Godfather and John Wayne. In re-telling how they killed their foes, the aging gangsters proposed to director Oppenheimer that they re-enact the massacres in the form of their favorite Hollywood films. Yeah. Shit gets weird: think fat gangsters in drag and Harmony Korine meets Apocalypse Now. Before signing on, executive producer, veteran filmmaker, and producer Werner Herzog called the film “unprecedented in the history of cinema.” A total must-see.
Then news of another swell filtered through, and I chased a winding road down a hill through rice paddies to meet the Jones brothers, Mikala and Keohne, on the East Coast for a few of these.
At the bottom of the winding road, the Jones brothers waited.
The Asylum Seeker’s debate:
The festival’s proximity to Australia meant this debate was once again extensively hashed out, albeit minus a conservative perspective. In accordance with Leunig’s inspiring humanist approach, I’m gonna give the final word on this complex issue to reputed Human Rights advocate and barrister, Julian Burnside. When discussing the plight of those attempting to reach Australia by boat from places as far abroad as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iran, he offered this undeniable human truth: “Danger is a mark of sincerity, it is a natural filter… asylum seekers aren’t trying to get to Australia, they’re trying to get anywhere. By attempting to deter them, a process he calls, “psychological warfare,” we are making Australia out to appear more unpleasant than the Taliban, the Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Iran. Is that what we want to define us as a nation abroad?” Indeed.
