Peace films foster
vision of global
understanding

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Star-Bulletin

The International Peace Film Festival starts an film series today, running Thursdays through April 18 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa St. John Plant Science Lab 011.

The featured films and documentaries are from a festival run by Common Ground, a Washington, D.C.-based organization, that promotes research and practice in conflict resolution and mediation. The event is sponsored here by the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the UH.

Institute director and associate professor Ronald McCarthy said the festival's aim is to show films that "contribute to preventing and reducing conflict, encouraging and moving the audience toward a greater personal understanding of the courageous and innovative ways in which people have turned enmity to friendship, disagreement into accord, and hurt into healing."

The free showings will start at 6 p.m.; doors open at 5:30. An open discussion, with light refreshments, will follow each screening. For more information, call 956-7427. Here are the films to be screened:

>> Today: "Regret to Inform," directed by Barbara Sonneborn. In this Oscar-nominated documentary, Sonneborn views the aftermath of the Vietnam War as a widow who goes to Vietnam in search of the area where her husband was killed. As much as the film depicts the suffering of American soldiers and their families, it also reveals the suffering of the Vietnamese. Peaceful images of Vietnam today are juxtaposed with brutal news footage shot during the war.

>> March 21: "Rain," directed by Ilan Yagoda. In 1949, a year of torrential rains, many refugees from the Holocaust arrived and settled in Israel, displacing those already living on the land. This documentary is about two groups of people -- connected to the same hill and the same olive groves -- and the Arab village that is now an Israeli kibbutz. The director's mother was one of the refugees who founded and built Kibbutz Megido. Yagoda, who had lived on the kibbutz, talked with some of the original refugees and settlers, each still carrying his own unique burden. He also talked with the original Arab elders who were forced to leave their village.

>> April 4: "Prelude to Kosovo," directed by John Michalczyk. The film challenges the conventional wisdom about recent horrors in Kosovo and offers shreds of hope for reconciliation and a brighter future. Michalczyk has a background in theology, and his ecumenical spirit and interest in religious history animates this informative film. "Prelude" was shot on location in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. The documentary combines graphic footage with interviews with religious and political figures, addressing the ideology of "ethnic cleansing" and the massacres resulting from a nationalist quest for political, cultural and religious domination. The Serbian Orthodox, Bosnian Muslim and Croatian Catholic perspectives are all represented.

>> April 11: "Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land," directed by Michel Khleifi. Khleifi interviewed nine inter-faith and inter-racial couples in Israel, asking each where they met, how they have addressed religious or cultural differences in their marriage, how their families have responded to the relationship and how they chose where to live. He also had a professor and three religious leaders comment: a sheikh, a rabbi and a priest. The three religious spokesmen are against inter-faith marriage, while the couples speak about their partner's kindness and other human qualities.

>> April 18: "Titanic Town," directed by Roger Michell. This British drama relates the true events that transpired during the 1970s in Northern Ireland. It is a poignant and comic tale of one woman's crusade to stop the violence. The title refers to Belfast, the city where the Titanic was built. A Catholic housewife, Bernie McPhelimy (Julie Walters), decides to resist the violence in a neighborhood tboth threatened and protected by both the British soldiers and the IRA. When she demands that both sides stop shooting, she is marked as an anti-IRA traitor.

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