Ex-soldiers hired by a Canadian mining company are seen using pepper spray on Junin residents in Malcolm Rogge's Under Rich Earth. Ex-soldiers hired by a Canadian mining company are seen using pepper spray on Junin residents in Malcolm Rogge's Under Rich Earth. (Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival)

Movies can be an extraordinary tool for human rights organizations, putting audiences face to face with stark images of abuse, says the chair of Toronto's annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Film is a powerful way of telling a story and "nobody can hide from the camera," festival chair Helga Stephenson told CBC News.

With media consolidation, "we don't get a lot of international information, so these films are becoming even more important because they are the stories behind the headlines. They are also what we're missing in our daily news reports — what's really going on around the world," she said.

The sixth edition of the Toronto festival gets underway Tuesday evening with a screening of Amos Gitai's Plus tard, tu comprendras (One Day You'll Understand ), about a woman forced to return to her memories of the Holocaust as her son attempts to probe his family's history.

Technology fuels broader filmmaking

The rapid improvements in technology in the past few decades have made it easy for regular people — especially of the younger generation — to dabble in movie-making and share their stories with the world, said Stephenson, who co-founded the Toronto branch of Human Rights Watch, the international research and advocacy group, and spent years working for the Toronto International Film Festival.

"People can have video cameras in their cigarette packages," she said. "They can shoot in places where people don't want film happening."

Such was the case for Toronto filmmaker Malcolm Rogge, who chronicles the Junin copper conflict in northwestern Ecuador in his documentary Under Rich Earth, screening at the festival on Sunday.

Rogge blends his own interviews, video footage and photos with radio broadcasts, official documents, as well as footage and photos provided by the residents of the Intag farming region to tell the story of their fight to prevent Canadian firm Ascendant Copper Corporation from mining in their community.

Traditionally a rich agricultural region producing a wide variety of food crops, Junin also rests next to the Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve, among the world's most biologically diverse protected areas.

Community documented encounters

Junin residents documented everything, including injuries resulting from violent encounters with some pro-mining neighbours. Junin residents documented everything, including injuries resulting from violent encounters with some pro-mining neighbours. (Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival)After successfully ousting a Japanese mining firm from their community in the 1990s, the residents had some experience in resisting the Canadian copper company. They relied on their strong system of local governance and community spirit, documented their host of tense interactions with paramilitaries hired by the mining company, and captured video recordings and photos of key encounters with a communal digital video camera.

The community kept "an extensive written log of all the things that was going on," Rogge said, adding that these materials "are now in the records of the Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights in Ecuador ... as official records."

The wealth of material "was partly why I wanted to make the film and partly why I made the film the way I did," he added.

In a world of reality television and with so many raised surrounded by technology such as cellphones and digital cameras, the younger generation is "used to video [and] you get a candor, and closeness and an intimacy that you wouldn't get either with a bigger camera or a more formal situation," Stephenson said.

That same young generation also seems to find "human rights, the environments and ecology far more immediate and relevant topics than the older generation," she added.

Other films screening as part of the festival include:

  • Snijeg (Snow)
  • Remnants of a War
  • It’s A Free World…
  • Battalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile, Parts 1 & 2)
  • Munyurangabo
Julie Bridgham's The Sari Soldiers — chronicling the stories of six modern Nepalese women — will close this year's event, co-presented by Cinematheque Ontario, on March 5.