2/05/2016

Part I: SEMBENE X BLACK GIRL X CAMP THIAROYRE: Domestic Slavery and Bioethics

Image: http://www.sembenefilm.com/

The 2015 film, Sembene!, is a documentary about the late writer-director, Ousman Sembene, (1923-2007). His bioethics relevant filmography begins with his first film, Black Girl (1966) and finishes with his last work, Moolaadé (2004). The documentary, Sembene!, is directed by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman. Samba was Sembene’s friend, colleague, and biographer. Sembene! was screened at the 38th Mill Valley Festival in October 2015. A stroke of programming genius also allowed patrons to view the recently restored Black Girl. Black Girl is one of the World Cinema projects preserved by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, a testament to Ousman Sembene’s stature as African Cinema’s founder. 

The structure of the movie Sembene! is formed from clips of the visually sublime, narratively sleek dramas created by the legendary filmmaker. Circumstances resulting in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) parallel Sembene’s life and work. Conscripted into the French Colonial Army, the artist subsequently served in the Free French Forces during WWII.  In 1944, a massacre perpetrated by White Colonial French soldiers resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 70 and 300 Black French African troops who had been German prisoners of war, returned to their home continent. Sembene’s film about the massacre, Camp Thiaroyre (1988), is one of his most stinging indictments of colonialism, so much so it was banned in France until 2005. 

Forced by economics to migrate to France after the war, he eventually became a Marseille dockhand. He found a home among French trade unionists, communists, anti-colonial and intellectual progressives. His back actually broken from lifting cargo, he was confined to bed. During his long recovery he read voraciously — existentialism, rebellion and the works of the Harlem Renaissance. Emerging from that period a writer, he also grasped cinema’s potential, especially for those without alphanumeric literacy. 

Raised by his grandmother, Sembene found exquisite narrative focus in his films about women and their oppression. The documentary, Sembene!, pays special attention to the bookends of the director’s film career, Black Girl and Moolaadé. Black Girl is about a Senegalese woman who worked in Africa as a nanny for a wealthy ex-patriot French family. She agrees to join them in France when they leave Africa. On the nanny’s arrival in Europe, the previously more affable employers, now on their home turf, turn the tables. The Senegalese nanny’s chores are expanded. A domestic slave, she is stripped of all dignity and the capacity to return home.

Since 1966, when Black Girl was made, 64 Million women, 15% being children, work as domestics without contracts, guarantees of labor standards, or redress of injustices. These, and the rising documentation of physical and sexual abuse, resulted in action by the International Labor Organization (ILO). In 2013, the ILO entered into force an international convention, C19, which protects domestic workers from slavery. At this writing, twenty nations have ratified the convention. The United States, though disproportionately hiring foreign born domestics, has not ratified.  Sembene’s  politically sophisticated film pre-empted the need for the ILO convention by a half century. 



See/Read:

Sembene! directed by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman (2015 ) Galle Ceddo Projects
Impact Partners, New Mexico Media Partners,SNE Partners (USA)1 hr. 22min. Available on line purchase.

Black Girl, directed by Ousman Sembene (1966) New Yorker Video (France) 65min. Available on line.

International Labor Organization Article 189: Domestic workers convention http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:2551460  accessed February 4, 2016


Claiming Rights - Domestic Workers’ Movements and Global Advances for Labor Reform https://www.hrw.org/report/2013/10/27/claiming-rights/domestic-workers-movements-and-global-advances-labor-reform Accessed February 3, 2016

2/04/2016

PART II: SEMBENE! X MOOLAADÉ X DESERT FLOWER: Female Genital Mutilation and Bioethics

Sembene! Theatrical Trailer https://vimeo.com/139538743


Sembene! is a documentary co-directed by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman. The filmmaking duo uses Sembene’s screen works to bracket the life events of African cinema’s founder. The ultimate illustration of capacity for complex socially relevant, visually compelling cinema lay in Sembene’s 2004 final film, Moolaadé (Magical Protection). This is a heart wrenching story of a woman named Collé living in a fictional, locked in time, Burkina Faso village.

Collé’s is a polygamous family. She resists her daughter having female genital mutilation (FGM), colloquially called “cutting.”  She is horrified that a relative secretly ‘cut’ her youngest daughter. The mother has been steadfast in her refusal of cutting since her children were born. Now, under the pressure of impending marriage, even the bride to be elder daughter wants her mother to capitulate. The mother still refuses though, causing the bride to social ridicule. Collé’s ostracism and beatings are her reward for redefining the cultural moral high ground.

Gradually winning a few other village women over, they often gather at the radio where new thoughts are introduced by journalism and music. The men in the village are not oblivious to the radio's support of women’s rebellious acts. The glory of Moolaadé is that the fight against female genital mutilation arises from the same culture from which the horror comes. Collé fights to change the archaism within her own community. Medicine has been served well when recognizing “The people with the problem very often hold within them the solution.”

Desert Flower is a film adapted from the book of the same name by Somali born writer and human rights worker, Waris Dari. It shows the evolution of the author’s own understanding and isolation because of her FGM. Her courage is catalyzed by her European immigration and moral shifts. 

If we believe that principles in ethical decision making are weighted; and that which is not medically indicated cannot be beneficent; real life protagonists like Collé are not well served when medical practitioners consider providing ‘female circumcision.' One could argue that male circumcision is equally archaic and medically not indicated. However, incidences of known and common negative sequela are not well documented in male circumcision.

FGM is like the Nazi Sea Water experiments. The Nuremberg Code, drawn from the Nuremberg Trials is, along with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the historical underpinning of modern bioethics. The former established two major violations of human research and medical care. One was research without a scientific hypothesis. The other is doing things that don’t need to be done. The classic example is the sea water experiments. There was no need to only give people sea water to drink, not for research or for their care. Centuries of ship's logs document the effects of drinking seawater.  Another example is a 40 year observational study of the natural history of syphilis on 300 Black men in Alabama when it had long been studied in Oslo years before. 

Emerging from stigma, the documentation of the negative effects of FGM, provided by those who have had it, establishes a clear pattern. Gynecologist Dr Rosemary Mburu from the World AIDS Campaign in Kenya, reports “female genital cutting” in her work. She estimates that while 15% of cut girls die of the excessive loss of blood or wound infection, survivors have lifelong pain, including: while having sex, urinating or working. 

Mary Nyangweso Wangila's 2014 book, Female Genital Cutting in Industrialized Countries: Mutilation or Cultural Tradition?, provides an excellent analysis.   Mary makes a strong case for not pitting culture against the human consciousness movement of the last 200 years. Slavery was once an acceptable norm too, but you can’t begin to stop it if no one agrees to try.  There we are, full circle back at Sembene’s first film, Black Girl and the issue of domestic slavery. 

Both of Sembene’s bookend films, like the story directors Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman portray, deal with personhood as included in each aspect of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Sembene is both honored and dishonored by being called the father of  African Cinema… he is so much more than that. 


Watch/Read:

Sembene! directed by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman (2015 ) Galle Ceddo Projects
Impact Partners, New Mexico Media Partners,SNE Partners (USA)1 hr. 22min. Available on line purchase.


Moolaadé directed by Ousman Sembene (2004)  New Yorker Video  (France) 2hr. 4min. Available on Line available on line.

Desert Flower (directed by) Sherry Hormann (2009)  Desert Flower Film Productions (Germany)  120 mins


Wangila, Mary N. Female Genital Cutting in Industrialized Countries: Mutilation or Cultural Tradition? Prager 2016.




2/02/2016

Bioethics & the Status of Women Filmmakers

There are currently less than 7% of films created by women making it to major film festivals —that is 7%, per year, worldwide. This percentage has remained low and static for 25 years. Film festival screenings constitute theatrical releases. Theatrical releases are required for film and/or television distribution.

Low access to film festivals limit women’s ability to earn livings behind the camera in their industry. The number of screen stories genuinely reflecting women’s experiences is also disproportionately diminished. Omission of the perspective of women in film complicates matters in the purview of bioethics: beneficence, autonomy and justice. 

23 percent of people surveyed consider entertainment television as the top three sources of their health information. That health information is being controlled through a male perspective as shots are usually called by male producers, directors and writers. It is a bioethical tenant that equality does not equal sameness. This was learned when in 1993, the US federal government mandated women and racial minorities be included in drug research. Clinical observation showed women and minorities were being harmed by lack of inclusion as women’s responses to pain and pain medications were significantly different from those of men. These new observations coincided with increasing the critical mass of women and peoples of color in the medical profession. Women in film seems to represent a parallel situation.

Women filmmakers are denied the opportunities to reflect functional abdominal pain, menopause, postpartum depression, caregiver burnout, forced sterilization. We are not seeing these stories; yet women struggle to comprehend their meanings in gyms, carpools and walks on dirt roads to schools around the world.

What is to be done? The 38th Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) in October 2015, piloted its “Mind the Gap” programming. This is a conscious efforts to seek and evaluate more films by women. The “Mind the Gap” goal is to change the disproportionately low numbers of films in major festivals, representing women working behind the camera, —directors, writers, cinematographers and producers. However, it is also an attempt to participate in a dialog about the origin of the problem. Mind the Gap includes a commitment to search for those films which do manage to be made by women, despite nearly insurmountable barriers. The hope is to help establish models which can be replicated to improve women filmmakers access to the industry. 

The MVFF is among the oldest and most respected USA film festivals. It is juried through the coveted Audience Awards, bestowed by a historically film savvy 60,000 MVFF patrons. In 2015, some 170 films were screened. Programmers of the MVFF are legendary for their curatorial capacity. Many of the independent, international, documentary, short and feature films seen at this festival are U.S, North American or World Premieres. MVFF’s influence derives from consistently programming and hosting major award winners well before the beginning of the award nomination season.
In the October 2015 MVFF, roughly thirty-three percent of films screened were developed by women behind the camera. That is a better female to male ratio than most top tier film festivals: compare Toronto, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance. However, the California Film Institute, the parent organization sponsoring the MVFF, has even higher aspirations. The CFI-MVFF goal is a fifty-fifty, female to male film director ratio, a far cry from the current international paltry 7% representation of women’s films in festivals. 

Among the 2015 MVFF premieres, with significant women’s content and as it happens also other forms of diversity, which you may not find in the Oscar lineup, were: Under the Same Sun (dir. Mitra Sen), A LIGHT BENEATH THEIR FEET (dir. Valerie Weiss), INTERWOVEN (dir.V.W. Scheich), and THE ASSASSIN (dir.You Hsiao-Hsien.)

Read: 
Smith, S., Pieper, K. et al, Gender & Short Films: Emerging Female Filmmakers and the Barriers Surrounding Their Careers examining short films and directors. http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/MDSC%20LUNAFEST%20Report%2010515.ashx, accessed February 1, 2016.

Smith, Stacy L., Choueiti, M. et al. Inequality in 700 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race,
accessed February 1, 2016

MVFF Mind the Gap http://www.mvff.com/mind-the-gap/ accessed February 1, 2016.


NIH Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research US Public Health Service http://archive.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/59fr14508.htm Accessed Feb 1, 2016

Cross Reference: 

http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2015/10/a-light-beneath-their-feet-bridges.html



http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2015/10/the-assassin-and-bioethics-death-and.html