Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, London 2007

Whose Human Rights?
The Railroad All-Stars, Chema Rodriguez
Hot House, Shimon Dotan

Hugh Ortega Breton and Caroline Bainbridge
posted 3 April 2007

Both these films deal with forms of political action shaped by the institutions of their respective cultures. It is telling that both films, one dealing with the plight of independent female prostitutes demanding recognition in Guatemala, the other with the lives of Palestinians incarcerated for political crimes in Israel, should be shown at a Human Rights Watch festival: 'human rights' are now the foremost platform for the expression of political and social ills in the West today. But there is nothing universal about the predicaments faced by two very different groups. Both films successfully convey the individual misfortunes of the protagonists, in contrasting and highly gendered settings.

Railroad Allstars opens with the relatively unfamiliar spectacle for Western audiences of women playing amateur football, and engrossed in playful banter about whether or not to name themselves 'Whores of the Railroad' in order to draw attention as forcefully as possible to their reasons for playing. In the end, they go for the comparative understatement of 'Railroad Allstars', despite adopting a tactical style that is far from subtle. This choice of moniker is highly significant given that, as soon as it is discovered that the team comprises only working prostitutes, they are immediately banned from the tournament to which they had been granted entry as a result of the petitioning of a sympathetic (male) journalist.

The film presents these events through a lens of hilarity. The drama and comic value is heightened when they are pitched against an unlikely line-up of young, virginal, Catholic schoolgirls called 'The Ice Devils', who are supported/policed from the sidelines by an acrid array of sanctimonious mothers. The moralising tone of these women is undercut by the over-excited middle-aged male commentator, who, much to the delight of the audience, insists on describing the 'Devils' as 'Babes' throughout.

The familiar virgin/whore binary of femininity neatly encapsulates the politics at the heart of the journey undertaken by the Allstars, as the film follows them on a tour of Guatemala where they take on other teams, including one consisting of female police officers. An unexpected alliance unfolds between the women in this particular match, as they share their sense of being sidelined by social attitudes to their respective professions. The tour is closely covered not just by national news channels but also across the Hispanic world, culminating in a live interview on the Spanish radio equivalent of Football Focus and an invitation to play El Salvador in an international fixture.

In a film following the efforts of the all-women, all star team to gain public recognition for the rights of sex workers, it is striking that most of the plot design hangs on the actions of the men who speak for them: the gay coach, Kimberly, the journalist, and the travel agent who sponsors their national tour, giving the women their first taste of holidaying in Guatemala and eating in Caribbean hotels. The travel agent doesn't miss a trick, using his screen time unashamedly to promote www.guatemalatours.net (we will be contacting him for a commission). Meanwhile, Kimberly plugs his puta fashion designs aimed at anyone interested in sexual deviancy in all its joyous polyvalence.

There is a sharp contrast between scenes such as these and the ones depicting the domestic lives of the women making up the team however, and the humour of the sequences on the road is considerably undercut by the marked pathos of the scenes of their everyday lives. It is in these contexts that the women's back stories come to light, and the dominant theme is one of violence perpetrated against these women by male family members.

A retired prostitute-cum-sexual heath worker encapsulates all these feelings and experiences and her melancholic song and infectious laugh provide a space for the spectator to ruminate. Her life as a sex worker is indelibly etched on her body, which bears the scar of her eye lost in a fight with a client. The tragedy of this tale is lampooned by the woman herself as she recounts the story of how her eye was replaced by a glass prosthetic offered by a more benevolent client, only to be lost once more as the result of her own alcoholic bingeing. This is one of many similar moments: time and again laughter is solicited in response to the continual tragic moments of these women's lives. Their coping mechanism is our comfort. They take their comfort in 'Our dear Lord'. The film leaves hanging the question of religion and its ambivalent role in the lives of these women; their use of it as a stick to beat themselves for their sinful lives as well as a source of hope.

The function of religious belief is also in question in Hot House, an examination of the lives of imprisoned members of Fatah and Hamas in the Israeli jails of Ber Sheba, Ashkelon, Hadarim, and Megiddo. For these men and women, religious belief is clearly a source of discipline and motivation but, unexpectedly, seems less important in explaining their lives than those of the prostitutes of Guatemala.

A visitor to the prison, on seeing the camera, denies the audience any feelings of pity by remonstrating with the imagined Western audience, telling us that our sympathy is not wanted. This is perhaps the most powerful moment in the film; the woman is an unexpected interlocutor and is clearly moved by her opportunity to voice her thoughts to the outside world. Her emotion contrasts starkly with the calm, reasoned and detailed responses of the interviews arranged with prison inmates, revealing the highly structured form of the whole piece. As a result, while we see a clear and methodical explanation of the situation of politically imprisoned Palestinians in 2005-6, we are left at a cold remove from their daily existence.

This contrasts with the way the audience is made to identify with the (humour of the) Guatemalan prostitutes, perhaps as a result of the warts and all approach filming of the ups and downs of their lives. These women are hard but not hardened. Of course, one has to bear in mind that militant Palestinians have suffered from years of Western news misrepresenting them as irrational and overly emotive victims and perpetrators. Hot House compellingly dispels this myth and replaces it with the firm conviction that the Palestinian problem will not be solved by imprisoning enemies of the state, any more than that worked in Northern Ireland or South Africa. The prisons have become universities for future politicians and bombing agents (those who organise the bombings), although some of them were clearly portrayed as having a great deal to learn.

In particular, the film effectively foregrounds the ethical dilemma of murder as a means of achieving political goals through a contrast between two unapologetic self-confessed suicide bombing agents and the much calmer, intellectualising demeanour of the senior party figures. The film makes use of the Western veneration of childhood to shape this dilemma, as it explicitly interrogates their humanity through a liberal democratic lens by testing their will to kill children. Predictably enough, the filmmaker chooses to interrogate the women more than the men in this regard: bringing to bear assumptions about the maternal duty to protect; a rather chauvinistic device to connect with the audience - it is common knowledge that soldiers of either gender must necessarily dehumanise their targets in order to retain their own humanity.

Despite this strategy, the film does bring into focus the stringency of belief and its role in shaping our notions of human rights. For example, by what criteria do we determine which rights are more human than others in the global political context? Which raises another question: how do these films get selected for a human rights festival? Qualitatively distinct social problems vie with one another for the claim of greatest cultural universality; it is as though they are competing for the No.1 slot in the human rights hit parade.