Hot Spots of Upheaval in a Topsy-Turvy World BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
After Sept. 11, this year's Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which shows movies with a strong social and political conscience, has acquired a new and inescapable resonance. To put it plainly, our blinders are off: it's no longer possible in the United States to imagine that the political and social upheavals in other countries don't affect us. ...
Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki's documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," which has the first of three festival screenings tomorrow at 4:30 p.m., is an unauthorized biography of the former Secretary of State. The film explores the controversial charges that Mr. Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal, an argument made by the journalist Christopher Hitchens in his book on the same subject.
The film examines his role in the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969, the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in the early 1970's, and the sale to the Indonesian President Suharto of American weapons, which were used in the massacre of a third of the population of East Timor in 1975. At best, Mr. Kissinger — who did not participate — emerges from this devastating film as the ultimate modern practitioner of realpolitik, the pragmatic political philosophy of the ends justifying the means. The movie will have its commercial opening at the Film Forum on Sept. 18. ...