El Documental del mes - THE DICTATOR HUNTER - el Documental del mes

"If you kill one person, you go to jail. If you kill 40 people, they put you in an insane asylum. But if you kill 40, 000 people, you get a comfortable exile with a bank account in another country, and that's what we want to change here," says Reed Brody. Brody hunts dictators for a living as a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. For seven years, Brody has been chasing one former dictator in particular: Hissène Habré, the former leader of Chad, who is charged with killing thousands of his own countrymen in the 1980s. Now Habré lives in Senegal where Brody is attempting to have him brought to trial or extradited. In The Dictator Hunter we follow Brody over the course of two suspenseful years as he travels through Africa, Europe and the United States. He conducts diplomacy like the chess games he plays with his son. But in his work, the chess pieces are politicians, journalists and judges that Brody positions against his opponent. The Dictator Hunter shows what it takes for one man to break the cycle of impunity...

Klaartje Quirijns grew up in the Netherlands and has worked as a director and producer, for the leading public television stations in the Netherlands. Her first film was about life in a maximum-security prison in Rotterdam. Since then, she produced and directed numerous documentaries with various subjects. Quirijns moved to New York City in 1999 and has continued to work for Dutch radio and television. She was the first Dutch journalist on Dutch national television and radio to report on September 11. She produced a documentary about the Brooklyn Dodgers and was creator of a video installation about street kids entitled "Homeless World," which was exhibited in the modern art museum 'De Kunsthal' in Rotterdam.She is currently working on a feature length documentary about psycho-therapy in New York called "On the Couch"

Director's Statement

A few years ago I was introduced to Reed Brody and Souleymane Guengueng. I met them at the office of Human Rights Watch in the Empire State building in New York. The two men were sitting under a world map in Brody's office with black and white mug shots of dictators all over the map. They pointed at one and looked at me and said: "this is one of the most brutal dictators you have probably never heard of: Hissene Habré of Chad and we want to bring this man to justice". I saw a film in these two men and their quest to change the system in which dictators could kill and get away with it. Both are tremendously driven, the one believing in the law, and the other one in God. I like to observe and explore where people come from, why they do what they do. In this case I wanted to know more about the backgrounds of Reed and Souleymane, I was moved by their friendship and curious about their mission. One is a survivor who lost his sight in the prisons in Chad and the other is an idealistic Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn, whose father survived the holocaust. Who is this man, why is he sacrificing money and his family, is he a Don Quixote, or is he vain, arrogant or just naive?

• World première - Toronto International Film Festival, Canada, 2007
• Special jury mention - IDFA - The Netherlands, 2007
• Special jury award - Festival International du film des droits humains, France, 2008