Thursday, June 26, 2003
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Film: The best of the fest

The Day My God Died

Andrew Levine's harrowing exposé of the child sex slave trade between Nepal and the teeming red light district in Bombay, India would be unbearable, were it not for the heartwarming stories of the agencies struggling to rescue a tiny percentage of the girls from their living hell. An unforgettably moving look at one country's struggle to deal with a problem afflicting every nation on earth, that richly deserves a wider audience.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Brian were in Venezuela making a film about President Hugo Chavez, who'd been elected in 1998 on a populist platform that included redistributing the nation's oil wealth more equitably, when they witnessed the April 2002 coup in which Chavez was ousted and subsequently reinstated. Striking not as a record of history being made, but as an indictment of U.S. government hypocrisy, which viewed Chavez as a Castro-style Commie threat. A thought-provoking look at media manipulation that, for once, shows the other side of the story.--AA