Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Living Rights
Duco Tellegen (Netherlands, 2005)

Introduced by Rachel Shigekane

Rachel Shigekane is senior program officer at the Human Rights Center and lecturer in peace and conflict studies at UC Berkeley.

Filmmaker Duco Tellegen (Behind Closed Eyes, HRWIFF 2002) has made a career of exploring the rich psychological terrain of children and young adults in critical moments of change. In Living Rights, he follows three young people, on three different continents, with nothing in common except a struggle to survive. The serenity of Kyoto's cityscapes is in high contrast to the agony within young Yoshi, a Japanese teenager diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (an autism-related disorder). On the plains of Kenya, fourteen-year-old Toti returns from her boarding school to revisit the Maasai village she escaped from as a child, and the family who had attempted to marry her off. Finally, near Chernobyl, Lena has the chance to be adopted by an Italian couple, and must decide between them and a foster mother she loves. Shot on Super 16, Living Rights takes full advantage of that format's lush imagery, bringing to life not only the problems of each child, but the visual realms of their environments: the antiseptic corridors of Yoshi's schoolrooms, the deep greens and browns of Toti's Kenya landscapes, or the collapsed buildings of Lena's Chernobyl, where nature is restaking its claim on what's left of a town.

—Jason Sanders

• Written by Tellegen. Photographed by Peter Brugman, Danny Elsen. (88 mins, In Japanese, Maasai, and Russian with English subtitles, Color, Beta SP)