22st(2020)
Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women
Mandy JACOBSON, Karmen JELINCIC
- United States
- 1996
- 63min
- DCP
- color
- Documentary
Kosovo war / wartime sexual violence / testimony / International Court of Justice
SYNOPSIS
Synopsis
The first-person account of two women caught in a war where rape was an everyday weapon. Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, who had enjoyed the lives of 'ordinary modern women' in Bosnia-Herzegovina, were taken to the notorious Serb concentration camp of Omarska, tortured and humiliated by their Serb captors like other Muslim and Croat women interned there. Once released, the pair turned personal struggles for survival into a larger fight for justice-aiding other women similarly brutalized, which have 'rape' included in the international lexicon of war crimes by the UN Tribunal at the Hague.
Program Note
This is the story of a female survivor who returned after being taken to an Omarska concentration camp in Prijedor, Bosnia, occupied by Serb forces. The testimony of those who speak on behalf of the dead while suffering from trauma in this 1996 produced work is still vivid. We need to treat this film, shot in closeups, like a silent movie. When they quietly deliver the terrible experience in a calm, dull voice, we can hear the omitted screams and cries. [KIM Sohui]
Director
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Mandy JACOBSON, Karmen JELINCICMandy JACOBSON, Karmen JELINCIC
Mandy JACOBSON
Mandy JACOBSON is a multiple award-winning, two-time Emmy documentary filmmaker who has been working out of New York and South Africa for the past 10 years. She has just completed 4 documentaries on Nelson Mandela as part of SABC's flagship series to celebrate the former Presidents' global contribution to human rights. JACOBSON's fieldwork has taken her across the globe including the USA, Brazil, Bosnia, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Cuba, Mozambique and South Africa to make heard stories not typically covered by the mass media, stories that explore the passion and politics of different forms of truth-telling an and justice-seeking.
Karmen JELINCIC
Ms. JELINCIC holds a Master Degree in International Human Rights Advocacy from Columbia University's School of International Affairs, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Television from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She was born in Croatia and raised in the United States. Since 1991, she has been actively involved in advocacy efforts here and abroad, in response to rape as a war crime, and other violations of human rights in the former Yugoslavia. Together with Mandy JACOBSON, she has traveled across the country screening footage from Calling the Ghosts at teach-ins, sitting on panel discussions, and appearing at numerous national and international conferences about the war in former Yugoslavia and the prosecution of rape as a war-crime. Ms. JELINCIC's past filmmaking credits include Someone Stole the Baby, a video documentary about a veteran SoHo tap dancer and her efforts to bring the original dance into the 1990s.
