What are you doing for dinner tonight? It's a simple enough question for most of us in our workaday lives, lives which probably don't involve going into war zones and other trouble spots to document often-unspeakable human rights abuses. For the subjects of Katy Chevigny and Ross Huffman's documentary E-Team, who do indeed gather evidence and testimonials from survivors under the aegis of the Human Rights Watch organization in order to shine a light on people who do these very bad things, it's a question they have to consider on a daily basis. In addition to smuggling themselves into deeply inhospitable situations to document the gory carnage and human suffering, Emergencies Team members Anna, Ole, Fred, and Peter all have ordinary-looking domestic lives — Anna and Ole are recently married, and she has a pre-teen son — but when they're away from home in the danger zones, they still have to factor in the need to eat regularly. It's that dash of seemingly banal reality that makes E-Team fascinating beyond being just a litany of atrocities; in a key scene, Anna is giving a phone interview about no-fly zones while cooking dinner for her family. Even while trying to make the world a slightly less horrific place, you gotta keep your blood sugar up.
Tags: Film, Presidio Theatre
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