Why should we engage with films about suffering?

The Human Rights Watch Film Fes­ti­val is under­way in Lon­don until Fri­day 18 March and will take its haul of 20 film events to Toron­to, New York and Nairo­bi before 2016 is out. One film on the ros­ter is Danae Elon’s PS Jerusalem, which has been picked up for dis­tri­b­u­tion by the on-demand ser­vice MUBI, enabling audi­ences to view it beyond its fes­ti­val cir­cuit run.

Elon’s doc­u­men­tary charts the relo­ca­tion of her fam­i­ly from New York to Jerusalem. She has a hus­band, two young boys and a baby on the way. Her father, well-known Israeli author, Amos Elon, has just died of can­cer. Part of her motive in emi­grat­ing is to revis­it the place where their shared life was root­ed, even though her father became dis­il­lu­sioned by Israel and left per­ma­nent­ly in 2004. Her nar­ra­tion often returns to the absent man that she still adores.

Three years pass in dreamy sun­lit instal­ments. We see her chil­dren grow­ing up against ongo­ing racial feuds, vio­lence and protests in the streets. Hus­band Philip is hav­ing a painful time. He is lone­ly, angry and scared by the ghet­toi­sa­tion, anger and fear that sur­rounds them. Danae feels torn. Her home is clear­ly trou­bling her fam­i­ly. The ques­tion that under­pins every moment is, ​‘Why trav­el to a city of suf­fer­ing?’ – a ques­tion that extends to the act of watch­ing all the films at Human Rights Watch Film Fes­ti­val. What com­pels us to buy tick­ets to watch sto­ries about peo­ple strug­gling across the globe? Why not just enjoy the win­dow-seat that is our free­dom? Why couldn’t Danae just stay in New York? Why did she whisk her young fam­i­ly away to the cen­tre of the Israel/​Palestine conflict?

The first thing to note is that more peo­ple have seen Dead­pool than will ever see PS Jerusalem and more peo­ple don’t emi­grate to war­zones than do, so we’re not exact­ly dis­cussing a human epi­dem­ic here. That said, there are sound rea­sons for going to places, phys­i­cal­ly or through film, that fea­ture mis­ery. In the same way that a Step­ford Wife with glazed eyes and a forced grin is scari­er than a per­son earnest­ly weep­ing, bed­ding down in a ​‘hap­py’ bub­ble can be worse for you than going wher­ev­er you need to go to under­stand the world.

For Danae, there is also the mat­ter of belong­ing. A com­fort­able envi­ron­ment doesn’t equate to feel­ing con­nect­ed to an envi­ron­ment. Indeed, a cer­tain amount of dis­com­fort dri­ves ambi­tion to make things bet­ter, or at least to com­mu­ni­cate what is wrong. ​“If there’s any hope of chang­ing it, we have to not flinch and stop avoid­ing the dark­est parts of our world,” said doc­u­men­tar­i­an Joshua Oppen­heimer, whose Indone­sian geno­cide films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence played at pre­vi­ous edi­tions of this festival.

If this seems too grand a motive to hold onto always, think of the chil­dren. Poor, anguished Philip is sud­den­ly live­ly in response to Danae wor­ry­ing that she is giv­ing her old­est kid, Tris­tan, too much bag­gage. ​“It’s just going to get him to become a very spe­cial kid with dif­fer­ent val­ues of life than anoth­er child… I think it’s a present more than any­thing,” he says. It will be inter­est­ing to see what kind of an adult Tris­tan grows into hav­ing been taught how to look con­flict square in the eye.

PS Jerusalem screens at the Bar­bi­can on 12 March and Pic­ture­house Cen­tral on 14 March. Book tick­ets at ff​.hrw​.org/film