(Screen grab: CAT&Docs / Vimeo)
The Unforgiven (2017). 75 min. Finland/Denmark. Directed by Lars Feldballe-Petersen.
Keep Quiet (2016). 93 min. United Kingdom/Hungary. Directed by Joseph Martin and Sam Blair.
Nothing really is owed to the ruthless. But if history’s most despicable actors make a genuine attempt to seek help, should they be ignored? Supported? Condemned forever?
These questions are dealt with in two riveting new documentaries that screened at this year’s Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). Each profiles a notorious European right-wing militant trying to come to terms with his past. Each man was once a key actor in an ethnocentric and para-militaristic organization and each, struggling to overcome deep, irrational hatreds, expresses regret for past behavior. Whether tackled or avoided, thorny ethical questions must be dealt with by all parties, both in front of and behind the camera. After watching, many viewers will feel compelled to wrestle with what they just witnessed. These are the kinds of films that you find yourself thinking about for days.
The Unforgiven
Esad Landzo, the central figure in Lars Feldballe-Petersen’s The Unforgiven, which had its world premiere at CPH:DOX, was a teenage guard at a prison camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. He explains that he set out to please his deputy commander by trying to be the perfect soldier, willing to go above and beyond what was asked of him — which he understood to mean engaging with the innocent men on his watch as brutally and mindlessly as possible. During his brief career at the prison, he killed and tortured and beat and sexually abused civilian fathers, sons and brothers. After the end of the Bosnian War, along with 160 others, he was convicted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and was sentenced to 15 years for war crimes, including murder and torture. We watch as he is released after 10 years and attempts to restart his life in Finland, the…