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JAPANESE AMERICAN BUILDS AN EMPIRE IN COLOMBIA IN EMERALD
COWBOY
 Colombia
is the world's main source of emeralds. In the Colombian
biopic Emerald Cowboy, based on
his biography, a twentysomething Eishy Hayata (played by
Luis Velasco), an American citizen born in Tokyo, one day
decides to visit Colombia. On learning firsthand that miners
are selling purloined emeralds on the streets near the mines,
he becomes so fascinated with the emerald industry that he
abandons his airline engineering job in Los Angeles to live
in Bogotá, and in 25 years is the chief executive
officer of the world's top emerald company. He finds new
emerald mines in the Andes, pays his employees handsomely,
and manages accounts of perhaps the most profitable legitimate
business in Colombia. Over the years, Colombia changes drastically,
with guns increasingly providing order rather than the law.
Hayata, therefore, encounters security problems as he navigates
his empire amid scam artists, rival emerald merchants, guerrillas,
kidnappers, corrupt officials, the cocaine cartel, and labor
unions. On March 25, 1995, ultranationalist members of a
phony union seek to shut down his business. Hayata is vulnerable
because he retains his American citizenship, though his spouse
is Colombian (played by Carolina Aristizabal), so the government
investigates Hayata to find wrongdoing, thus satisfying the
ultranationalists, but he responds that his family is Colombian
and that so is he in spirit. Hayata does not back down to
threats. His fists fly at unionists trying to block his office
on an upper floor of a Bogotá building, and his associates
join in, resulting in a retreat of the ultranationalists
to the ground floor just in time for police to come to Hayata's
rescue. On November 1, 1998, his Colombian daughter begs
Hayata to take her to the emerald mines before her high school
graduation. Although warning her of the danger of the excursion,
she insists. On exiting from the mine, an armed band indeed
attacks the Hayata party. Outnumbered, Hayata escapes with
his daughter, yet they find their way back to the car that
they use for the trip. His daughter then graduates on schedule
from a high school in Colombia, bound for Harvard University.
What is remarkable about the film, which the Political Film
Society has nominated as best film exposé of 2003,
is that the older Hayata stiffly plays himself. Filmed in
handheld digital, the film is a quasidocumentary, codirected
by Hayata and Andrew Molina. In 2000, Hayata fell into a
coma from a gunshot wound. Emerald Cowboy serves
as his epitaph and eulogy. MH
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BEYOND
BORDERS SHOWS THE UGLY SIDE OF REFUGEE RELIEF
 According
to Sarah Jordan (played by Angelina Jolie) in Beyond
Borders, there are some 50 million refugees in
the world; the United Nations High Commission for Refugees
handles half, and various nongovernmental organizations cope
with what they can of the rest. Directed by Martin Campbell,
the film is dedicated to the refugees and the aid workers,
whose courage makes life possible where hope is almost lost.
The principal focus is on Dr. Nick Callahan (played by Clive
Owen), who represents a courageous NGO, presumably Medicines
sans Frontières. The story begins in 1984 at a banquet
of a fictional Aid Relief Organization in London. After Sarah's
father-in-law receives praise for generous donations to the
organization. Callahan bursts into the banquet hall with an
emaciated ten-year-old Ethiopian boy whose condition provokes
tears from Sarah. Having just returned from Ethiopia with the
boy, Callahan lambastes the organization for spending funds
on the banquet but has nothing for a very real crisis in Ethiopia,
where millions are starving and dying from disease. Soon, Callahan
and the boy are arrested for the intrusion. Callahan is released
after being taken to a police station. The boy, sent to an
alien detention center, manages to escape; the next day he
is found dead from overexposure to the cold. Sarah then decides
to cash in her life savings, go to Ethiopia to see conditions
for herself, and, before the film ends, she ends up visiting
similar non-UNHCR refugee camps in Cambodia in 1989 and Chechnya
in 1995 (though the actual locations are Kenya and Canada).
What filmviewers learn is that UNHCR helps only the politically
correct refugees; the most desperate cases are left for the
NGOs, which are understaffed and undersupplied, often in war
zones. Although Dr. Callahan speaks quite harshly to Sarah
about her unexpected presence in Ethiopia, both before and
after she delivers to him several thousand dollars in traveler's
checks, she falls in love with him for his courage amid impossible
conditions. Since she can only observe, Sarah leaves but hopes
to learn of Dr. Callahan's whereabouts in the future. On returning
to London, she resigns from her job in an art gallery to assume
a position at UNHCR. Her visits to Dr. Callahan in 1989 and
1995 occur after her sister Charlotte (played by Teri Polo)
tracks him down; each time, she leaves her loving husband Henry
Bauford (played by Linus Roache) and family. One of the children
whom she leaves behind is conceived while she is with Dr. Callahan
in a Khmer Rouge-controlled zone within Cambodia, so one purpose
of the 1995 visit is to inform him that he has a daughter.
Filmviewers will correctly expect that one of the two or both
will die in the end, given the hazardous conditions of aiding
victims of wars, and the story appears rather amateurish in
combining Saving Private Ryan (1988)
with Tears of the
Sun (2002). Nevertheless, the conditions
depicted on the screen of Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya
are so stark that the Political Film Society has nominated Beyond
Borders for an award as best film exposé of
the year as well as best film in raising consciousness about
both human rights and peace. MH
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