DVD Review: Watchers Of The Sky

Watchers Of The Sky is a powerful, heart-rending documentary on genocide, and on the people who have worked to prevent it. The film focuses on the work of Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word genocide, and on Samantha Power, Emmanuel Uwurukundo, Luis Moreno Ocampo and Ben Ferencz, who have all contributed in major ways to the struggle against genocide.

The film was inspired by A Problem From Hell: America And The Age Of Genocide by Samantha Power,  and she is the main voice of the film, functioning both as the voice of experience and also as a sort of narrator. She became a war correspondent when, fresh out of college, she saw images of the concentration camps in Bosnia. She talks about how historically people have gotten away with mass exterminations. “Lemkin’s point – that you have to create the impression that perpetrators will be watched, that they will be accountable in some fashion.”

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jew who suffered dislocation in his youth during World War I. At a very young age, he became interested in exterminations, particularly about how the Armenians were killed by the Turks, and how a survivor then hunted down the man responsible and killed him. That man was then tried for murder, and Lemkin wondered, “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?” In his early twenties, he decided to work toward inventing international law to ban the practice of destroying ethnic groups. And this was before World War II, before the Holocaust, before he lost his entire family. In fact, in 1933 he read his paper at an international meeting of lawyers, but was told the crime of mass exterminations happened so infrequently, and not in Europe, so they weren’t interested. Throughout the film, Lemkin’s words appear on screen, almost like dark and moving poetry.

Also interviewed in this film is Ben Fenecz, former prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and the film does include some footage of him at Nuremberg from 1947, where he used the world genocide in his opening statement. At the age of fifty he decided to try to reform the world, to prevent the next holocaust, working to have “war-making, called the Crime of Aggression, prosecutable by international law,” as a title card tells us. Emmanuel Uwurukundo is the field director for the United Nations Refugee Agency in Chad, overseeing three refugee camps on the border with Darfur, Sudan with nearly sixty thousand refugees. And one of the most horrifying moments of the film is when he recounts how his own family was killed. Luis Moreno Ocampo is a former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. “My fear is Dafur could be forgotten,” he says at one point, reminding of us how Hitler was reported to say that the Germans would be able to get away with their plans because no one remembers the Armenians.

There is a lot of excellent footage in the film. One shot that stands out is of a long line of refugees marching during World War II, which gradually segues into a shot of refugees from the former Yugoslavia marching in 1992, showing that this does indeed happen again and again. The film includes footage from 1995, when the Serbs marched into a city, separating its citizens by gender and age, all the while assuring them calmly, “Nobody will harm you.” And we see the people complying. It’s frightening, because it’s so clearly the same as what we know about how the Nazis worked. And it’s followed by footage of the army then executing the men and boys.

Watchers Of The Sky is at times uplifting, at times depressing, but always effective. It’s fascinating to see how Lemkin had to go about getting the United Nations to recognize genocide in times of peace as a crime. In 1948, the convention was adopted, and you feel so much relief as you watch. But that is almost exactly halfway through the film, and you know that genocide has yet to be eradicated.

Special Features

The DVD contains some bonus footage, including more footage of Ben Fenecz at the United Nations, where he speaks with some people about committees and also addresses the assembly. There is also footage shot at a Darfurian rebel safe house, including interviews with a man who lost his eye and with a thirteen-year-old soldier.

The special features also include interviews with Raphael Lemkin’s friends and family members, including Sam Lemkin, Florence Levy, Nancy Steinson Ehrlich, Abe Bolgats and Ruth Wetter. These give us more information about Lemkin as a person, about his poverty and his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt. Also included is the film’s trailer.

Watchers Of The Sky was directed by Edet Belzberg, and was released on DVD on February 17, 2015 through Music Box Films.