NEW YORK – (Reuters) – Iraqis living in danger after working with U.S. troops and diplomats and an examination of women in modern India are two subjects grabbing the attention of critics and audiences among documentaries showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.

Both films are part of a lineup of 32 documentaries at the New York festival, which runs through Sunday, that tell true tales from inside and outside the United States. Documentaries, which have become more stylized in recent years with inexpensive hi-tech cameras, have traditionally been a strength at Tribeca. This year is no exception, and many of these non-fiction movies will be seen in theaters and on TV throughout 2012.

“The List” tells of American Kirk Johnson’s fight to save U.S.-allied Iraqis who are at risk of being kidnapped and killed by militants that have marked them as traitors. The film argues that the Iraqis are trapped in bureaucratic red tape while waiting years for U.S. visas.

“He is an American hero, he represents what America thinks it is and wants to be overseas but is really not who we have been,” director Beth Murphy told Reuters about Johnson. Murphy spent four years making the film and shooting footage in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the United States.

Johnson helped reconstruction efforts in Iraq, but returned to the United States and unexpectedly suffered post traumatic stress disorder, leading to a fall from a second floor window.

Since then, he has been lobbying politicians and compiling a thick dossier, known as “The List,” of thousands of U.S.-affiliated Iraqis still waiting for visas, many of whom were forced to flee to surrounding countries.

Top U.S. diplomats are shown in the film delaying aid and testifying in Washington that they don’t know how many Iraqis who worked for them are under constant threat.

For his work, Johnson, 32, has been labeled a modern-day Oskar Schindler — a German who helped save Jews during World War Two by keeping them working in his factories. His story was the focus of Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.”

Showbiz publication Variety said in its glowing review of “The List” that it effectively traces Johnson’s “heroic actions by a lone American in a fight for justice,” as well as the emotional stories of several U.S.-allied Iraqis proud of their work for American troops and now desperate for help.

“The film is a combination of Kirk’s story to try and save them, combined with the stories of several Iraqis on his list,” Murphy said. “We can’t ignore the reason they are in this horrible predicament. The reason is us.”

After partnering with pro bono lawyers, Johnson has helped about 1500 Iraqis obtain visas, but there are thousands waiting. Similarly, thousands of Afghans who have worked in translator and other jobs with troops and diplomats still await visas and fear they will be further targeted when soldiers leave.

MODERN INDIAN WOMEN

Not far from those war-torn regions springs another film that has encouraged conversations at Tribeca, but this one centers on culture wars in modern India and the plight of women.

“The World Before Her,” which was chosen as the opening night documentary film, parallels the lives of women in the Miss India beauty pageant and a fundamentalist Hindu camp for girls.

The documentary, which also took four years to make, is yet to be screened in India and may prove controversial for its rare peek and footage of a Hindu fundamentalist camp. Canadian director Nisha Pahuja worked two years to gain access to it.

“The Miss India pageant was a way to look at India as country in transition and also show how this new, modern-day India was being written on the bodies of women,” said Pahuja who moved to Canada from India at an early age.

The two seemingly opposite Indian worlds showing capitalism versus fundamentalism capture “a country that is divided and trying to figure out what it is,” said Pahuja.

At the same time, she added that by addressing the complexities of modern Indian women, the film asks how different they really are. Ultimately, audiences are left to conclude women in India “want the ability to choose the course of their life,” whether fundamentalist or modern, rich or poor.

Elsewhere, several Tribeca documentaries have offered compelling portraits of people marginalized inside the United States, including “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story” that tells of Booker Wright, a black waiter in a white-owned restaurant who was the subject of an NBC News piece in 1965.

Shot in black and white with a sometimes grainy, poetic style, director Raymond De Felitta recounts Wright’s story and his own father’s quandary in producing the NBC story that placed Wright’s life in danger and symbolized the racial discrimination in the U.S. south.

“The Revisionaries” spotlights a current battle in that same region over politicizing educational textbooks by focusing on the Texas State Board of Education’s review of standards and conservatives’ efforts to weaken the theory of evolution.

Finally, changes in U.S. TV and politically conservative personalities are examined in “Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr.”

Downey Jr. hosted a provocative, popular 1980s talk show that, the film argues, paved the way for the sort of aggressive behavior shown on today’s TV programs like “The Jerry Springer Show” that win ratings but lower entertainment standards.

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The Lord High Executioner in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Mikado” gloats about his “little list” of future victims, but Kirk Johnson totes around a bigger one in “The List” — several huge binders’ worth. On it are names, credentials, commendations and profiles of Iraqis whose faithful service on behalf of various U.S. forces and agencies have exposed them and their families to terrorist reprisals. Though the pic traces Oskar Schindler-esque heroic actions by a lone American in a fight for justice, its effectiveness stems equally from the autonomy it grants its Iraqi protagonists. Strong docu should hit theaters prior to smallscreen play.
While opposed in principle to the invasion of Iraq, Johnson felt his extensive knowledge of Islamic culture and fluency in Arabic compelled him to join the reconstruction efforts then under way. But his mission shifted when an email from Yaghdan, an Iraqi friend and fellow worker, told of threatened reprisals for his aid to Americans. The email, which Johnson posted on the Internet, precipitated a flood of cries for help from people in similar straits. Helmer Beth Murphy even includes extremists’ videos showing bloody executions of such “traitors” to emphasize the immediacy of the danger.

Johnson managed to amass a roomful of pro bono lawyers willing to shepherd Iraqis through the labyrinthine red tape that the Patriot Act added to already stringent immigration laws. Although thousands of Iraqis gained access to the U.S., few were on Johnson’s list. Murphy shows Johnson testifying before Congressional committees about the government’s moral obligation to save those who risked their lives to help the U.S. Some representatives express appropriate shock and outrage, but accomplish nothing concrete.

Helmer Murphy closely follows several listees who made it out of Iraq. Yaghdan and his brood, shown meeting several times with Johnson in Baghdad, were warmly welcomed by him upon deplaning and invited to stay at his parents’ Midwestern home. Murphy also catches up with Ibrahim, who became Johnson’s right-hand man when he finally reached America, testifying before Congress and assisting others in their quest to escape Iraqi retaliation.

Murphy’s previous docu, “Beyond Belief,” similarly featured a cross-cultural dual focus, as two American women widowed by 9/11 travel to Afghanistan to help war widows there. While that film opened with the wives’ reactions to their loss, it’s not until late in “The List” that Murphy introduces Johnson’s hitherto unsuspected trauma, as he admits that his decision to aid Iraqis came from his inability to get beyond his own experiences there.

Ending in neither triumph nor defeat, “The List” celebrates the determined efforts of a sole American to effectuate a rescue that should seem a no-brainer.

This week, when I arrived with a group of combat journalists at the BDC, a table in the gallery was arranged as a tribute to two photojournalists who died while covering the conflict in Libya. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed by a mortar attack exactly one year ago today. They were both young and strong, widely respected professionals in their fields: Hondros was a Pulitzer-prize nominated photojournalist; Hetherington an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and photographer.

At the time of their deaths, the White House press office released a statement saying, in part, “Journalists across the globe risk their lives each day to keep us informed, demand accountability from world leaders, and give a voice to those who would not otherwise be heard.” The fates of Hetherington and Hondros served as a reminder of the need to protect journalists as they cover conflicts across the globe.

Unfortunately, protecting a combat journalist is easier said than done. The nature of the job is risky, and freelancers—or independents like me—often work without a net, so to speak—alone or in small groups, unarmed, and mired in foreign language, culture, climate, topography, laws and customs.

As a documentary filmmaker, I’ve experienced this firsthand—in Kosovo, where I worked with Chris Hondros in 1999; in Afghanistan; in Iraq, and in Syria. I’ve never been harmed, but I’ve been threatened, warned, followed, and searched at gunpoint, as have many of my colleagues. This week, a group of 24 of us arrived at the Bronx Documentary Center at the invitation of author, journalist and documentarian Sebastian Junger, who has taken on the daunting task of trying to help ensure the safety of journalists who cover foreign conflicts. Junger’s motivation is both personal and altruistic: he and Tim Hetherington were friends and colleagues, and had worked together extensively in Afghanistan covering the war there.

In investigating Hetherington’s death, Junger discovered that his friend might have survived his injuries with a minimum of quick first aid. Instead, the photographer bled to death just a few minutes from the hospital.

As he grieved for his friend, Junger gave up working in combat areas. After covering areas of violence for almost two decades, he set a new goal—equipping journalists with a basic knowledge of first aid and lifesaving techniques, as well as combat medical kits to be carried at all times in war zones. His hope is that over time, this medical knowledge and the pre-packed first aid provisions will become standard for journalists covering foreign conflicts. In time, he hopes these preparations will replace the sometimes fatalistic “whatever happens, happens” attitude of many war correspondents.

With support from many of the agencies that employed Tim Heatherington and Chris Hondros, Junger launched RISC—Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues. This week, the one year anniversary of the deaths in Libya, marks RISC’s first class, held in the same Bronx gallery that houses all those award-winning war photos from Iraq.
My classmates and I—5 women and 19 men in all—have come from as far as Hong Kong and Egypt and as close as Boston and New York. The RISC training is offered without charge—the journalist just has to get here and be on the list. We are spending our three days together learning from an incredible team of battlefield medicine experts, including the remarkable Sawyer Alberi, a Coast Guard Academy grad/Flight Medic/Combat Medic/and Combat Medical Trainer for the Department of State. Her credentials are beyond reproach, and her demonstrations of how to provide care under fire left me with a new and profound respect for the work medics do.

In our three days of training, we have brought the mayhem of medical dummies, simulated injuries, fake blood, and journalists sprawled around the room to the BDC. We are learning how to identify and treat three conditions that are leading causes of preventable deaths on a battlefield: hemorrhaging; airway blockage; and tension pneumothorax—a life-threatening condition associated with chest trauma. I can now do both a rudimentary airway assessment and a “blood sweep” to quickly identify if a colleague is losing a lot of blood. The kits we will carry into trouble areas with us from now on contain the basic tools to deal with each emergency—including the best tourniquets on the market to stop the kind of hemorrhaging that killed Hetherington.
As I try to absorb everything the instructors want to teach us during these three days, I keep replaying the list of all the dangerous, war-torn places I’ve been in pursuit of an interview, a bit of footage, or a story I believed needed to be told. I realize I’ve been both naïve and irresponsible to go into the field unprepared (and to enlist a camera crew to come with me).

As Sebastian Junger explained at the beginning of the first day of our class, “I barely know how to put on a band aid, and most of the press corps that I know barely knows how to put on a band aid either.” As we travel far from the security of our own doctors and emergency rooms, and often out of range of quick medical attention, we have a responsibility to be able to take care of ourselves, and of each other.

I was glad to see Melissa Silverstein’s article on IndieWire pick out the films directed by women at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Reading her recent posts about the stagnant growth of female directors in film, I am proud to see Beth Murphy and her fellow female directors featured. These women bring a unique voice to documentary and narrative filmmaking. Melissa identified a solution to reverse the trend of underdog women directors – start talking about them and championing their films! Tribeca will be a good place to start.

We’ve just returned from our trip to the Czech Republic, where we recorded the orchestrated tracks of our original score for THE LIST in a studio just outside Prague. As Kevin and I walked in we were stunned when we heard John’s compositions played by live musicians for the first time. It’s unbelievable to me that we had forty members of the Czech Philharmonic recording tracks for our film. It’s something we’ve never experienced before and I don’t know how we lived without it.

Our composer, John Califra, has really inspired us through the score he’s composed. It’s unified the vision that Kevin and I have had for this project since the beginning. John said it best, “This is about Kirk and what he’s done as an American being [in Iraq]… He represents an ideal of what [America] pretends to be but isn’t.” John’s vision for this score has always been to avoid trying to reference an Arabic style of music in any way. Trying to emulate a certain style, he says, makes it all about the emulation of a “foreign” sound and puts up a barrier between the audience and the film. This story is really about people connecting to people, not just Americans connecting to Iraqis.

Working with Christo Pavlov, our conductor, has been wonderful, and he’s really brought some great insight to the music. He and John have been communicating about the score for a while now and it’s clear that they’re on the same page with what needs to be done. The recording day was incredibly successful and we’re all excited to put the music together with the final cut of THE LIST.

“…characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about… The characters… are my own unrealized possibilities… an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”