The restitution of personhood: exposing possibilities for transformation through human rights films

Abstract

Film is a powerful medium, one made even more powerful through recent digital innovation. A growing number of international film festivals dedicated to the promotion of human rights and dignity regularly showcase implicit opportunities for transformation in contexts and countries where injustice has occurred. This paper asks how such films may be best used to advance social justice agendas including the use as social science text. It offers two contributions towards this endeavour. The first, the restitution of personhood, provides a theorised understanding of transformative action and shows how such an analytical framework might be useful in analysing the films' transformative and instructive messages. The restitution of personhood expands the conventional understanding of restitution as a legal remedy, and instead addresses the elements of personhood (dignity, memory, equality, opportunity, means and citizenship) amongst those dishonoured by injustice; considers how actors may be located in at least five positions in relation to injustice or resistance to injustice (as architects, implementers, beneficiaries, inheritors or those dishonoured); and how action to restore personhood operates in various domains of agency at individual, civic and institutional or structural levels. The second is a critical interrogative rubric, offered as a series of questions, to evaluate the potential and pitfalls of human rights' films to provoke social justice action. The paper begins by questioning the intended audience and desired effect of human rights films. It describes and applies the restitution of personhood analytical framework and the proposed critical interrogative framework to three films as case studies. 'Ezra' (2007) deals with child soldiers in Sierra Leone; 'My heart of darkness' (2010) concerns reconciliation between former enemy combatants in South Africa; and 'Kamenge Northern Quarters' (2010) showcases civic action in post-genocide Burundi.