This year’s festival of 25 films opened in London in March with Persepolis, an animated film based on the hugely successful graphic novel of the same name by Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi. It tells the moving, autobiographical tale of young Marjane’s life in Iran after the fall of the Shah and at the start of the rise in fundamentalism. In black and white, shadowy, and with no attempt to fool the audience into believing they are watching real life, it still manages to be more gripping than any big-budget Hollywood cartoon. Satrapi candidly describes Iran’s deterioration under successive regimes, each promising freedom but delivering only pain, prison and death to the people she loved.

It is the kind of subject that can get depressing, but she relieves the tension by weaving in comic anecdotes of being a teenager in post-revolution Iran, trying to enjoy punk music and parties while escaping nosy passers-by. Creative animation, Persepolis also proves, has a special power in being able to offer an insight into someone’s dreams, thoughts and memories in a way that actuality struggles with. The look on Marjane’s face as a girl, when she spies her dead neighbour’s hand in a pile of rubble after a bombing, looks hauntingly like Munch’s Scream retreating into shadows.

One of the other juicy offerings at this year’s festival was Manufactured Landscapes by Canadian filmmaker, Jennifer Baichwal. This follows the work of celebrated photographer Edward Burtynsky as he snaps mind-blowingly grand industrial scenes, from factory floors that stretch out into the horizon to hollowed-out metal canyons left behind by extractive mining companies. Burtynsky provides only a thin web of narrative, but the scale and natural noise of the industrial vistas that he silently photographs fill the calm completely.

iIt makes perfect, logical sense that billions of people consuming the resources of our giant planet would leave behind rivers of waste and football fields of cogs and wheels, but seeing them in their simple vastness is nevertheless awe inspiring. It feels like looking at a field of crops – except none of it is natural.

This is strange fruit with strange colours, all entirely the product of man. Most disconcerting are the hundreds of Chinese factory workers who open the film, like identical worker ants, buzzing away at their tiny allocated tasks on a gigantic assembly line. Nature and person, person and machine all melt into one.

As well as delivering unique films such as this, one of the other claims of the Human Rights Watch film festival is to ‘celebrate the power of the human spirit and intellect to prevail’. Iron Ladies of Liberia is a documentary that fulfils this promise completely. In a continent written off by some as a basket case, Liberia has become a symbol of progress, largely thanks to its inspirational new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Liberian journalist Siatta Scott Johnson and Daniel Junge followed Sirleaf closely during her first year in power, along with her other appointed ‘iron ladies’, including the national chief of police and finance minister.

The result is an honest account of their struggle to repair a country in social and economic ruin, which suffers under a
cancer of corruption infecting even the highest echelons of government. Sirleaf tackles this challenge with the force of a rock star, turning those around her into quivering wrecks by using the pure strength of her no-nonsense personality.

From Chinese diplomats to George Bush, everyone seems to be a fan. Filmmaker Siatta Scott Johnson is clearly among them, railing against the sexism and arrogance of Sirleaf’s opponents. Whether this means that we only get to see the president in her most positive light is unclear. But the film is nevertheless a fascinating glimpse into the real Liberia, from someone who has a vested interest in its future.

The Human Rights Watch international film festival took place in London from 21-30 March. Persepolis and Manufactured Landscapes are currently showing around the UK and available on DVD. Iron Ladies of
Liberia is due for release this summer. www.hrw.org/iff

These are questions hardly anyone dared to ask in public, until British punk rocker Aki Nawaz and his group Fun-Da-Mental produced their latest album, All is War (The Benefits of G-Had). It is an explosive mix of the kind of politically powerful lyrics that could have MI5 knocking at your door. It is so contentious that Nawaz’s own record label has refused to support it and the distributors decided not to touch it.

‘I’m not just a musician, my political tentacles are up,’ says Nawaz. He is a veteran punk and despite the name, Fun-Da-Mental are many years older than the recent spread of religious fundamentalism. Nawaz began his career in the 1980s as the drummer with Southern Death Cult (better known in a later incarnation as goth rockers The Cult), and then became a hero to many British Asian teenagers who grew up in the 1990s listening to his angry lyrics packed with feelings of cultural detachment and disaffection.

He secured a place as the founding father of British Asian music many years ago when he created Nation Records, a label that gave a home to artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, Natacha Atlas and Talvin Singh when no other record company was interested in them. While these musicians went on to stardom, Fun-Da-Mental stayed true to their radical political roots and have maintained a small but devoted following ever since.

I last interviewed Nawaz two years ago, after the Iraq war began and before the London bombings. A seasoned anti-racism campaigner, he was showing signs of weariness and considered leaving Britain to live in Pakistan and do charity work. Instead of moving abroad, however, he has spent more than a year making All is War. It is his attempt to shake up the system and he admits, with a smile, that he has willingly crossed a line.

The album’s release date was uncomfortably close to the anniversary of the London bombings – not the wisest move – and the media reaction has been unsurprisingly vociferous. ‘Fury at suicide bomb rap,’ proclaimed the Sun, echoed by the Guardian and NME. The BBC went so far as to contact the Home Office to find out whether Nawaz was in contravention of the Terrorism Act.

‘They’re so consumed with finding the bogeyman. I stepped out of the box of acceptability, so they went after me,’ says Nawaz. Most of the fuss has been over two songs: ‘Che Bin’, a track that compares Osama Bin Laden to Che Guevara, and ‘Cookbook DIY’, describing the steps taken by a terrorist in assembling a chemical bomb:

I’m strapped up ’cross my chest, bomb belt attached

Deeply satisfied with the plan I hatched

Electrodes connected to a gas cooker lighter

It’s not easy listening, but to pick out single lines from an entire album for attack is unfair. Some internet blogs have suggested that Nawaz is only trying to court publicity by writing songs about suicide bombing and terrorism. But there is plenty of evidence of Fun-Da-Mental’s musical abilities in All is War, particularly the use of Quwaali singers, dhol drums, and African rhythms, alongside a variety of strong voices and languages.

The songs take a ride across so many different countries and cultures that the finished album is almost a world music compilation. There are some masterful mixes that bear testament to Nawaz’s global journeys from Kashmir to Brazil.

All is War follows the same vein as Fun-Da-Mental’s earlier albums, with dark and melodic sounds laid beneath tough, chanting lyrics. The band’s political tone, however, has shifted away from simply issues of identity and race towards those of Muslim persecution and the relationship between terrorism and war. Producing another truly global album has allowed Fun-Da-Mental to step outside the British experience of terrorism.

‘I was in the Amazon last year, in the middle of nowhere,’ Nawaz says of a recent trip. ‘All the people in the lodge where I was staying told me, “Viva Osama!” – after the Americans had left.’

For someone in Britain to suggest that Osama Bin Laden is anything other than a bloodthirsty terrorist is tantamount to denouncing yourself as a fully paid-up member of Al-Qaeda with a bomb under your mattress. But for many in the Arab world and beyond, Osama is already a hero. It is an uncomfortable truth, forcing questions that western governments haven’t been brave enough to confront. Indeed, new legislation against the glorification of terrorism has put a stopper on any discussion even before it has begun. Nawaz says he is trying to open up the debate, even if it means landing himself in prison.

‘I wouldn’t mind the terrorism laws if there had been a debate before they came in. I don’t think the glorification of terrorism law would have been passed if there had been a debate first. I make it my business to sit and talk with people right across the spectrum, from the hardcore to the liberal,’ he says.

Nawaz has travelled the world speaking to everyone from Islamic scholars and academics to young Muslims in an effort to understand the root causes of the fury that has lead to violence. One could argue that there are few people better placed to understand such anger than a punk rocker. He is a liberal Muslim and has studied the Qur’an and sharia law to try to sift the facts about his religion from the fiction. His conclusion is that terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam is all about politics, not religion.

‘There’s a complete and utter denial of the relationship to this with foreign policy,’ he says. ‘On 7 July last year my son was on his way to King’s Cross. For anyone to think I would condone the attacks on London is ridiculous. I just understand the catalyst. My anger comes from the causes of terrorism.’

His grievance lies with those who he says have hijacked the debate and turned it into something other than a political problem. ‘Parasites’ is a track that describes what Nawaz says is the ‘blood-sucking nature’ of the government and Muslim community leaders who misrepresent the people they claim to protect:

Gold glitters in their mouths

Most of them corrupt

They lay claim to be your countrymen

He wears a crown of knowledge, preaching morality, decency and deceit

This is political poetry at its rawest, and repeats a charge made widely about some establishment figures who have exploited their arbitrary position as spokespeople for the British Muslim community to voice opinions that many fellow Muslims don’t share.

Far from advocating terrorism or suicide bombing, Nawaz says that he wants to create a fresh political debate that addresses the neglected issue of Western foreign policy. He argues that righting the wrongs of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan is the key to ending Muslim resentment, not racial integration. ‘I Reject’ articulates the frustration he feels:

Reject your thieving foreign policies

Reject your elitist congregation

Reject your mini skirt liberation

Reject your concept of integration

His efforts, as he puts it, to broaden the debate with songs like this have been met with only criticism so far. ‘What disappoints me most is the silence,’ he says. ‘Unless we talk about it, things will get worse. Something will happen; someone will blow up the queen. My question is: how do we put the handbrake on?’