Reading, regarding, and Waiting: Three New Documentaries from Nova Scotia

Three new documentaries screened at the 2005 Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax evoke the saliency of place amidst the global flow of culture in distinct and compelling ways. Regarding: Cohen (Dir: Lesley Ann Patten) begins with images of the street protests from the December 2004 George W. Bush visit to Halifax. The images are familiar and, as always, evocative: a mass of ordinary people standing up to this figure of injustice. Yet the relentlessness of the Bush war machine mark these images, at least for me, as bittersweet and that is the feeling conveyed on the face of the film's subject, activist lawyer Lee Cohen. Bush visited Halifax to promote Canadian involvement in the Ballistic Missile Defence plan as well as to affirm the continued militarization of the Halifax harbour (a frequent port for American military and nuclear vessels). Cohen's face is grim, as if resigned to the necessity of street protest in the face of the intransigence of political power, but we hear his voice articulating the moral responsibility we have to disobey unjust laws--as measured by the simple but not simplistic rule that laws degrading human beings are unjust. Near the conclusion of this film, we revisit these same protest images but the meaning is fundamentally transformed by what we have seen. We now understand that the film's subject has come to the protest for affirmation, to know that there are others, others, who believe in alternatives to the present system of inequity, war, and misery. Lee Cohen represents people seeking asylum before the Refugee Board of Canada, where hearings are increasingly held by teleconference, meaning that the person facing deportation may never see the political appointee deciding his or her fate. The vast majority of applicants are displaced by war, famine, and poverty--the effects of military aggression and the inequities of global capitalism. Cohen describes the refugee process as the wild-west of the legal system because the decision to refuse asylum can lead to the death of the applicant upon return to his or her country of origin. It is a system managed by political appointees with no particular expertise in the issues at hand, overdetermined by the dominant ideology originating in the United States, an ideology of security hysteria and fear of the other, and where individual lives are caught up in the shifting currents of political expediency rather than compassion. Indeed, ethnicity has always been a prime factor in Canadian immigration policy from the racist policies toward Chinese labourers at the foundation of Canada, internment camps during WWII, the Mackenzie King government's none is too many policy toward Jews, to the current ideological hysteria. This historical context, in which Canada plays lap-dog to American imperialist ambitions is the context for the film which follows, in verite style, Cohen's impassioned efforts on behalf of his clients. The cases that we see unfold are lived effects of policy: a Russian sailor and (former navy colonel) who flees the slave sans wage working conditions of Russian gangster capitalism is refused refugee status in spite of evidence that he will be attacked by the Russian mob for testifying about, among other things, his ship's illegal fishing practices off the coast of Canada. The case is a powerful example both of how national economic concerns and individual compassion are sacrificed with the realignment of global capital. The second case detailed in the film is even more striking in this regard: A Kosovar refugee, whose status as refugee is an outcome of Canadian involvement in the 78 day NATO bombings in the former Yugoslavia, is refused status and takes sanctuary in a Halifax church for over a year. Only after sustained efforts on behalf of a large community of activists is she final able to gain her freedom--and this is the key to the film's importance, for while it focuses on the work of the activist lawyer who is also the film's narrator, it avoids hagiography in return for a demonstration of the commitment of community. …

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