Landmine doco presents shocking images

Suspended from a bamboo pole, the curved bulge of cloth swings like a hammock as its bearers move along the undulating, muddy jungle trail.

An occasional whimper of pain from the unseen person inside - insistent and delirious - hints at the horror about to unfold.

In a clearing, the group, including "backpack doctors" whose faces are obscured but who are plainly Westerners, perform surgery on a man whose leg has been vaporised by a landmine.

The stumps of his tibia and fibula, lower leg bones peeled shockingly white by the blast, thrust towards the camera. Large flaps of skin, stripped clean yet strangely untouched, hang like rags.

The sequence, smuggled out of Myanmar (the former Burma) where it was shot in 2004, is the most viscerally hideous, but far from the only shocking one in Disarm, a passionate, provocative and unabashedly partisan documentary that plays in Auckland next month.

Disarm, screening as part of the World Cinema Showcase at the Academy Cinema from Thursday, is in part the work of expatriate New Zealander Mary Wareham, a longtime campaigner against landmines - but new to film-making.

"I'm an activist at heart," she says from Oslo, where she is on sabbatical from her work with Washington DC-based Human Rights Watch.

"I was interested in film-making as a medium to get the message across. The landmine issue is a very visual one and one that can be explained much better through pictures than words. I was coming to fear that the campaign against landmines was getting lost in a welter of acronyms and reams of reports, when what it's really about is stopping people getting their legs blown off."

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), launched in 1992, has enlisted the support of more than 1000 non-governmental organisations in 60 countries. In 1997, it achieved a global ban on landmines, which is ratified by 154 countries.

That success earned the campaign's spokeswoman Jody Williams and the team (including Wareham) the Nobel Peace Prize. But much remains to be done: the 44 countries that have not signed up include the US and China, perennially squabbling neighbours India and Pakistan and the two Koreas.

"Through the film I wanted to show some of the countries that are not in step and some of the places that we don't think about that much. New Zealanders think of Cambodia, which is obviously very badly affected. But they are making a huge amount of progress, whereas in Burma the situation is a nightmare. That's why I was so glad to get that footage, which was the only footage we didn't shoot."

No one can know how many landmines lie just beneath the surface of huge swathes of the Earth. But the figure, combined with the mines still stockpiled, runs into the hundreds of millions. The scale of the problem is graphically demonstrated in Disarm in sequences showing men scratching hillsides away crumb by crumb, attempting to make ancestral land safe to return to.

One interviewee says, "When peace comes, there will be massive casualties."

Wareham says the film is also about the bigger picture of modern warfare.

"Mines are old - and the concept of putting deadly things in the ground, booby traps, has been around for a long time. But the percentage of civilians killed has steadily increased since the First World War and people now believe that only 10 per cent of the casualties in war are military."

* Disarm, May 4, 5 and 7, World Cinema Showcase

LOWDOWN

WHAT: World Cinema Showcase, 2006

WHERE: Academy Cinema, Lorne St, Auckland City

WHEN: Thursday April 20 to Wednesday May 10

INFO: www.worldcinemashowcase.co.nz and www.academycinemas.co.nz