Rex Bloomstein
Human Rights: Does Anyone Care?
Summary
As a filmmaker, Rex Bloomstein felt he should find ways to bring the subject of human rights to a mass television audience. In this lecture, Bloomstein shares some examples of the work he has done over the years in trying to meet this charge.
Rex Bloomstein
Rex Bloomstein has produced films on human rights, crime and punishment, and the Holocaust. He pioneered the modern prison documentary with films such as Lifers (1983) and Strangeways (1980), which won two British Academy Awards. As well as other television productions such as Auschwitz and the Allies, and his three-part history of anti-Semitism, The Longest Hatred, he produced KZ, described as one of the first post-modern Holocaust documentaries. Other feature documentaries include An Independent Mind (2008), on freedom of expression, This Prison Where I Live (2010), on imprisoned Burmese comedian, Zarganar, and The World of Jewish Humor (1990), which traces the evolution of Jewish humor from New York’s turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to the present.
Yeah. Indeed. Good point. Interesting, isn’t it? The elites, the dictatorships, democratic governments turning a blind eye to human rights violations. It’s real politic, isn’t it? It’s votes, it’s money. It’s fascism. I think that’s alive and well, I’m afraid, in the world. And I think it’s a constant struggle for all of us to confront this. And don’t forget, in societies like this, we saw it in that clip from “Traitors to Hitler,” but perhaps you might remember at the beginning, if the law is suborn to the state, if there’s no independence, if there’s no scrutiny, if there’s no accountability, we’re in trouble. And this is a struggle that we face all the time, every day. And I think we should have been part of that struggle.
An interesting question, isn’t it? I believe in people’s capacity to do great things. I’ve seen many examples of it, you know? Fighting for human rights, fighting to bring attention to what’s going on. So I think that, and we can see it every day in Ukraine, you know, such courage and bravery. It’s all there in the world. But alongside that is the darkness, the darkness in human beings through fear, anxiety, greed, cruelty. I’m afraid we have to come to terms with our ability to reframe society the way that we want to see it. And that’s why I think two things are crucial to me, and they give me optimism and despair: accountability and scrutiny. If a society has accountability, if a society maintains an independent scrutiny, then I think we can do great things. Without them, the darkness prevails. And that’s what’s happening in Putin’s Russia.
I hope they’re just as diligent and I hope they’re just as scrupulous and they must be. We can’t just focus on one side. That’s grossly unfair. And there’ve been, and I’ve documented it. There are examples of torture in the Palestinian territories and there’s some very, you know, human rights abuses, wherever they are, have got to be scrutinised and looked at. And I would be seriously critical of Amnesty, or any of the human rights groups if they weren’t applying the same standards as they do to Israel. That would be quite wrong.