by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
THE LAST JUST MAN
***½/****
directed by Steven Silver
The Last Just Man is a conventional but engrossing account of the appalling UN SNAFU in Rwanda, told from the point of view of the scapegoat who tried to stop it. Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire had little field experience when he headed into Rwanda–he likened it to sending a fireman in prevention to a four-alarm blaze–and discovered, when the country was on the verge of erupting, that his superiors would refuse to get involved. Smarting from the debacle in Somalia, they were skittish about sending troops in, but as the ruling Hutus take out their historical animus against the Tutsis (manufactured decades before by brutal Belgian colonists), their self-protection left Dallaire and the Tutsis at the centre of the apocalypse.
There are times when aesthetic considerations should take a backseat to information, and this is one of them: Despite the black-tie voiceover and the TV-news style chronology, there’s no denying the power of the story and the questions that it raises. Dallaire comes off as an astoundingly compassionate man, trying desperately to save the people under his helpless watch and putting his life in danger to do so. As his story veers from the escalation of hostilities to the morale-boosting power of Stompin’ Tom Connors, his determination to salvage what he can with pitifully few resources makes him seem like a better man to put on Canadian currency than Mackenzie King. The UN and USA, meanwhile, seem like corrupt and self-serving bureaucracies more concerned with image than justice, and while that shouldn’t come as a shock, the film makes clear the cost of their vanity. This is heartbreaking, important viewing.
MISSING ALLEN (2001)
Missing Allen: The Man Who Became a Camera
Missing Allen – Wo ist Allen Ross?
***/****
directed by Christian Bauer
Allen Ross was a Chicago-area documentary filmmaker who in 1995 vanished without a trace; Christian Bauer’s film is an attempt, four years later, to come to grips with his friend’s disappearance while searching to discover what happened to him. At first, the film is blunt and uninformative: Bauer’s voice-over begins with clichés (Ross’s camera was “a tool by which he understood himself”) and the initial interviews don’t build much of the absent filmmaker’s personality. But as the film tells the story of the documentarians’ friendship and begins to unravel Ross’s mystery, it quickly gathers steam and becomes compulsive viewing.
Bauer may not be much on introspection–he was likely too close to the story to see a bigger picture–but his trans-American journey to find his comrade is so tense and sinister that you won’t really notice. His fixation on the various locations Ross may have been–shunted around by a Texas “Samaritan” cult complete with Branch Davidian connections–brings the horror of his ultimate fate sickeningly alive, and Bauer’s total involvement in the search makes him the kind of buddy everybody wishes they had. Simply as a record of a detective case, Missing Allen rivals The Thin Blue Line, and if it lacks that film’s philosophical edge, it’s still a vibrant tribute to a friend’s devotion.
NIPI (1999)
Voice
***½/****
directed by Liz Garbus
A bittersweet marking of the creation of Nunavut, Nipi examines what the Inuit have lost as much as what they gained. Talking with various politicians, officials, and elders about what has changed, we hear both a sigh of relief that self-determination has been achieved and a wail of mourning that it forced them to adopt the “southerners'” game plan. The video opens on a rueful appraisal of the communal ways that were destroyed by Euro-Canadian self-interest–hunters hunt alone now, and not in groups that pass on the culture–informing all of the back-room dealings that wrested control from people who would–and did–speak for the Inuit. Interspersed with the exasperated interviewees are images of traditional Inuit life (hunting parties, contests, etc.) that have a double meaning in this context: Are they a glimpse of what is being saved, or what is now gone? It’s a deceptively simple documentary that sits in the back of your mind and grows; I thought it was okay when I first saw it, but days later I haven’t been able to shake it.
