Each year authors at the UND Writers Conference are invited to select films that have influenced their work or have a special connection to the year’s theme. These are their 2008 selections.
The film festival is free and open to the public. All films will be shown in the Lecture Bowl, located on the second floor of the UND Memorial Union (Room 204).
 The Battle of Algiers
Wednesday, March 26 - 2 p.m.
Selected by Salman Rushdie
Col. Mathieu: What were they saying in Paris yesterday?”
Journalist: Nothing. Sartre's written another article.
Col. Mathieu: Will you kindly explain to me why the Sartres are always born on the other side?
Journalist: So you like Sartre, Colonel?
Col. Mathieu: Not really, but I like him even less as an adversary.
Synopsis: “A film commissioned by the Algerian government that shows the Algerian revolution from both sides. The French foreign legion has left Vietnam in defeat and has something to prove. The Algerians are seeking independence. The two clash. The torture used by the French is contrasted with the Algerian's use of bombs in soda shops. A look at war as a nasty thing that harms and sullies everyone who participates in it.” John Vogel for IMDB
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Cast includes Brahim Hadiadj, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti. In French and Arabic, with English subtitles. Shot in black and white. Run time: 121 minutes.
Salman Rushdie writes: “I would suggest Gillo Pontecorvo's great masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. Just because it's possibly the best political film ever made and talks about a time when secular leftist politics, not Islamic radicalism, was the vehicle of middle eastern aspirations...”
 The Year of Living Dangerously
Wednesday, March 26 - 6 p.m.
Selected by Peter Kuper
“I would have given up the world for her. You wouldn't even give up one story.” – Billy Kwan
Synopsis: Guy Hamilton is a journalist on his first job as a foreign correspondent. His apparently humdrum assignment to Indonesia soon turns hot as President Sukarno electrifies the populace and frightens foreign powers. Guy soon is the hottest reporter on the story. Guy's affair with diplomat Jill Bryant also helps. Eventually Guy must face some major moral choices.Reid Gagle for IMDB
Directed by Peter Weir. Cast includes Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hunt. Run time: 115 minutes.
Peter Kuper writes: “My pick is Year of Living Dangerously. It captures the invigorating and unsettling experience of being an outsider in a foreign country (that happens to have an exploding revolution underway.) It also demonstrates the collision between personal entanglement and journalistic integrity with a dash of hot passion, which is always a plus.”
 Catch a Fire
Thursday, March 27 - 2 p.m.
“My children, when they speak of their father, they will say he was a man who stood up for what was right, a man who said he must do something now. What will your children say about you?” – Patrick Chamusso in Catch a Fire
Synopsis: “This film, based on actual events in Apartheid-era South Africa, follows Patrick Chamusso, a black man wrongly accused of sabotage. After he and his wife are tortured by the government, Chamusso becomes a radical guerrilla fighter for the African National Congress. The story asserts how, for both Chamusso and his conflicted torturer (played by Tim Robbins), there is no way of avoiding confrontation with such issues.”
Directed by Phillip Noyce. Cast includes Tim Robbins, Derek Luke, Bonnie Henna. Rated PG-13. Run time: 97 min. (U.S., 2006).
 Amores Perros
Thursday, March 27 - 6 p.m.
Selected by Junot Díaz
“You and your plans. You know what my grandmother used to say? If you want to make God laugh...tell Him your plans.”
Synopsis: A horrific car accident connects three stories, each involving characters dealing with loss, regret, and life's harsh realities, all in the name of love.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Cast includes Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero, and Vanessa Bauche. In Spanish with English subtitles. Rated R. Run time: 153 minutes. (Mexico, 2000)
Junot Díaz writes: “There is no other contemporary film (in my opinion) that so incisively movingly and heartbreakingly captures the extraordinary history and extraordinary contradictions that haunt Latin America. And at a structural level its flat-out badass mother of a flick. Nothing like it. Its ambitions and themes and its double-gaze (present/past) had an enormous impact on my novel Oscar Wao as did its brutal beauty.”
 The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
Friday, March 28 - 2 p.m.
Selected by Alice Fulton
"He who rapes a woman rapes an entire nation."
Synopsis: “The Greatest Silence is about the war in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the systematic rape, torture and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of girls in that war -- and the use of rape as a weapon of choice.” -- Lisa Jackson, Director.
Documentary. In French and Swahili. English subtitles. 76 minutes. (2008).
Alice Fulton writes: "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," winner of the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Festival, is an important and timely film. The director's website describes it as follows: "Since 1998 a brutal war has been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over four million people have died....Tens of thousands of women and girls have been systematically kidnapped, raped, mutilated and tortured.... The world knows nothing of these women. Their stories have never been told." Director Lisa F. Jackson spent 2006 in the Congo's war zones documenting their tragic plight. Her film bears witness to violence grounded in vast inequities of power; it exemplifies courage and resistance under the most harrowing circumstances.
As a poet and writer, I'm committed to undermining postures of arrogance and entitlement, the context of "impunity." Silence -- especially enforced silence -- has been one of my deep subjects, as has resistance, a quality as important to poetics as to revolutions. I've tried to engage with the background rather than the figure, to find new linguistic ways of confronting disenfranchisement, cruelty, and suffering, while retaining the uncanny qualities of poetry. I've tried to be a student of inconvenient knowledge--the sort of knowledge that, when taken to heart, forces us to change our lives in revolutionary ways.
And this, all of this, is why I've chosen "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.”
 Lumumba
Friday, March 28 - 6 p.m.
Selected by Russell Banks
Synopsis: The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba.
Directed by Raoul Peck. Cast includes Eriq Ebouaney, Alex Descas, Théophilé Sowie, Maka Kotto, Dieudonné Kabongo. Dubbed. Unrated. Run time: 115 minutes. (2000).
Russell Banks writes: “Lumumba…a fascinating mix of advocacy journalism, biography, history, and fiction, and though the four strands are woven seamlessly together you always know which of the four you're watching, so you never feel manipulated or deceived. Also, it's a film that portrays Africans from an African point of view, with African actors (except for the American and Belgian characters), written and directed by a Haitian raised in Congo and educated in France and Germany. It's a truly global production, in the best possible way. There is World Music, and increasingly World Literature and this film is a sign that there is World Cinema. And it was made for very little money, less than $3 million. Peck is directing two of my films, as it happens, "Cloudsplitter" (for HBO) and "Continental Drift" (with my screenplay). His intentions and ambitions as a film-maker come close to my intentions and desires as a fiction writer.”
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