Kennedy discusses Abu Ghraib, HIV, Iraq War

Award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer Rory Kennedy challenged the Hopkins community to have a heightened awareness of social issues including domestic violence, the AIDS epidemic and the Iraq war last night at the MSE Symposium.

Kennedy explained her experiences while filmmaking and the impact that she hopes they have, and included clips from four of her films.

"As a producer and director, I primarily focus my energies on societal problems," Kennedy said, "and I aim to create awareness and motivate people to act."

Most of her work focuses on people who are unable to speak for themselves.

"I try to give a voice to people who may not be heard outside of their own communities or families," she said.

"The statistics start to have real meaning ... these are all real people facing real challenges, and in each story there is hope, in immediate and concrete terms," she said.

Kennedy added that her documentaries focused on the need for intervention, saying that it could be "the difference between hope and despair, self-sufficiency and dependence, and even, in some cases, life and death."

"These are all regular people standing up in the face of all too regular hardship, and we have a lot to learn from them," she added.

The first clip Kennedy showed was from American Hollow, a film about a family in Appalachia with a history of domestic abuse against its women, which she made with Moxie Firecracker Films with the support of HBO in 1999.

"I spent a year on and off filming the family, living with them and trying to get a sense of what they were like," Kennedy said. "Domestic violence affects women from all backgrounds, races and classes, but I do think that women who live in rural areas face specific obstacles as a result of their geographic locations.

"Police can take up to two or three hours to get there. Women have uneven work backgrounds because it is very hard to hold on to a job so they don't have the independence that work allows them, so they face very specific obstacles."

Kennedy pointed out that there are now programs in place to help affected women as well as sympathetic courts that often take action to facilitate divorces and allow women exclusive rights to children.

"The programs and individuals who intervene make a significant difference in the lives of individual people and are important for us to support in various ways," Kennedy said.

In some cases, however, the family is the source of the problem - as her next clip, from A Boy's Life, exhibited.

A Boy's Life was filmed in Mississippi in the home of a seven-year-old boy with a mental illness that had caused him to kill seven dogs and cats and attempt suicide three times before the time of filming. His grandmother had intervened when he and his brother suffered abuse at the hands of their mother, but after some time, Kennedy realized that their grandmother was really causing the problem.

"I was originally intending to look at changes in welfare, specifically the late 90s changes affecting children who suffer from mental illness who would not be covered under the new welfare law," she said.

"On the surface, [the grandmother] had done a great job. Later it became clear that she was the source of the problem," Kennedy continued. "With social service agencies, when we hear horrible stories about children abused by foster care, it's often a more complex situation than a social worker can assess just from walking in and meeting up with the family.

"The real abuse was much more emotional. She would try to convince [her grandson] he was sick. It's impressions of a period of time, and the film does an effective job of capturing more of the nuances of family dynamics," Kennedy said.

The next film clip that Kennedy showed was from a five-part series called Pandemic about the AIDS epidemic. Kennedy decided to make this film after hanging back in Uganda after a trip under the Clinton administration.

She told the story about a particular woman named Bernadette from the region who had 13 children, 12 of whom died of AIDS, leaving her the sole caretaker of 35 grandchildren. This turned out to be a regular thing. One of Bernadette's neighbors had had seven children, all of whom died of AIDS, and another had 12 out of 15 fall victim.

"Entire families have been annihilated. Communities no longer exist, [nor do] neighbors and families. It's a heartbreaking situation. When I returned I learned that AIDS was spreading at alarming rates to other parts of the world," Kennedy said.

Her film highlighted individual stories of AIDS victims from Brazil, Uganda, India, Thailand and Russia.

In the clip from Thailand, a young woman was in the final stages of the disease. Some teenagers had raped her at age 13 in her village, resulting in her being ostracized by the village. Her parents, not knowing what to do with her, married her off to a man who was abusive and whose child she had at age 15. He then left her, so she moved south and worked at a bar, finally becoming a prostitute and contracting AIDS. The clip showed her final meeting with her sad and ashamed parents.

"One of the most significant issues in the face of AIDS is the stigma associated with it. Over and over again I heard people say it was far worse to deal with the emotional impact of having AIDS than the physical impact," Kennedy said.

"It's a testimony to the power of stigma and people's reactions to AIDS."

The final and most recent clip was from an award-winning film showed at the Sundance Film Festival called The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, about the "systematic policy put into place after 9/11" that contributed to events such as the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004.

Kennedy reminded the receptive audience about the importance of the American constitution in Iraq, while we "agonize over rising body counts among our own forces, and the innocent Iraqis' dead," saying that the the Bush administration still detains people for no reason and subjects them to "depravation and torture."

"I'd seen the photos that came out in 2003 and was frightened and horrified at what I saw," Kennedy explained.

"Afterwards the administration came out very systematically, saying this was a case of Animal House on the night shift. I found that this was not the case but was a part of a systematic policy put into place after 9/11. The abuses that we saw coming out of the photographs were not only known behaviors happening at Abu Ghraib at the time but in many cases were approved by administration," she said.

The film showed this through interviews with those involved at various prisons in Iraq, as well as inmates.

"This does not excuse [the behavior], but I feel that I understand it a heck of a lot better," she said.

"We are fighting for liberty and freedom along with commitment of people like yourselves, for a vision of a world that is more equal, just and compassionate."