HRW Film Festival

Fri.-Thurs., June 10-23

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is back with succor for the politically minded but broke would-be adventure traveler, taking them deep into everywhere they want to be that doesn't take American Express.

Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez's La Sierra (premieres Thurs., June 16) captures beautifully the lives of three kids neck-deep in Columbia's rural gang violence. Though the subjects claim alignment with right-wing paramilitary groups in the war against "leftist" guerrillas, ideology never enters the picture. They are drawn into the gang lifestyle by the same forces at work from Crenshaw to Tokyo: boredom and poverty.

The festival's other great selection from Latin America, State of Fear (premieres Fri., June 10), examines the findings of the countries' Truth Commission following Peru's long reign of state terror.

Jim Butterworth's Seoul Train (premieres Sun., June 12) shines a bright light on China's policy of returning North Korean immigrants to their home country, where they are sent to labor camps and worked to death as traitors. Focusing on the little-known network of Westerners and South Koreans who compose a sort of underground-railroad for escaped North Koreans, the film indicts both the North Korean and Chinese regimes. Hidden cameras offer rare footage of ordinary life in North Korea, as well as several heartbreaking minutes in which desperate North Korean asylum seekers are violently captured by Chinese guards at the doorstep of the Japanese embassy in Beijing.

Duco Tellegen's Living Rights (premieres Fri., June 17) is a gorgeous trio of shorts involving children: A Japanese teenager struggles with autism, a Kenyan girl runs away from her traditional village, and a girl on the outskirts of Chernobyl's hot zone is torn between home and a healthier life in Italy with a new family.

Garrett Scott and Ian Olds' Occupation Dreamland (premieres Tues., June 14) is in some ways superior to this year's other celebrated Iraq doc, Gunner Palace, not least because of the film's admirable restraint in the use of soundtrack. The footage of troops getting pressure-cooked by senior officers into reenlisting-"Do you want to end up in a cardboard box back home?"-is worth its weight in depleted uranium.

Also out of Iraq is Sean McAllister's The Liberace of Baghdad (premiers Fri., June 10), which profiles the strange fortunes of Samir Peter. A pop star under Saddam, he now plays in a half-empty hotel bar to depressed contractors, drunk mercenaries and weary journalists.

For full schedule and tickets, visit filmlinc.com.

-Alexander Zaitchik