Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 24/2/2012)

As in the past, several of the events will be followed by speaker sessions, with the guests including BBC World Affairs Correspondent Mike Wooldridge and Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties). With screenings divided between the Brookes Hub in Turl Street and the Ultimate Picture Palace, this is an ideal opportunity for young and old alike to get informed and get involved.

The positive contribution that women can make in areas of patriarchal intransigence is examined by director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail Disney in Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which recalls how Christian and Muslim women combined to bring an end Liberia's second civil war by barricading stalled treaty talks that were being held in Ghana. This may not be the most audiovisually innovative title on offer this week, but it's certainly the most inspirational.

Liberia was founded in 1847 by slaves who had been emancipated in the United States and wished to return to their African roots. However, the sense of unity didn't last and, at the height of a conflict that would eventually claim over 200,000 lives, warlord Charles Taylor took power in 1989 and imposed a barbarous regime dedicated to keeping the population divided and demoralised by allowing lawless gangs of drug-addled youths to roam the streets and intimidate anyone who dared to oppose them.

Having chronicled the murderous struggle between Taylor and Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), Reticker and Disney turn their attention to the sprawling refugee camps outside the capital Monrovia and show how the deleterious impact that they were having on daily life prompted Christian social worker Leymah Gbowee and Muslim cop Asatu Bah Kenneth to join forces to protest for peace. In addition to wearing white t-shirts and occupying the city's fish market, they also used Lysistratan tactics to win over their menfolk and finally dispatched a delegation to the 2003 peace talks in the Ghanaian capital Accra to maintain the pressure on combatants who were enjoying the trappings of power too much to conclude a truce.

The passion and eloquence of these resourceful and courageous women make this as engaging as it's compelling, and the election of Africa's first female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, gives it an optimistic climax. Reticker makes unfussy use of distressing archival footage to put events in their historical context. But she also wisely allows Gbowee, Bah Kenneth, Etty Weah, Vaiba Flomo, Etweda Cooper and Janet Johnson Bryant to speak for themselves and her admiration for their strength, solidarity and common sense elevates this from a simple tribute to their tenacity and humanity to being a clarion call for movements for peace, truth and reconciliation across the globe to emulate the Liberian women's persistence, vigilance and pragmatism.

The pursuit of justice also dominates Joe Berlinger's Crude, as he follows the efforts of 30,000 plaintiffs from the Ecuadorian Amazon to receive restitution from oil giant Chevron for the pollution of their landscape with carcinogenic chemicals. In merging with Texaco in 2001, Chevron inherited the case and attorney Adolfo Callejas keeps attempting to pass the blame on to PetroEcuador, which assumed control of the operation in 1993. Corporate scientist Sue McMillen and remediation supervisor Ricardo Reis Veiga similarly plead the company's innocence. But 35 year-old Shushufindi lawyer Pablo Fajardo refuses to be intimidated and, in conjunction with American colleague Steven Doninger, he gathers testimonies from the Corfán and Secoya peoples of Nueva Loja, arranges for the testing of soil samples and keeps the case in the media spotlight.

He's helped enormously by the support of Amazon Watch, Vanity Fair (which carries an article on his crusade) and Trudie Styler, who not only spends time meeting locals like María Garofalo and her 17 year-old daughter (who both have cancer and must work exhausting shifts to afford their treatment in distant clinics), but also persuades husband Sting to promote the cause at Live Earth. But the campaign's biggest propaganda coup is the visit to San Carlos of newly elected president Rafael Correa, whose response to the situation is a promise to bring all indigenous perpetrators to book.

Berlinger has an easy target here, as there's nothing more likely to incur a viewer's wrath than a multinational Goliath seeking to use its wealth and clout to pummel a plucky David into submission. His sympathies are pretty apparent, but he allows the Chevron representatives to have their say and even cites articles accusing the Philadelphia law firm Kohn, Swift & Graf of backing Fajardo in the hope of profiting from an `Amazonian swindle'. However, his real purpose is not to cheerlead, but to highlight how easy it is for an American blue chip to exploit a place and its people and then not only refuse to take the responsibility, but cynically use a legal system loaded in their favour to avoid either paying damages or redressing the environmental calamity they caused.

Mohamed al-Daradji's Son of Babylon is an Iraqi road movie that owes much to the humanist tradition of Iranian film-making. Contrasting the mythical glories of antiquity with the shocking realities of a nation decimated by four decades of tyranny, this seeks to place the blame for Iraq's woes firmly on the shoulders on Saddam Hussein. But, in striving to encourage reconciliation by suggesting that even eager cohorts acted more out of fear than conviction, Al-Daradji risks compromising the authenticity of a picture that already resorts frequently to sentimentality when the enormity of the truth appears too much to bear.

Three weeks after Saddam's fall in April 2003, Shezhad Hussein learns that Kurdish prisoners have been released from captivity in Nasiriyah and she desperately hopes that the son she has not seen since his arrest following the First Gulf War will be among them. Accompanied by 12 year-old grandson Yasser Taleeb (who has never seen his father), she hitches a lift with truck driver Salih Abdul Rahman Farhad, who is irritated by Taleeb brandishing his father's military jacket and his incessant tooting on an old flute. However, despite a breakdown and the occasional rant, Farhad gets his passengers to Baghdad, where Taleeb befriends cigarette seller Muhammed Hussein Jbara after his grandmother dispatches him to find out where they are supposed to catch the bus south.

Eventually, the pair reach the end of their 600-mile journey. But the prison is empty and the records of who survived incarceration are either chaotic or non-existent. Hussein is told about the mass graves that are being discovered across the country, but it's only after the bus back to the capital breaks down that she agrees to allow kindly middle-aged Bashir al-Majid to help her search for his missing son.

Having consulted Asmaeel Al-Matri at a mosque that had given refuge to political prisoners, the trio reach a burial ground where Hussein sympathises with grieving widow Kefaya Dakhel Kareem. However, their anguish proves too much for Al-Majid, who confesses that he was a Revolutionary Guardsman actively participated in the Anfal against the Kurds. Hussein forgives him, but Taleeb drives him away and ushers his grandmother on to a bus home. Shortly into the journey, he spots a signpost to the remains of the Hanging Gardens. But when he tries to rouse Hussein, he realises she has passed away.

Evocatively photographed in barren deserts and decimated cityscapes by the director and Duraid Munajim, this is a movingly poetic and intensely metaphorical lament for a country and its suffering people. Yet Al-Daradji struggles to make the case that Arabs endured as much as the Kurds and other persecuted minorities and his plea for unity through redemption and forgiveness sometimes seems a little naive.

The excellent non-professional cast reflect his earnestness to the extent that, while the irrepressible Taleeb slips in some much-needed mischievousness, he is also made to embody a slightly specious connection between the Babylonian past and the post-Ba'thist future. But, even if the film's socio-political insights are a touch simplistic, it's still infinitely preferable to see the Iraqi perspective being expressed by indigenous artists rather than being patronisingly imposed by Hollywood.

The focus falls squarely on the standards maintained inside Gitmo camp in Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez's Four Days Inside Guantánamo, which draws on seven hours of security camera footage recently declassified by the courts to show how Omar Khadr was interrogated by Canadian intelligence agents after the 15 year-old Pakistani-Canadian was captured in Afghanistan in 2002.

Having alone survived a relentless American aerial bombardment, Khadr became the first child soldier to be prosecuted for war crimes since the Second World War after allegedly throwing the grenade that killed special forces sergeant Christopher Speer. He was tortured at Bagram Air Base before being sent to Guantánamo, where he endured eight years of incarceration before finally getting his day in court. But it was his ordeal at the hands of ruthless CSIS operatives between 13-16 February 2003 that brought his name to international attention and this gruelling documentary examines its political, legal and psychological elements.

Making harrowing use of the released surveillance imagery in split screens beside the guest speakers, Côté and Henríquez also include contributions from the Scarborough-born teenager's mother and oldest sister, Maha Elsamnah and Zaynab Khadr, and fellow detainees Moazzam Begg, Amdouh Habib, Ruhal Ahmed, Omar Deghayes and Richard Belmar. They also elicit comments on the questioning tactics from psychiatrists Raul Berdichevsky and Stephen Xenakis, Craig Mokhiber (the Deputy Director of the Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights), Gar Pardy (the retired Director General of Canadian Consular Affairs), ex-Foreign Minister Bill Graham and Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard. But the most revealing insights are provided by defence lawyers Dennis Edney and Nathan Withling, US Navy lawyer Lieutenant Commander William Kuebler (who acted Khadr’s military counsel from 2007-09) and Specialist Damien Corsetti, who was serving with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion at Bagram during Khadr's inquisition.

Avoiding the temptation to re-try Khadr on film or delve into his father Ahmed Said Khadr's connections with al-Qaeda, Côté and Henríquez concentrate on the dynamics of the CSIS sessions, as the questioning grew increasingly aggressive as the responses became more frustrated and desperate. Thus, they are able to allow his eventual coerced confession to speak for itself and make his guilty plea bargain to reduce a potential 40-year sentence to eight seem all the more shockingly unjust.

The travails of reaching Europe inform Philippe Lioret's Welcome, which infuriated the French government with its unflinchingly critical attitude to the country's immigration policy. Narrative contrivance occasionally threatens to undermine this laudable melodrama. But it retains credibility, thanks to Lioret's unfussy realism and some committed performances.

Swimming coach Vincent Lindon is struggling to come to terms with wife Audrey Dana leaving him for another man when he befriends Firat Ayverdi, who has just arrived in Calais after a three-month journey from Mosul. Desperate to reach England to reunite with girlfriend Derya Ayverdi, the 17 year-old Kurd agrees to risk a crossing in the back of a lorry with old friend, Selim Akgul. But his claustrophobia causes them to be detected during a security check and he's targeted by fellow travellers who want compensation for the cash they've lost to the traffickers.

However, Ayverdi's resolve is renewed by the news that his beloved is about to be married off by her strict restaurateur father and, having decided to swim the Channel, he goes to the local baths and pays for lessons with Lindon, who offers the teenager a place to sleep, even though sheltering refugees is illegal. Dana becomes increasingly concerned by Lindon's reckless commitment to a complete stranger, but his need to matter to someone spurs him on, even after the inevitable tragedy occurs.

With Lindon adopting Jean Gabin's gritty everyman persona, this is an engrossing melodrama that prefers to make its political points in the margins. The middle-class, football-mad Ayverdi is driven more by love than economic necessity and his yearning chimes in with Lindon's dream of winning back Dana with an act of quiet heroism. Yet Lioret incisively critiques French immigration laws and the cynicism of the local police, as they try to control the endless stream of human aspiration and misery that courses through their patch. He also makes forbidding use of Laurent Dailland's chilly images of the docks and beaches to reinforce the hostility of environs that nevertheless offer tantalising snatches of hope amidst the dangers and uncertainties of transit.

Larysa Kondracki explores similar themes in The Whistleblower, a hard-hitting, thriller based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a cop from Lincoln, Nebraska, who uncovered a sex trafficking operation in Bosnia in 1999 and had to fight UN intransigence and the vested interest of several US contractors to bring the shameful story to wider attention. Avoiding the sanctimoniousness that so often blights screen depictions of courageous battles against the odds, this is an uncompromising exposé of a brutally degrading trade. But the Canadian first-timer betrays her inexperience in failing to convey the danger her heroine faces and this lack of tension enervates the picture's dramatic and advocatory power.

Desperate to move closer to the teenage daughter who lives in another states with her father, Rachel Weisz decides to quit the police force and accept a six-month assignment in postwar Bosnia with Democra Security in order to earn the tax free $100,000 that will enable her to rebuild her life. Providing back-up to the UN peace-keeping force, Weisz rapidly rises through the ranks and is appointed head of the UN Gender Office that investigates cases of domestic abuse, rape and sex trafficking.

Reporting to Vanessa Redgrave, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission, Weisz discovers that several of the bars frequented by her colleagues - including new boyfriend Nikolaj Lie Kaas - are involved in a racket to supply girls to the local brothels. However, none of her other superiors is interested in following up her inquiries and Weisz despairs that Monica Bellucci's repatriation office is obstructive to the point of complicity in trying to help women like Ukrainians Roxana Condurache and Rayisa Kondracki, who are willing to testify about their experiences.

Clearly, Larysa Kondracki and co-scenarist Eilis Kirwan felt compelled to show the torment endured by the sex slaves. But restraint is key, even when the aim is to disconcert, and some of the pitiless perversions are presented here in gratuitous detail. Moreover, the film runs the risk of prioritising the heroics of the outsider over the injustices of those trapped in a nightmare they cannot escape. Yet, Kondracki also allows the drama to drift after Condurache is kidnapped and killed before she can denounce her persecutors and the closing passages, in which Weisz returns to Stateside and is encouraged to go public with her story by UN bigwig David Strathairn, feels formulaic and slightly triumphalist.

Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly researched study that makes important points about the efficacy of the United Nations and the extent to which Washington is prepared to turn a blind eye to the behaviour of companies exploiting humanitarian situations to profit from the misery of victims. As in her Oscar-winning role in Fernando Meirelles's John Le Carré adaptation, The Constant Gardener (2005), Rachel Weisz plays the selfless crusader with conviction and compassion and she is solidly supported by Redgrave and Condurache. But, for all its good intentions, this feels more like a `cause of the week' teleplay than a trenchant piece of political cinema.

Completing the programme are Mai Masri's Frontier of Dreams and Fears (2001), which chronicles the friendship forged by Palestinian girls Mona and Manar, despite the fact they live in refugee camps in Lebanon and Israel; Mathilda Piehl's Kuchus of Uganda (2008), which exposes the perniciousness of government-sanctioned homophobia in Uganda; Nic Dunlop, Ricki Stern and Anne Sunberg's Burma Soldier, a Colin Firth-narrated profile of pro-democracy activist Ko Myo Myint; and Sheron Dayoc's Halaw - Ways of the Sea (both 2010), which joins a group of illegal migrants willing to risk everything to escape poverty.