Juan Jorge Michel Fariña

A model for teaching bioethics and human rights through cinema and popular TV series: A methodological approach

Since its origins, cinema has promoted awareness of ethical problems. With the expansion of the film industry, these subjects have reached wider audiences, promoting interesting discussions inside and outside the academic world. Meanwhile, studies of explicit ethical subjects related to Science and Technology have increased, as has the attention paid to Human Rights problems. This paper describes a unique model of using scenarios in the form of film clips from popular television series and films to teach human rights from a perspective of bioethics. The methodology has been developed over twelve years of teaching and research by the Department of Ethics and Human Rights in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires. This approach has been developed for mental health intervention in disasters and applied in a course utilizing multi-media materials that has been organized to facilitate understanding the articles of the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights and to promote interest and research in a new field intersecting psychology, human rights, health and legal issues. An illustration of the technique is presented, using an episode from a popular television drama.

Re-storying violence and its aftermath through film

How can one intervene when the past is in ruins, when suffering which is at once past and ever-present is imbued with unresolved loss? Euro-American filmmakers Eric Black, Frauke Sandig and Fritz Ofner offer two distinct responses to a question which plagues most societies emerging from decades of armed conflict and gross violations of human rights. Guatemala is the focus of both Evolution of Violence (2012) and Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth (2011). The directors seek answers to this question in the grand sweep of History, with an official story punctuated by daily remembrances or stories from survivors – and at least one perpetrator – of colonial occupation, state terror and 500 years of what authors increasingly describe as ‘chronic violence’.