NEW – Double Bill Screening: Turkey’s Hidden Shame and Lost Children of Chechnya

Double Bill screening of two 25 minute investigative episodes produced exclusively for Witness, the international strand at Al Jazeera English. Both examine the plight of downtrodden and forgotten populations in Turkey and Chechnya.

Turkey’s Hidden Shame

Turkish lawyer Eren Keskin represents hundreds of women – many of them Kurdish – who say they’ve been sexually assaulted in custody.

The attackers are not other prisoners; they’re members of the Turkish security services. But instead of seeing policemen thrown behind bars, Eren finds she’s in danger herself of being sent to jail for the crime of ‘Insulting the Security Forces’.

This film follows Eren as she goes to court to face charges brought by one of the many police chiefs she’s antagonized through her work as a combative human rights lawyer.

An ORTV Production for Al Jazeera English
Directed by Julia Rooke
Length: 23 mins
2008

Lost Children of Chechnya

Dr Khassan Baiev was one of the few surgeons who remained in Grozny throughout the brutal civil wars often operating on up to 40 people per day until he was forced to seek asylum in the US in 2000. Many of his patients were children, most of whom have still never known life without war.

In The Lost Children of Chechnya Baiev returns to Grozny to carry on the work he started and finds the capital a very different place to the one he left.

Directed and Produced by: Tim Tate and Jane Kokan
Length: 23 mins
2008
An Interesting Films production for Al Jazeera English