Taghi Rahmani, journalist and husband of Nobel Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, at the end of the disturbing incident where god is not, by Mehran Tamadon, on the torture in Iranian prisons that he also suffered, called for the release of his wife, guilty of inciting the Iranian women to uncover their faces. To tell the unspeakable, to show what there is no evidence of, Tamadon in where god is not he had the brilliant idea of asking three torture victims to reconstruct the room where they were tortured or imprisoned with improvised materials, and in the meantime he made them explain what was happening. The result is a documentary of great beauty and interest, also due to the participation of Homa Kalhori, whose will was broken by torture to the point of causing her conversion and transforming her into an executioner. After years in which she remained convinced that she had done God’s will by torturing rebellious women, she managed to emerge from the mental cage in which she had remained imprisoned, and she told it before her in a book A coffin for the living (unfortunately only available in Persian) and then in the documentary.
«Violence cannot be prevented with violence! We need to play on another level” said the famous American activist Angela Davis, who came to Geneva to talk regarding the violence committed by the police. What plan? «First of all we would need schools, healthcare, housing for everyone, a society and a common life completely rethought…”
In the year in which half of the world’s population goes to vote without rules on the use of artificial intelligence, it is dismaying Total trust, by Jialing Zhang, which shows the technological surveillance system in place in China. «Revealing what appears to be a truly Orwellian scenario, the documentary shows in a compelling way the persecution of Chinese human rights defenders and denounces the use of the latest surveillance technologies to meticulously monitor the lives of millions of people. This disconcerting image of the rise of authoritarianism raises an important question: is a future controlled by technology, where we will no longer be free to exercise our rights, a real risk that we all run? wrote the jurors who awarded the film the Focusprix prize from the World Organization Against Torture.
The documentary follows the lives of the families of some political prisoners, the meticulous control of their lives and those of their children through biometric data and not continuously collected with the excuse of security, constantly monitored by cameras placed in all the places they frequent, even on the balconies of neighbors, in order to peek into their apartments, in front of the houses of all relatives, and in parallel the social experiment begun in 2012: a pilot program to control the population based on the work of 4.5 million ” grid guards.” In fact, citizens have been divided into grids and entrusted to a controller who constantly monitors them, monitors their movements, behaviors, habits, also aided by complaints from other citizens. Digitally controlled, the system is based on a points mechanism: those who behave badly lose points, while those who care well gain them, for example by spying or doing voluntary work. There are 190 ways to earn points, and 1040 ways to lose them, for example by protesting, suing the government, behaving in an original way at weddings or funerals. The number of points influences the possibility of taking planes, trains, of applying for certain jobs or certain public tenders, the possibility that children can attend the best schools.
Total trust was followed by a forum in which Peggy Hicks, Director of Thematic Engagement, Special Procedures and Right to Development at the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said she was very concerned that there are still no regulations on the use of intelligence artificial, not even on the use of facial recognition. The lawyer specializing in human rights Susie Alegre said that it must be regulated as soon as possible, and that we cannot wait to make an international agreement, or even just an agreement at the level of individual countries, but each individual sector must start to give itself some rules. She gave the example of lawyers, explaining that specialists in each sector know what is most urgently needed to be regulated at their level, and that they must do so. «We must not be obsessed with the idea of making general and all-encompassing rules, instead let’s start regulating the various sectors!» she said, and Hicks echoed her, also proposing a responsibility of companies not to violate human rights with their products. “If companies fear high fines or prison for their executives, they will think twice before putting technologies that violate human rights on the market.” Alarmed regarding the elections that will involve half the world’s population this year, Alegre added that big data can give us suggestions on how people think, but also on how to manipulate their thinking and pointed out that it is not necessary to collect all the data which are collected every day. Moreover, the spectators of the Fifdh were alerted to this already in 2019, with the screening of the very interesting documentary The Great Hack: L’affaire Cambridge Analytica, of Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer.
#Human #rights #Fifdh #festival #teaches #actors #spectators
2024-03-27 21:23:36
