The screaming engine is pushing the long-tailed boat against the powerful current and whirlpools of the Salween River. A few miles ahead, a Burmese military post is set on the heights of a grey sand beach. The boat slows down. […] Hardly 48 hours earlier the 39-year-old American had been kissing his wife Suzan and their three children goodbye as he prepared to set off on a long and boring 30 hour journey. Leaving his dental practice and his middle-class house in Mandeville, Louisiana behind, his first of several flights took him to San Francisco, en route to this remote corner of Asia. […]

When he arrived at Bangkok's Don Muang International Airport, intrigued customs officers spent three hours searching his aluminum cases and bags filled with medical equipment. ‘They asked me if I was doing business. I told them it was for a humanitarian mission, so they let me go’, he recalls. What Allison conveniently forgot to mention was that the mission would be organized in Burma after illegally crossing the Thai border. […] The next morning, after a night on the sand on the right bank of the Salween, the expedition including nurses, medics and guerrillas, as well as about 30 porters loaded with medical equipment and medicines entered a labyrinth of paths into the jungle.

Most directors at Cannes you can meet at their hotels lining the boardwalk for a Perrier and an interview. Not Lars von Trier (born 1956), the director of such disturbing films as Europa (1991), Dancer in the Dark (2000), and Dogville (2003). For the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, von Trier had sequestered himself in Antibes, far from the maddening crowds, at the exclusive Hotel Cap perched atop a nature reserve. As my taxi rounded the cliffs, the sky turned gray and mist floated on the waves, rather like the empty landscape of von Trier's own movie, Breaking the Waves (1996). A lone tornado ripped across the water. The taxi dropped me into total silence–except for the twittering of birds–and on the mowed slopes to von Trier's private cabana, there on a path rounding the sea, I came upon the director himself, walking calmly alone in his white suit and white beard, looking like the gentle proprietor of a great plantation. After all, his newest film at the time, Manderlay, a scathing critique of racism in the United States, takes place on one.

Von Trier is a lot more gentle than one might expect from a man with the reputation for terrorizing his actresses. A small man, with a twinkle in his eye, he is quick to tilt his head and mumble a response, no matter what you ask–and what usually comes out of his mouth seems to surprise both him and the journalist.

Introduction

During the third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, most of the countries in Latin America made transitions from military dictatorship to electoral democracies. Most of the newly elected governments were right wing–neoconservatives or neoliberals–and chose to develop or maintain elite democracy and the hegemony of neoliberal economic policies, and were less concerned with social reforms. The business elite and the dominant domestic and international actors, with a few exceptions, accepted the outcome of electoral democracy, mainly because the threat of the radical left had vanished, because of poor economic performances, and because the economic elite had been excluded from politics during the military dictatorships. Further, it would decrease the demand of people's expectation of deepening democracy and carrying out social reforms, and it would give economic prosperity and a peaceful future.

However, this global development of democracy and neoliberalism has some paradoxes in Latin America. On one hand, democracy has enlarged the right to vote to all adults in free and fair elections, including groups that were excluded from politics during military rule, such as radical leftist parties. On the other hand, democratically elected governments do not function in the same way as “normal” democratic governments are supposed to function. In the Latinobarómetro poll (2002), more than sixty percent of the people were discontented because of the failure of the governments, political leaders, political parties and the political institutions' ability to provide needs such as jobs, education and security.

Ever since their Palme d'Or-nominated Street of Crocodiles brought them to the attention of critics and new fans in 1986, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay (born 1947) have parlayed their willfully weird stop-motion animation into a dazzling array of projects for film, music and theater. Disciples of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and early pioneers like Ladislav Starevich and Walerian Borowczyk, the Brothers Quay are masters of a dreamscape all their own, creating phantasmagoric fables literally cobbled together from the junk-box detritus of yesteryear: wire, string, spools, buttons, forks, doll parts, flywheels, and other antiquated oddities and homemade mechanisms. Equally inspired by the pessimistic strain of Continental literary fabulism (Kafka, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz), their hermetic, quasi-mythic visions of madness and existential distress have an Old World patina that makes them as beautifully otherworldly as they are beguiling.

Natives of Philadelphia, the Quays attended the Royal College of Art in the 1960s for graphic design and soon acquired a taste for Eastern European animation and puppetry, especially the tradition of marionette theater extolled in German Romantic Heinrich von Kleist's famous 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre.”

A true understanding of the problematic of rights of the refugees and the displaced demands a genuine understanding of the discourse and practice of a bunch of international humanitarian and human rights laws. Here, we define ‘law’ as a morally inspired system of rules, enforced through a set of institutions. Such a definition approaches ‘law’ from both a normative as well as a causal perspective. Seen from such perspectives, the study of law introduces us to the formal/approved patterns of the refugee regime. Simultaneously, it acts as a moral and practical tool to negotiate with various power formations, of formal or informal nature, both within and without the boundaries of nation states. In the following section, various aspects of this issue have been brilliantly discussed by well-known experts from around the world.

Jeevan Thiagarajah and Dinusha Pathiraja, in their thought provoking article, have offered a discursive analysis of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, with focus on the different types of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka and have found that ‘Sri Lanka has in many respects failed’ to address this issue. The authors await the completion of The Ending Displacement Act and hope that ‘it will be able to turn the lives of the internally displaced in Sri Lanka towards a better future’. On the other hand, Oishik Sircar, a bright young scholar of legal science, seeks to give the ‘increasingly self-contained discourse’ of international women' rights movement its missing link: the postcolonial angle.

I don't consider myself a professional interviewer, so I'm not writing this introduction in order to give “how-to” advice to anyone. All of my interviews with film directors have been done because I wanted to do them; I didn't do them for money, certainly, and a number of them lay unpublished–indeed, untranscribed–for a couple of decades. I think the filmmakers in question appreciated my amateur status and may have trusted me all the more because of it. This is especially true of the late François Truffaut, who–as a former journalist himself–seemed charmed by the fact that I had traveled all the way to Paris, at my own expense, just to have a three- or four-hour conversation with him that might, or might not, appear in print.

When I call myself an amateur, of course I don't mean “unprofessional.” I thoroughly prepare myself for every interview by seeing all of a director's films at least once (DVDs have made this a lot less difficult than it used to be!) and reading everything about him and his work I can lay my hands on. I also prepare lists of “good questions,” even though I don't always stick to the list. The trick in an interview is to “read” your subject and figure out how to get the most (by which I mean the best) out of him–and that sometimes means asking a provocative and even inflammatory question that's not on your list.

‘Refugee’, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is ‘a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster’. Thus, even this simple dictionary definition makes ‘refugee’ a person living on the edge of human existence and at the mercy and will of ‘others’ (i.e. the willing and, most of the time, unwilling, even hostile ‘host-states’). And, the definition becomes complex and varied if we move through various international instruments that defined ‘refugee’ since the days of the League of Nations and the definition provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Pooja Ahluwalia's ‘Ethical Origins of Refugee Rights’ thoroughly deals with these definitions, especially with the later ones developed by the UNHCR and other organizations under the UN. Although the UNHCR definition is seen by critics as ‘too narrow’, as it does not include all the reasons that clearly inform us why someone might actually become a refugee, it is the world's largest refugee rehabilitation organization that is striving to protect refugee rights since its inception in 1950.

Ahluwalia meticulously follows the evolution of the discourse of definition provided by the UNHCR since the 1951 Convention and the subsequent development of another crucial category of Displaced Persons. This thorough and meticulous nature of the article makes it ‘a must’ for all who care for refugee rights.

The media has been variously defined as a public sphere providing space for issues of importance to be discussed and debated; a major collective source of information and images, which is essential for citizen participation; a network providing a crucial link between individuals and ‘the collective’, which is society. Its power stems from its ownership of the power to interpret, reproduce and disseminate information. It is a power that arises from the social recognition that all human beings have the right to information and the freedom of expression.

Having said this, let us look at this resource a little more closely. The fact that it has often proved unequal to the task it is expected to do is to state the obvious: its silences often being as significant as its statements. It would be useful to ask ourselves, then, why this happens. Well, society as we know it is a terrain in which various discourses, reflecting the interests of discrete groups, are constantly competing with each other for supremacy. While some of these get to the top of the heap, the rest are marginalized, and often forgotten. The newspapers we read, the television we watch, the internet we scan, contributes in no small measure to this process. But, that's not all. The media, even as they attempt to reflect social and political events occurring around us, are themselves sites where contending ideologies and viewpoints do battle. But there is a further complication to consider.

BACKGROUND

Following the independence in 1947, the economic development planning in Pakistan, was based on large-scale industrialization. In less than the period of the first five-year plan, various mega development projects were launched to exploit natural resources.

The projects for building large dams at Terbela and Mangla were initiated in the early decades of independence to rise among the industrialized countries of the world. In the later years, Ghazi Brotha and various other medium scale dams were also constructed to regulate water resources. Although these projects played an important role in the economic development of the country, at the same time they caused havoc in terms of depletion of natural resources and particularly the displacement of thousands of people from their ancestral homes and habitats. People living on dam sites for centuries were not only physically displaced but they also lost their livelihood. Consequently, the displaced populations faced various kinds of impoverishment risks like landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalization, food insecurity, loss of common resources, among others. […]

With regard to delayed resettlement, Tarbela Dam Project is the most relevant example where a significant number of families are yet to be resettled. The land given in compensation was not as good in terms of quality as was acquired by the government. Either resettlement was delayed or just could not be done. Cash compensation to the affected people was not adequate either. The dislocation of the landless has gone unnoticed in all water related projects.

As the lights at Arclight's swanky movie theater go up at the end of Mania Akbari's 20 Fingers at Los Angeles' 2004 AFI Film Festival, a swarthy Iranian gentleman seated more or less center/center stands up and begins the Q&A session with the following in Farsi:

And that wasn't all. After he had received a measured answer from the director–she acknowledged there were many forms of cinema, and that a plot-driven drama that might have appealed to him was not the film she was interested in making–her interlocutor stood up again to rail against the film and ask his second question: Why did this film not resemble another film he'd seen and liked much more, Shabeh Yalda, which also dealt with relationships?

There was more to come…

As Akbari (born 1974), an attractive 30-year-old Iranian woman with close-cropped short hair, walked out of the movie theater at the end of this official Q&A, a slightly older Iranian came up weeping and accused her of propagating, “lies and filth” about Iranians and their relationships, “up there on the screen.”

I have been thinking a lot about Robert Wise (1914–2005) lately, partly because he is one of Hollywood's most underrated directors–hardly acknowledged as a true “auteur”–and partly because so much of his work falls into the genre that interests me most at this time: film noir.

The virtues of Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) became apparent when it was issued in a widescreen video version. Unfortunately, when the film was originally released, the virtues of the director's vision were completely eclipsed by viewers' feelings about the Star Trek television series.

Viewed now–independent of one's previous attitudes toward Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock–Star Trek is an impressive achievement. It is a classic example of what Raymond Durgnat calls “a compass and protractor film,” in which the sheer interplay of abstract colors, forms, and motion is consistently pleasing to the eye; and Wise, apparently, was given plenty of room to indulge his penchant for abstract exercises of this sort. For example, a sequence whose only narrative significance can be summarized in the words, “Kirk returns to his ship,” is elaborated by Wise into a six-minute tour de force of music, composition, and montage.

But, as in most of Wise's best work, the tendency toward abstract formalism is balanced by reserves of feeling. Here, most of the feelings cluster around the film's “monster,” an enormous thinking machine attempting to evolve into human form (specifically, the form of beautiful Indian actress Persis Khambatta), and the reciprocal feelings of one of the crew members (Stephen Collins) toward this pseudo-human.

Although forced migration in India is usually divided into two broad types – internal and external, depending on the territorial expanse within which it occurs, we propose to concentrate more on the first type for reasons not beyond our comprehension.

First, while the problem of immigration from across the international borders has been a topic of frequent discussion and responsible for sparking off many a nativist outburst in different parts of India, the issue of internal displacement has assumed alarming proportions especially in recent years, but has hardly received any attention worth its name in popular circles. There is no denying the fact that the issue of internal displacement is yet to acquire the kind of legal standing – whether national or international, that is usually accorded to the external one – particularly of the refugees. Secondly, whereas India's role as a refugee receiving country has been widely acclaimed both within the country as well as abroad, her role in generating refugees has been of marginal significance compared to that of some of her next-door neighbours. This, however, does not leave any room for complacence, and the pressures on the state to adopt certain pre-emptive and corrective measures are now formidable. […] Thirdly, it is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to make a watertight distinction between these two types for much of what we call, internal displacement is externally induced and has international spillovers at least in the neighbouring regions.