Kitman TV: 05/01/11

Thanks to Wyrda222
Because prospects of a livelihood at home are more or less non-existent, thousands of young African women go to the wealthy Persian Gulf states every year to work as domestic servants. For many Ethiopian girls, employment as a housemaid in Dubai is their only hope of paid work. They earn one hundred dollars a month for a 24/7 job in the household of an Arab family. Back home, this kind of money would be beyond their wildest dreams. But once they arrive in the "dreamland" of Dubai, the dream rapidly turns into a nightmare. From then on, life turns into a struggle for sheer survival. They are the slaves of the 21st century, trapped in a dilemma from which there is no way out. Resistance can easily have fatal consequences. Many African housemaids are so desperate that they end up committing suicide. Very few of them manage to escape. If they do get away, they end up wandering aimlessly through the streets of Dubai with nowhere to go. NGOs operating under cover do their best to offer these fugitive housemaids a roof over their heads and to keep them from being imprisoned for vagrancy. Frequently, the female volunteers working for these aid organizations, many of them as the wives of wealthy emirs cannot even tell their own husbands about their voluntary work. For these men, treating their employees as if they were slaves is the most natural thing in the world. Years later, the young Ethiopian girls return to their native villages in a pitiable state. They are traumatized and most of them are physically ill besides. They spend most of their savings on paying their medical bills. As they vegetate in their tiny wooden huts, they tell of the multiple physical and mental cruelties perpetrated on them, the constant reminders that they were cheap commodities that could be replaced at any time. But despite the horrors awaiting them at their workplaces, the majority of these girls want to return to the United Arab Emirates. The reason is the feeling of responsibility they have for their families. The film describes the fates of young Ethiopian girls before and after their work spells in Dubai. It shows how human traffickers recruit their victims and spirit them away to their foreign destinations, and it accompanies these young women on their progress from the crippling poverty at home to the affluence of the Gulf states. Its central subjects are their dream of a better life, the hopeless dilemma in which these young women are caught up, and the perpetual violation of human rights. In addition, the documentary casts light on everyday life in the dazzling glitter and glamour of Dubai and reveals the two-faced brutality and the socially accepted abuse of power on which much of its domestic life is based.

Once upon a time in a land far far away
millions of people lived under a very different political system
Now lost in the mist of time. It was called communism

The communists said everything would be bigger and better under communism and they were right. The queus were longer the party conferences were larger. There were ten times as many secret policemen. And there was not just one Germany there were two!

But there was one thing that was better under communism than everything else, and that was he jokes...the communist jokes!

George Orwell wrote that in a repressive political system every joke is a "tiny revolution." Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. Hammer & Tickle recounts a humorous history of the Soviet Union and its satellite states through the jokes that flourished under the oppressive regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Jokes, the film contends, were a language of truth under Communism; a language that allowed people to navigate the disconnect between propaganda and reality and provided a means of resisting the system despite the absence of free speech. Using animated sequences, manipulated archival footage, and sketches to resurrect the jokes, the film offers an ironic take on the history of Communism while simultaneously investigating the social and political impact of jokes under Soviet rule. Interviews with Solidarity leader and former Polish president Lech Walesa, hard-line Polish leader General Jaroszelski, German actor Peter Sodann, German satirist and author Ernst Roehl, East German newspaper editor and Politburo member Guenter Schabowski, and academics Christie Davies and Roy Medvedev address the role that jokes played in challenging and weakening the Communist system from the inside even as joke-tellers faced censure or time in the Gulag for voicing their humor. Light and irreverent in its tone, Hammer & Tickle is really about the ultimate seriousness of joking and the use of the power of laughter to overcome hardship. This history of humor under the Soviet regime offers a direct, incontrovertible way to understand what it was like living in a Communist society, and is also proof that the human spirit can never be broken. imbd summary

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