Putting the World to Rights

Based in London at the Curzons Soho and Mayfair, The ICA and the Ritzy Picturehouse, this year's programme has been arranged around the themes Times of Conflict and Responses to Terrorism; Human Dignity, Discrimination and Resources; Migrants' and Women's Rights; and Truth Justice and Accountability. Running from 23 March to 1 April, it includes titles from Belgium, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guantanamo, Guatemala, Hebron, Iran, Ireland, Kenya, Lebanon, Peru, South Africa, Turkey, the United States, Yemen and the former Yugoslavia.

The events surrounding the disputed Iranian election in 2009 are examined through a mixture of interview, archive and animation in Ali Samadi Ahadi's The Green Wave. Opting for more of a graphic novel look than Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, this is an ambitious attempt to use personal testimony, blog entries, Twitter messages and home movie footage to show how President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad relied on force to cling on to power after thousands took to the streets in support of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. However, a mawkish score by Ali N. Askin, the manipulative monologues and some undistinguished graphics detract from the film's power.

Ahadi centres his account on fictional students Azadeh and Kaveh, who are voiced respectively by Pegah Ferydoni and Navid Akhavan. Azadeh is rather caught up in events after the Mousavi stadium speech that launched the Green Revolution, but Kaveh works for his campaign team and finds herself in the eye of the storm as support for change grows and people of all ages and backgrounds demonstrate on the streets with an unprecedented boldness and enthusiasm.

However, following the announcement that Ahmadinejad had won 69% of the poll, the reprisals began, with security agents riding through Teheran on motorbikes to administer beatings and snipers firing on the crowds and infamously killing defenceless protesters like Neda Agha-Soltan. Both Azadeh and Kaveh are arrested and they chillingly recall the harsh treatment they received and the brutality they saw being inflicted upon others. But, despite the sobriety of Alireza Darvish's artwork, Sina Mostafawy's animation struggles to convey the full horror of the pitiless violence with the same viscerality as Barbara Toennieshen and Andreas Menn's live-action montages.

Nonetheless, Ahadi makes solid use of eyewitness accounts by journalist Mitra Khalatbari, lawyer Shadi Sadr, activist Babak, ex-militiaman Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, blogger Mehdi Mohseni, Shiite cleric Mohsen Kadivar, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and former UN war crimes prosecutor Payam Akhavan. But their considered accounts only emphasise the emotive content of the voiceovers and the agit-prop nature of the graphics. Consequently, while this provides an accessible account of the anti-Ahmadinejad fervour and the severity of the crackdown, it fails to explore the reasons for the popular uprising and the extent to which the West's obsession with Iran's nuclear ambitions has deflected attention away from the dictatorship's barbaric crushing of dissidence.

Another disputed election provides the impetus for Patrick Reed's The Team, which examines an attempt by the producers of a TV soap opera to restore unity to Kenya in the wake of the tribal tensions that erupted following President Mwai Kibaki's 2007 run-off with Raila Odinga. Using the personal experiences of the cast members to expose the social disparities and iniquities that exist in what was supposed to be Africa's most stable state, this errs more towards human interest than human rights. Yet it still provides a fascinating insight into Kenyan culture and the power of art to promote understanding.

Director Ingolo wa Keya, script consultant John Sibi-Okumu, producer Levitt Kamau, executive producer Mburugu Gikunda, cinematographer Martin Munyua and assistant director Irene Kariuki fill in the background to the series, while also outlining the difficulties of selecting 12 actors from hundreds of mostly non-professional applicants and the pressures of shooting 13 episodes in 30 days in some of the most dangerous parts of Nairobi. But the primary focus falls on four members of the Imani unisex soccer team, whose stories typify the ethnic and class issues that have exacerbated the rivalries between the ruling Kikuyus and such as suppressed peoples as the Luhya and the Luo.

Millicent Wambui (who plays Johari) is mixed race and brings her experiences of living in the capital's slums to the role of a feisty woman aware of her rights in both a patriarchal society and a chauvinist sport. Bonaventure Wangara was also raised in the direst poverty and he channels something of his rage into the character of Priest, who is very different from Oli, a law student and fellow Luo, played by Wayan Mwita, who devotes his time to a Baptist church in the ghetto when not on set. By contrast, Waihiga Mwaura brings his affluent Kikuyu experience to the part of Abbas, who is something of a spoilt brat.

Reed makes little attempt to delineate the soap storyline or assess its quality as drama. Instead, he concentrates on the interaction of the cast members and the impact that shooting contentious segments like a mob beating has on co-stars like Peter Ngoju (Rodez). But, while Reed makes trenchant points about the state of the nation, the vehemence of the unrest that saw 1500 killed and more than half a million displaced and the need to educate the electorate (particularly the younger voters), the most powerful moment involves the murder of Mwita shortly after the show began to air, while the most moving aspect concerns the effect it has as Wambui, Wangara and Mwaura tour it around the country to ensure it is seen by as wide an audience as possible.

In stark contrast to bustling slums like Kibera, Hebron has become something of a ghost town since the West Bank was occupied. Amidst the 160,000 Palestinians resident in the city is a colony of 600 Israeli settlers. But, as Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson reveal in This Is My Land...Hebron, it requires a security force of over 2000 to protect them.

Situated 30km south of Jerusalem, Hebron was once a thriving trading centre. Moreover, as the burial place of Abraham, it was also a place of pilgrimage for Jews, Muslims and Christians. But its fortunes have dwindled as tensions have increased since April 1968, when Rabbi Moshe Levinger - emboldened by victory in the previous year's Six Day War - led a small group of supporters posing as Swiss tourists in occupying the Arab Park Hotel and proclaiming his intention to reclaim Hebron for Israel.

After two years of negotiations, the government offered Levinger an abandoned military base at Kiryat Arba. But this soon became a command post for expansionist activity and, in 1979, Levinger's wife Miriam was among 40 women to seize the Hadassah Hospital in the old city. Three further enclaves sprang up, housing 86 families. But the nature of the stand-off changed dramatically in 1994, when Brooklyn immigrant Baruck Goldstein gunned down 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque and army units were sent into the city to defend the settlers and transform the once-thriving Al Shuhada Street and the Vegetable Market into an exclusion zone.

Encompassing opinions from both sides of the divide, this is a sober record of a desperate situation. Israeli and Palestinian activists hurl angry accusations, while journalists from the Haaretz news service and members of the Knesset struggle to retain a sense of objectivity. Amidst such bitterness and hatred, it's difficult to see how any solution can be found to an intractable problem. But the `Breaking the Silence' tours conducted by ex-soldier Yehuda Shaul and the `Shooting Back' videos filmed on the front line for Oren Yakobovich's B'Tselem initiative suggest that there may be room for hope after all.

Amati and Natanson raise issues too often trivialised by the Western media and Laura Poitras an equally effective job in contextualising al-Qaeda and revealing its human side in The Oath. Centring on brothers-in-law Abu Jandal and Salim Hamdan - who were respectively Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and personal driver - this is a compelling insight into the evolution of ideologies, as Jandal begins a new life as a cabby in the Yemeni capital Sana'a and Hamdan is tried by the military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

Following the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country in Poitras's `New American Century' trilogy, this is a riveting study of the personal consequences of pursuing jihad. Jandal (the nom de guerre used by Nasser Al-Bahari) recruited Hamdan when he was utterly convinced of the rectitude of Bin Laden's strategy of terrorism and guerilla warfare. But he broke his oath and quit the organisation, leaving his sister's husband to face the fury of the US justice system after he was arrested.

Despite coaxing his son into stating that America was to blame for Uncle Salim's plight, Jandal is tormented with guilt, as he suffers Islamist death threats for cutting a deal following his arrest after the USS Cole bombardment to participate in the Yemeni government's Dialogue Committees programme to rehabilitate jihadi firebrands. Yet he continues to believe in the triumph of radical religion and the conquest/conversion of the West.

As access to Jandal was unlimited, his story takes precedence. But Poitras makes commendable use of Kirsten Johnson's striking images of the Guantanamo compound and Moustafa Ali's reading of Hamdan's correspondence to convey his sense of injustice and betrayal. The legal side of his struggle is discussed with staunch equanimity by American military attorney Brian Mizer, as the case of Hamdan vs Rumsfeld goes to the US Supreme Court in 2006. But it's Jandal's pained response to a letter disowning him and ordering him to stop using the media to justify his actions that most acutely exposes the price he has to pay for his new-found freedom.

Deftly edited by Jonathan Oppenheim and solemnly scored by Osvaldo Golijov, this makes intriguing contrasts between the everyday turmoil of life in Sana'a and restrictive practices of Gitmo. However, the focus falls more squarely on the Cuban camp in Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez's You Don't Like the Truth - 4 Days Inside Guantanamo, which draws on seven hours of security camera footage recently declassified by the courts to show how Omar Khadr was interrogated by Canadian intelligence agents after the 15 year-old Pakistani-Canadian was captured in Afghanistan in 2002.

Having alone survived a relentless American aerial bombardment, Khadr became the first child soldier to be prosecuted for war crimes since the Second World War after allegedly throwing the grenade that killed special forces sergeant Christopher Speer. He was tortured at Bagram Air Base before being sent to Guantanamo, where he endured eight years of incarceration before finally getting his day in court. But it was his ordeal at the hands of ruthless CSIS operatives between 13-16 February 2003 that brought his name to international attention and this gruelling documentary examines its political, legal and psychological elements.

Making harrowing use of the released surveillance imagery in split screens beside the guest speakers, Côté and Henríquez also include contributions from the Scarborough-born teenager's mother and oldest sister, Maha Elsamnah and Zaynab Khadr, and fellow detainees Moazzam Begg, Amdouh Habib, Ruhal Ahmed, Omar Deghayes and Richard Belmar. They also elicit comments on the questioning tactics from psychiatrists Raul Berdichevsky and Stephen Xenakis, Craig Mokhiber (the Deputy Director of the Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights), Gar Pardy (the retired Director General of Canadian Consular Affairs), ex-Foreign Minister Bill Graham and Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard. But the most revealing insights are provided by defence lawyers Dennis Edney and Nathan Withling, US Navy lawyer Lieutenant Commander William Kuebler (who acted Khadr's military counsel from 2007-09) and Specialist Damien Corsetti, who was serving with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion at Bagram during Khadr's inquisition.

Avoiding the temptation to re-try Khadr on film or delve into his father Ahmed Said Khadr's connections with al-Qaeda, Côté and Henríquez concentrate on the dynamics of the CSIS sessions, as the questioning grew increasingly aggressive as the responses became more frustrated and desperate. Thus, they are able to allow his eventual confession to speak for itself and make his 40-year sentence seem all the more shockingly unjust.

The flexing of communal muscle in the face of an unholy alliance between a multinational corporation and a compliant government is celebrated by Risteard Ó Domhnaill in The Pipe, which chronicles the efforts of the residents of the County Mayo coast to resist the construction of the 9km Corrib gas pipeline from Broadhaven Bay through Glengad and Rossport to the Shell refinery at Ballinaboy. However, mounting effective resistance to a potential threat to the environment, civil liberties and traditional livelihoods proves trickier than the founders of the Shell to Sea campaign envisaged.

When the proposals were first made public in 2005, farmer Willie Corduff was jailed for three months along with four others for obstructing Shell activity. However, being married to one of the Rossport Five didn't spare Mary Corduff the fury of teacher Maura Harrington when a road block in October 2006 spawned violent confrontations between the locals and the Garda. Indeed, Harrington grew more outraged when Fr Michael Nallen suggested writing to Shell to ask it to consider an alternative site on the less densely uninhabited land near Glinsk.

However, the protests succeeded in delaying Shell, who returned with a revised route in 2008. As Willie Corduff showed Ó Domhnaill the perils of burying pipes beneath the unpredictable bog, German-born farmer Monica Müller took out a court order banning Shell from conducting surveys after it sough to skirt local conventions by purchasing a share of the Rossport commonage. But work on the seashore began regardless in July and while Willie was arrested again for rejoining the Rossport Solidarity Camp, Pat `The Chief' O'Donnell and his son Jonathan took their boats into the bay to protect their precious fishing grounds.

But, when several fishermen accepted compensation, the O'Donnells found themselves fighting a lone battle against the Solitaire, the world's biggest pipe-laying vessel and he was twice arrested at sea. Meanwhile, Harrington embarked upon a hunger strike and blacksmith John Monaghan took the case to the European Court of Justice. However, it was an accident aboard Shell's behemoth that put the kybosh on the operation and the villagers allowed themselves to enjoy what they knew would be a transitory victory.

As Ó Domhnaill reveals in the closing captions, the pipeline was laid in June 2009 after O'Donnell was arrested again for seeking to ensure the safety of his crab pots. Yet, just three months later, Shell was found guilty of contempt for breaching Müller's injunction. The company fought the decision in the Irish High Court and won. But, with the European Court threatening to intervene, the Irish Planning Board decided that Corrib was `unacceptable' on safety grounds and Shell was considering its options as the documentary wrapped.

Notwithstanding the intensity and sometimes the ferocity of the remonstrations, Ó Domhnaill laces the action with plenty of Irish wit to match the causticity of the remarks made by the residents to each other, as well as the gardaí based in the locale and the bussed-in security goons. He allows Fianna Fáil government and Shell (who refused to participate in the film) to condemn themselves in absentia for their respective complicity and duplicity. But his primary focus falls on the markedly different approaches taken by the neighbours. Harrington makes a mark with her furious debating skills, while Müller and Monaghan make shrewd use of the legal avenues. But the undoubted heroes of the piece are the easy-going Corduff and the doughty O'Donnell, whose confrontations with Irish naval ships, Garda patrols and the fearsome Solitaire are the stuff of Hemingway.

The authorities show similar disregard for the well-being of those dwelling on the 50 blocks that make up Skid Row in Thomas Napper's Lost Angels. Organisations such as The Midnight Mission run by Clancy Imislund and Orlando Wild and Mollie Lowery and Casey Horan's LAMP Lodge offer the homeless and dispossessed of Los Angeles a place to stay while they deal with their mental fragilities and combat their addictions. But everything changed in September 2006, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa introduced the Safter Cities initiative with LAPD chief William J. Bratton, who had introduced the equally draconian Broken Windows policy in New York.

Over 17,000 people live on in the Central City East district. As Alice Callaghan, the manager of the Las Familias Del Pueblo centre, explains, not all of them are vagrants. But around half are and their numbers have been growing since Reaganite laws closed down America's mental health institutions and effectively criminalised those who should have been hospitalised. Law professor Gary Blasi, Catholic soup kitchen organisers Jeff and Katheryn Dietrich and Becky Dennison and Pete White from the LA Community Action Network similarly denounce this war on the poor that many have branded Democratic Fascism. But the most eloquent critics of this cynical bid to clear up streets deemed ripe for gentrification are the residents themselves.

Former Olympic silver medallist Danny Harris recalls how he slipped into drug abuse following the 1984 Games and he was saved by the Midnight Mission. But the majority of Napper's subjects base themselves at LAMP, which has no mandatory drug tests or limits on the length of stay. Emanuel `OG' Compito was so tired of Skid Row's litter problem that he set up the voluntary street cleaning operation that occupies his time when he's not painting murals. Linda Harris also devotes herself to helping others, as she makes light of her painful neurofibromatosis to work in the kitchen, while Walter `Redd' Moore urges the marginalised to stop blaming themselves for their situation, as nobody selected `hobo' on school careers day.

Steve `General Dogon' Richardson also does his bit for the community, as he is LACAN's principal human rights activist and he keeps a close eye on the activities of the LAPD (even seemingly benevolent offcers like Dion Joseph). Conversely, Albert `Bam Bam' Olson and Terri `Detroit' Hughes are more self-contained. However, each has serious issues to tackle, as Bam Bam is an HIV+ transsexual and has to battle drug addiction and mental instability, while mother of three Detroit is recovering from the crack habit that she fell into after her divorce.

But the most engaging interviewees are gangling African-American Keith `KK' Cohen and his diminutive white fiancée Lee Anne Leven. He is a compassionate man with a love of horses and a willingness to speak up for the persecuted that allows him to berate the LAPD top brass during a public meeting with an orator's erudition. Moreover, he defends Leven's right to collect garbage in her shopping trolley, as she wanders around the neighbourhood feeding stray cats. Their affection is truly touching and this makes the revelation in the closing captions all the more distressing.

Sincerely narrated by Catherine Keener and with cinematographers Seamus McGarvey, Christopher Gosch and Fortunato Procopio unassumingly locating the characters within their downtown milieu, this is a poignant, provocative, but never bathetic snapshot of a maligned community. It has problems with crime and substance abuse, but it also has vitality and pride and Napper captures this spirit, while also commending the charitable workers and condemning the law makers and enforcers who prefer to demonise the inhabitants and waste tax dollars on imprisoning them when it would be cheaper to renovate rundown housing.

Seizing a second chance is also the theme of Zeina Daccache's 12 Angry Lebanese, as 45 inmates of Beirut's notorious Roumieh jail collaborate on a production of Bernard Rose's celebrated jury room play, 12 Angry Men. As one of Lebabon's leading theatre directors, Daccache risked much to set up the Lebanon's first prison drama project. But she was not only rewarded by the commitment of her actors and musicians, but also by the reform of a legal anomaly that had prolonged many sentences unnecessarily.

Arguing that the rehearsals would provide beneficial therapy for her cast, Daccache not only secured permission for her initiative, but also EU funding. Over 200 prisoners auditioned and she reduced them down to 45, who would participate in acting and musical workshops, in addition to preparing for the play, which would be presented over eight nights to a mixture of the paying public and members of the Lebanese government, military and law enforcement agencies.

Working with murderers, rapists and drug dealers proved a daunting task. But Daccache's feisty enthusiasm and willingness to treat the inmates as men rather than outcasts won them over. Indeed, she even convinced some of them to open up about their past in group discussions. However, Daccache was determined to focus on the present and hardened types like Magdi (who is awaiting news of his execution date), Jibran (who is nearing the end of a sentence for rape) and Youssef (who is 18 years into a life stretch) begin to reassess themselves under her tutelage. Others like William from Nigeria and Hussein from Bangladesh rise to the challenge of using their monologue slots to describe the racism to which they're subjected on a daily basis, while Capo is persuaded to participate instead of spectating and veterans like Hawillo discover they have more in common than they imagined with younger bucks like Hussein, Hassan, Abou Abdo and Jamil, who surprise themselves with their passion for the play and their respect for a woman.

Providing an intriguing insight into the creative process in extremis, this inspirational documentary also reveals the extent to which men discarded by society were able to regain their dignity and find a new purpose. Moreover, Deccache also succeeds in demonstrating the value of education and expression to rehabilitation and it's to be hoped that she produces a similar film on her work with abused women.

Swedish documentarist Mikael Wiström first met Peruvian couple Daniel and Natividad in 1974. He has twice revisited them on screen in Den andra stranden (1993) and Compadre (2004), as they started to raise their children Sandra, Dani, Judith and Nataneal in the coastal town of Chorillos. Life was always tough. But, as Wiström and Alberto Herskovits renew acquaintance with the Barrientos clan in Familia, it is in the process of falling apart, as Sandra has married and moved to Brazil and Nati is on the verge of leaving for San Sebastian in Spain to work in a hotel to help supplement Daniel's meagre income as a motorcycle taxi driver.

Having always been strict with his daughters, Daniel has rather allowed son Dani to drift through life. Consequently, he has failed to hold down a steady job and tends to treat wife Azucena and son Guillermo as an impediment to his freedom rather than a reason to knuckle down. Judith is equally frustrated, as her role as housekeeper has prevented her from spreading her wings and she resents being forced to look after Nataneal, while Nati is away.

In Spain, Nati befriends Bolivian migrant Virginia. But she finds hotel work exhausting and is relieved to become a maid to a wealthy middle-aged woman, even though she has to wait on her hand and foot. Back in Peru, however, Daniel has decided that the time has come to marry the mother of his children and he begins making arrangements for a wedding ceremony, just as Azucena begins divorce proceedings.

Including Peter Östlund's monochrome imagery from the earlier meetings, this fine film shows just how far the Barrientos have come since they lived in a wooden shack and scraped a livelihood by gleaning on a vast rubbish dump. But Wiström and Herskovits also reveal the strain that endless struggle and an 18-month separation places on Nati and Daniel's relationship. They also highlight the extreme loneliness of the long distance worker, as Nati wanders the streets on her days off and tries to put a positive spin on her situation during the weekly phone call home.

Shot predominantly in close-ups that feel more intimate than intrusive, this is clearly an affectionate portrait. But more emphasis might have been placed on Dani and Judith, whose problems are rooted in the fact that economic necessity meant that their parents had little time for them when they were growing up.

Another mother makes sacrifices that have markedly different effects upon her offspring in Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel's Pushing the Elephant. But Rose Mapendo is also in demand on the world stage, whether it's running her refugee charity Mapendo New Horizons, speaking at the White House, addressing the UNHCR in Geneva or attending the Goma peace talks in her Democratic Republic of Congo. Thus, when she is reunited with the daughter she was forced to leave behind when she fled her homeland, Rose has to make some difficult decisions.

Born a Banyamulenge (or Congolese Tutsis) in Mulenge and raised in Mimembwe, Rose had eight children before her husband was executed during the civil war that broke out in 1996 and left five million dead and another three million homeless. Shortly after she was widowed in 2000, Rose gave birth to twins in a refugee camp and was compelled to give her daughter Aimee to an elderly soldier in order to save her jailed son John's life. Aimee had a child, but the liaison brought the family's plight to the attention of rebel leader Joseph Kabila, who arranged for them to flee to the Gatumba camp in Burundi.

In 2004, however, the camp was attacked and 166 Banyamulenge were massacred. The atrocity persuaded Rose to relocate to Phoenix, Arizona with John, Aimee, Jaye, Chubahiro, Ilunga, Museveni, Sandro, Andre and Celor. But she had to leave daughter Nangabire with her grandparents, as they insisted on someone staying behind to help till their land. However, after 12 years, Nangabire is finally flying to the United States with Rose's sister, Yoyeuse, to begin a new life.

By juxtaposing Rose's work with children and refugees with her fraught domestic situation, Davenport and Mandel succeed in showing just how remarkable her achievement really is. Indeed, it's no wonder that Susan Sarandon considers her a hero and that Angelina Jolie regards her with genuine admiration as she collects the United Nations Humanitarian of the Year Award. But, while they capture the warmth of the welcome that Rose receives as she travels to Nairobi and on to Uviva in Congo and back to Gatumba, they also reveal the problems that Nangabire faces in acclimatising to a new country and dealing with the abandonment issues that distance her from both her siblings and her mother.

Just as Rose's choices impact upon her children, so Russian exile Anne Coesens decides to endure being parted from 13 year-old son Alexandre Gontcharov in the hope of bringing about their reunion and ensuring they can remain in Belgium in Olivier Masset-Depasse's fact-based drama, Illegal. Exposing the harsh realities inside the country's detention centres and the lengths to which the frightened are forced to go to avoid repatriation, this is viscerally photographed in the handheld Dardenne manner that has almost become compulsory for hard-hitting social realism. But, there's nothing formulaic or melodramatic about this sombre study of illegal immigration, organised crime and legal systems that seem to be stacked against the very people they are supposed to help.

Eight years after she fled Russia with her five year-old son (Milo Masset-Depasse), French teacher Coesens survives as a cleaner in Liège. However, when her application for residency is rejected, she resorts to burning off her fingerprints so she can continue to live in secrecy with landlord Tomasz Bialkowski and avoid being identified by the authorities. But, soon after taking this drastic step, Coesens is arrested as she makes preparations for Gontcharov's birthday and she is taken to a women's holding centre, while the boy seeks sanctuary with her friends Natalia Belokonskaya and Olga Zhdanova.

Exploiting the fact that her records can't be traced because of her lack of prints, Coesens initially refuses to co-operate with her interrogators. But, fearing that Gontcharov will be snatched by Bialkowski's Mafia contacts, she unwisely uses a friend's details to speed up her release and lands herself in even more serious trouble. In desperation, she discusses the possibility of escape with fellow inmates and is warned about the severity of reprisal beatings. But, with her extradition date fast approaching, Coesens realises she has nothing left to lose by taking a risk.

Vaguely recalling Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort (2000), this is a disconcerting insight into the migrant's daily dread of capture, the ease with which they are exploited by employers and crime syndicates and the suspicion and hostility with which they are treated by the police and border agency officials. Masset-Depasse makes probing use of Tommaso Fiorilli's restless camera to reinforce Coesens's skittish watchfulness, whether she's trying to avoid uniforms on the street, mobsters in her neighbourhood or those she mistrusts within the hostel. But its the refusal to let the plot take precedence over the impressive Coesens's psychological struggle, as she relies on her wits and pay phone calls to reassure herself that Gontcharov is safe, that makes this so authentic and admirable.

Sibel Kekilli plays another mother vowing to do whatever it takes to protect her son in actress-turned-director Feo Aladag's When We Leave. But, rather than limiting her options, the German authorities offer Kekilli a haven from her unsupportive family - providing she breaks off all contact with them.

Raised in Berlin by gastarbeiter parents Settar Tanriogen and Derya Alabora, Kekilli settled in Istanbul after marrying Ufuk Bayraktar. However, he turned out to be a brute and, after he discovers she has had a secret abortion, she escapes Turkey with five year-old son Nizam Schiller. But, instead of welcoming her home, Tanriogen and older brother Tamer Yigit are furious that she has shamed her husband and not only alienate her in-laws, but also their own neighbours, who insist that a wife should stay with her husband regardless of her treatment.

Younger siblings Serhad Can and Almila Bagriacik sympathise with Kekilli's plight. But Alabora sides with her staunchly conservative husband and Kekilli is forced to call the police when Tanriogen and Yilgit attempt to abduct Schiller and return him to his father to save face. Yet, despite best friend Alwara Höfels finding her a restaurant job and new workmate Florian Lukas offering her unconditional support, Kekilli feels guilty for upsetting her parents. But her attempts to make amends have unforeseen consequences.

Taking her inspiration from a notorious 2005 honour killing, Aladag leaves the audience in little doubt about her views on arranged marriage and Muslim fundamentalism. She also makes salient points about the effect that gender and generation have on assimilation. But a lack of nuance in both storytelling and characterisation undermines a debut that slips inexorably from grim realism into wilful melodrama.

Despite adroitly reducing the depth of field to reinforce Kekilli's narrowing options, Judith Kaufmann's photography is as lush as Max Richter and Stéphane Moucha's manipulative score, while the performances of Bayraktar, Tanriogen and Yilgit rely on a strident chauvinism that often borders on caricature. Kekilli is more persuasive as the independent woman caught between clashing cultural mores. But, while Aladag accepts that Kekilli makes mistakes in striving for a better life for herself and her child, she is too keen to depict her as a victim of patriarchal prejudice, Islamic intransigence and, ultimately, cruel fate.

In 1982, Guatemalan general José Effrain Ríos Montt led a CIA-backed coup that deposed General Romeo Lucas García and established a junta that presided over an unprecedented slaughter that saw 14,000 lives lost in just under 18 months. Many of the victims were Mayan peasants and documentarists Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel travelled to Central America to expose the genocide in When the Mountains Tremble (1983).

The tragic tale was related by Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiché Indian who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. A decade later, she reunited with Yates for Granito, which sought to assess the work being done by the Historical Clarification Commission, a truth and reconciliation body established unde the Oslo Accords that ended the 30-year civil war in which an estimated 200,000 lost their lives. Unfortunately, the sequel proves nowhere near as shocking or accomplished as its predecessor.

Opening awkwardly with a reconstruction of a 1954 conversation between US Ambassador John E. Peurifoy (Eddie Jones) and left-wing president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (Shawn Elliott), When the Mountains Tremble uses Menchú's direct-to-camera recollections to explain how a combination of the conservative classes and successive American administrations had conspired to bolster regimes that had treated the indigenous population with greater contempt than the 16th-century conquistadors. But it was the pitiless brutality of the death squads operating without hindrance from Ríos Montt or the Reagan White House that finally provoked the Mayans to rebel. However, the backlash proved equally savage and Menchú remembers witnessing her brother's earless body being returned to the village as a warning against future subversion.

Yates's film did much to alert the wider world to the situation in Guatemala. But it wasn't until the mid-2000s that forensic archivist Kate Doyle approached her to view footage that might be used to secure convictions against the perpetrators of the massacres and Granito (on which she shares the directorial credit with editor Peter Kinoy and producer Paco de Onis) juxtaposes Yates's search through boxes of archive material with the uncovering of key evidence in previously inaccessible police files and the mass graves of La Verbena cemetery.

Forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, journalist-turned-lawyer Naomi Roht-Arriaza, former guerilla leader Gustavo Meoño, prosecuting attorney Almudena Bernabeu, Spanish investigating judge Santiago Pedraz, victims' rights activist Antonio Caba Caba and Centre for Human Rights legal director Francisco Soto all make valuable contributions. But Yates's decision to add an ongoing assessment of how her Guatemalan experience had shaped her film-making career imparts an unfortunately narcissistic tone that distracts from Doyle's discovery of a document that proved not only proved that Operation Sofia was a premeditated assault on the Mayans, but also that the high command knew exactly what its foot soldiers were doing in the Ixil region.

The efforts of Alejandra García to discover the fate of her disappeared father Fernando is equally deflected by Yates's introspective reveries, as is the constitutional court's refusal to extradite Ríos Montt (who is still politically active). But her courage in defying the authorities and filming the Mayan resistance should never be overlooked.

By contrast, Juan José Lozano and Hollman Morris provide a much more trenchant insight into the workings of Colombia's Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Impunity. However, those with only a limited knowledge of the struggle between such armed groups as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) will struggle to follow the intricacies of cases that are being heard in separate, video-linked rooms for defendants and victims, as hatreds have hardly diminished since the July 2005 passage of the Justice and Peace Law (No.975) that led to the disbanding of the AUC by its leader Salvatore Mancuso, on the proviso that any resulting prison terms would be limited to between five and eight years for those co-operating with the courts.

Some 32,000 AUC guerillas surrendered and 3600 commanders were considered for prosecution. However, only 600 were actually investigated and only 28 were brought before the tribunals. Lozano and Morris show Hernan Giraldo, Ever Veloza, Uber Banquez, Jorge Laverde and Rodrigo Tovar on the stand, where they name AUC founder Carlos Castaño and army bigwigs Colonel Byron Carvajal and General Rito Alejo del Rio among those aware of the crimes that turned Colombia into a vast clandestine cemetery.

As protesters took to the streets and appeals for greater honesty were made by human rights activist Iván Cepeda and Gustavo Gallon, the Director of the Colombia Commission of Jurists, President Alvaro Uribe's deputy Francisco Santos and prosecutor Luiz Gonzalez insisted that, despite its imperfections, the system would ensure that justice was done. Meanwhile, Gustavo Petro of the Alternative Democratic Pole alliance began speaking out in congress against government collusion with the drug barons, while Veloza started claiming that banana, cattle, fishing, mining and sugar tycoons had sanctioned the removal of peasants from their lands.

This sudden spate of accusations prompted Uribe's cousin, Mario Escobar, to seek asylum in the Costa Rican embassy. But, soon afterwards, the president agreed to the extradition of Tovar and Mancuso to the United States to face drugs charges, thus, stopping them from being tried at home. This development led Spanish prosecutor Balthasar Garzon and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to make a protest visit to Bogota. But it proved to no avail, as Veloza was also shipped out, leaving the families of the victims to hope that the remains of their loved ones would be excavated from the newly discovered mass graves in lieu of retribution.

The ceremony at which relatives receive caskets of remains to the accompaniment of `Land of Hope and Glory' rather sums up the grotesque farce that surrounds Colombia's efforts to come to terms with its past. In truth, of course, the country's present is equally blighted and Lozano and Morris might have made more of the political, social and criminal climate in which evidence for possible trials is being collected. Nevertheless, this is a compelling and disturbing insight into the ease with which the rich and powerful can obstruct and even circumvent justice and how quickly fine words can come to mean nothing.