Estrella

Two weeks ago the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) heralded the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which began in April of 1994 and lasted for 100 days until June of that same day. It became know as the quickest mass execution and killing spree since the Holocaust. In 1994, the Hutu president of Rwanda’s plane was shot down, and the blame was put on the Tutsis, who had historically been in power, but there wasn’t any hard evidence to who shot down the plane. This incident followed the peace process between ethnic Tutsis and Hutus, which only erupted into a civil war turned genocide when Hutu radical militias known as the interhamwe went from village to village, encouraging Hutus to murder their Tutsi neighbors and any Tutsi sympathizers. Graves still remain in Rwanda, and bones and sinew still arise out of the churches where Tutsis and Tutsi sympathizers went for safety but were instead trapped to be hacked to death. Hutus and Tutsis now l...

A promise of a job can come in many different forms, but for young women in former Eastern bloc countries, there could be danger. Human trafficking has pillaged eastern European countries and preyed on the innocent for the expense of free labor and sexual exploitation. Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower shows a view into that realm where those who you thought you could trust to protect actually are those who try to persecute you. The Whistleblower focused on the real-life account of the Natacha’s 1 who came from Eastern Europe with the promise of better jobs but who were trafficked into the sex trade. Kathryn Bolkovac (portrayed by actress Rachel Weisz) was the former Nebraskan cop who took the opportunity to become a U.N. peacekeeper in formerly war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina. Once in Bosnia Bolkovac uncovered a major trafficking operation of Eastern European women into Bosnia, which was being operated and controlled by U.N. peacekeepers, multinational companies’ contractors...

I have started watching films based on the war motif. I kicked off the war series with Red Tails , a heroic portrait of the Tuskegee Airmen who flew in combat for the U.S. against the Nazis during WWII. Real characters of men came to life as well as the hurt of segregation and racism and the pain of losing men in war. But war is hell, and my second film showed a much more visual and guttural graphic of that saying. In the Land of Blood and Honey was Angelina Jolie’s first directed film, but I know that it won’t be her last. As much as Jolie is embraced and embedded into American Hollywood, her underlying skin breathes for international conflicts, hoping to bring peace to them. In another life, I see her being a diplomat, an activist and a reporter. In this life, her efforts to meet with other distressed people in the developing world in international conflicts has made her all three.   The Bosnian War was noted as “the worst war in European histo...