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.
No comments:
Post a Comment