Films about our species’ enduring capacity to be inhumane toward its own are perennials at film festivals (and, one can suppose, they will continue to be so as long as sides are drawn, wars are waged, and violence is sanctioned as the most expedient solution). This is certainly the case with the San Francisco International Film Festival, which offered visceral stopovers at the Sri Lankan civil war (Between Two Worlds); the Rwandan genocides of a decade ago (The Day God Walked Away); the Third Balkan War (Ordinary People); the 2008 Russian-Georgian war (Russian Lessons); and the various battlefronts, past and present, that have gripped the Mid-East (Budrus, Lebanon, Port of Memory), including those which have become outposts in our own government’s “War on Terror” (Restrepo, The Oath). […]
I'm a freelance writer and editor based in San Francisco, California.
