Write on Human Rights: Take Three

Paul Christian Fermin's excellent review of Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini's Back Home Tomorrow is the next featured entry in Facets' "blog the Human Rights Watch Film Festival" contest!


There’s a scene in Back Home Tomorrow where a mother tries negotiating with doctors preparing to amputate her son’s hand, or at least what’s left of it, after being exposed to a residual land mine. Her request? To cut only three of her child’s fingers, as opposed to severing from the wrist as recommended by the surgeon. Her plea comes not from a place of medical expertise or even passing knowledge, but from somewhere familiar to parents willing to sacrifice nearly anything for their children, if only to salvage a charred (and by now useless) hand—a Pyrrhic victory by anyone’s standards.

Yet it would be inaccurate to assume that this sort of “unrelenting brutality” is what comprises the rest of the documentary (and by extension my fault for giving that impression). On the contrary, Back Home Tomorrow achieves an astonishing poetry in its, at times, frenetic intercutting between the stories of two young lives: seven-year-old Murtaza, another Kabul victim of land mines, many of which are leftovers from the Afghan-Soviet War; and sixteen-year-old Yagoub, whose family fled from Darfur to a Mayo refugee camp in Khartoum, hoping to find medical attention for his mitral regurgitation (a heart disorder requiring treatment their entire village combined was unable to afford). The beacon of hope for them is Emergency, an Italian NGO that provides free medical and surgical treatment for civilian war victims, one out of three of whom happens to be a child.

The narrative follows these two boys from admittance to discharge, maintaining a dialectical pattern of chaos and then calm, misery and then some joy—however momentary—before the pattern repeats itself again. So, we’re treated to an impromptu wheelchair race involving Murtaza and his friends at the Afghan hospital—before cutting to a close-up of a severed hand—or to the operating table with Yagoub’s chest split wide open, cross-cut with images of his family members waiting patiently, outside, under the cool of the shade. It’s a dialectic established as early as the opening credits sequence, and one not always pursued in documentaries. My Neighbor, My Killer, for example—another selection from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival—chronicles the painful and complicated Gacaca proceedings in Rwanda, seemingly unperturbed by any need to “balance” its bleakness with glimpses of hope or joy, and perhaps justifiably so.

That said, Back Home Tomorrow’s calculated juxtapositions can be a bit strained at times—say, when we’re presented with one of the Afghan boys playing quietly in the hospital garden, before cutting directly to wild animals scavenging through a dung heap in Sudan—but for the most part the editing achieves a remarkable lyricism, no doubt helped by its refusal of extended commentaries and directorial voice-overs (techniques more fitting for something like The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court, which also screened at Facets Cinémathèque for the Festival).

Back Home Tomorrow is, after all, a filmic meditation on the effects of war, not its causes. Directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini felt no need to include abstract discourse about “war” and “poverty,” and rightly so—a single take of Murtaza slipping in-and-out of consciousness after surgery, startled by the bandaged stump that exists where his hand should be, immediately establishes their existential reality in a way words could never. And so the unanswered question of why these two children become the focus of this documentary—as opposed to any of the other numerous patients—mirrors, in a strange way, if not the arbitrariness of war itself, then at least its blind intrusions on even the young. “How was I supposed to know it was a mine?” asks one of the Afghan boys near the end.

A final thought: At one point Murtaza wanders into an adjacent hospital ward filled with some of the adult patients. The wordless sequence that follows is, alone, worth the price of admission. The scene invites us to consider that perhaps it’s only in the movies—though, to a certain extent in photography also—where we’re free to gaze into the face of a stranger (even a manifestly foreign one), wide-eyed, searchingly, and unashamed. Much like the children in another Italian film, Rome Open City, the injustices we witness here are to be gathered up and stored in our memories, if only to spur us into future action.