Seventeen years ago, professor Tula Goenka created the Human Rights Film Festival in New York City which is built upon the goal to share human rights films from South Asian countries including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

On Thursday, another slew of films will be presented by Goenka and co-director Roger Hallas in collaboration with Syracuse University. The film festival runs until Saturday night and includes film narratives from South Delhi, Spain and South Africa, among others. The goal of the festival is to inspire students, Goenka said.

“The main reason I have done this film festival for 17 years is for students. Something sparks in them,” Goenka said.

As early as January, Goenka and Hallas began their search for films, narrowing their sights on cinematic works pertaining to “silence,” which is the theme of this year’s Syracuse Symposium 2019, Goenka said.

The theme will be expressed through multiple perspectives at a local but also global range, said Diane Drake, the program coordinator at the Humanities Center — which co-presents the festival —  in an email.

The co-directors were able to take the broad concept of the theme to choose films that displayed silence like in “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements,” which tells the story of a deaf young boy and his grandparents, and others that used silence in terms of social justice.

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The documentary “N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear,” tells the story of Native American writer Navarro Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel “House Made of Dawn,” and the Kiowa people from Southwestern Oklahoma. This created some noise surrounding America’s indigenous history as it is the PBS documentary series “American Masters”’ first time producing a film about a Native American writer, Goenka said.

Jeffrey Palmer, the director of “Words from a Bear” and former film professor at SU, said the film, as well as the conversation it inspires, is important to him as he is also a member of the Kiowa tribe. Palmer said it’s rare to have an indigenous individual direct a film about their culture.

The documentary dives into different periods of native history, including the darker events in America’s timeline in regards to how native people were treated, while following the biography of N. Scott Momaday, Palmer said.

“In terms of a Native American people, there’s certainly been a lot of human rights issues that continue to persist,” Palmer said. “If we can have that dialogue after the film with the audience, I think that would be fantastic.”

Palmer said he threw in the kitchen sink in terms of all the possible techniques he could use in his documentary film for it to still remain a documentary film. That’s another conversation he hopes to spark among audience members during a Q&A session at the festival.

Hallas added that the films they chose stood out to him because of their ability “to articulate significant perspectives in rich and compelling ways.”

By this, he refers to the cinematic techniques used by the filmmakers that experiment with the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, including the use of animation in “Moonlight Sonata” and “Words from a Bear,” he said.

“We look for documentaries that work as films and don’t rely too heavily on the standard tropes: some archival footage, some talking heads, an expository voiceover that tells us the way the world is,” Hallas said. “We’re looking for films that find creative ways to articulate and illuminate the world.”

Published on September 23, 2019 at 11:06 pm