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A weeklong festival of documentary films on the war and human rights began at the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka on Sunday.
   Litterateur Syed Shamsul Huq inaugurated the 3rd international docu films on liberation and human rights by lighting candles.
   ‘There are still many things of the war of independence left unnoticed from where the filmmakers could make films’, he said while inaugurating the festival.
   He also reminisced about the war, a nine-month armed struggle with the Pakistan led occupation force in 1971.
   Liberation War Museum organised the festival for the third time.
   Trustees of the Liberation War Museum, Mafidul Hoque and Rabiul Hussain, among others, also spoke on the occasion.
   After the inauguration, ‘A Certain Liberation’ by Yasmine Kabir was screened. The film was dedicated to the memory of Birangan Guru Dashi.
   A total of 21 films will be screened at the festival, said the organisers.
   Ten countries including America, United Kingdom, South Africa, India and Bangladesh are participating at the festival, they said.
   ‘Films will be shown in three categories –– international, country focus and Bangladesh panorama’, said festival director Manzare Hasin Murad.
   Films from Iraq will be screened in the country focus, he said.
   War Dance, a 105 minute film from USA-Uganda and 84-minute film Meeting Resistance from USA-Iraq will be screened today at 3:00pm and 5:30pm respectively.
   Voice Warriors of ‘71, Tales from the Margin, An Oppressed People is Always Right, The Last Rites, No End in Sight, Muktijuddhe Chattagram (part 1), Cuba: An African Oddyssey, Taxi to the Dark Side, The War on Democracy, Mirpur– The Last Frontier, In Search of History, The Blood of my Brother, Roaring Kansat, Iron Eaters, The Leader, His Driver and the Drivers Wife and Voices of Iraq will be screened on the following days of the festival, said the organisers.

A woman’s place has never been just in the home — not even in ancient Greece.
   The proof is in an exhibit titled ‘Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens’ — a collection of artifacts that correct the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children.
   In the display covering Greek life, art and religion, women play important, vibrant roles, as do their goddesses — from lover to priestess to political peacemaker to protagonist of public festivals.
   ‘Today’s woman has more in common with the woman of ancient Athens than one imagines,’ said curator Stella Chryssoulaki. She pointed to a vase showing a group of women who escaped city life, getting together in the countryside for a three-day festival honoring their beloved god Dionysius. They talked and shared lots of wine, leaving their husbands behind.
   Contrary to the popular perception of the Athenian female rituals as wild orgies, ‘there was no sex.’
   It was a religious rite, but also ‘a way to get out of the house and talk and exchange feelings,’ Chryssoulaki said. ‘It was kind of like group therapy — and then they went home relaxed and ready for the stresses of daily life.’
   Resentful husbands gave these gatherings a bad name, but actually Dionysius ‘was a gentle god, both somewhat masculine and feminine,’ she said.
   The 155 artifacts illuminated in cases and on pedestals in the Manhattan exhibit are mostly from Greece, with contributions from the Vatican, Russia’s Hermitage Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top art sources in Italy and Germany.
   Just steps from Fifth Avenue, ‘Worshiping Women’ is located in the Onassis Cultural Center in the basement of a modern Manhattan skyscraper, Olympic Tower, that on a higher floor houses the American offices of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. It’s named after the son of the late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who was married to Jacqueline Kennedy; his son and heir, Alexander, had died young in a plane crash.
   The center’s mission is to promote Hellenic culture, and it sponsors exhibitions in the underground gallery such as ‘Worshiping Women,’ which opened Dec. 10 and runs through May 9. The show was conceived by Nikolaos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece in Athens, and Alan Shapiro, professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University.
   While women in Athens couldn’t vote and were told whom to marry, the exhibit is packed with objects that attest to their vital roles in everything from food and sex to birth and death.
   Women were part of both politics and religion, which in those days overlapped.
   A large earthen vessel depicts a scene from Homer’s ‘Iliad’ in which a Trojan priestess receives Greek warriors who had come to recover Helen from Troy. ‘The priestess secures the peace,’ said the curator.
   A key depicted on another vase was kept only by a woman who opened the door to the treasures in the temple of the priestesses.
   A small bronze statuette of Athena shows her as armed and dangerous, leading Athens’ warriors against Troy. And on a black vase, she’s a thinker, etching words onto the waxen surface of a ‘laptop’ notebook with a sharp wooden stick that served as a writing tool.

Two modern-day sequels to Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables have been allowed by a French appeals court.
   In 2001, novelist Francois Ceresa published the follow-ups to the acclaimed 19th-Century classic.
   But Hugo’s family objected
   to the books - Cosette and
   the Time of Illusions and Marius or The Fugitive - arguing they were an insult to the original work.
   The Paris High Court ruled they did not constitute a threat to the integrity of the original novel.
   Hugo’s heirs - including his great, great grandson Pierre Hugo - filed a suit in 2001 demanding 685,000 euros (£636,181) in damages from Ceresa, who wrote the novels using the characters and style of Les Miserables.
   They also sought to ban the two books.
   The family had since reduced its claim to a symbolic one euro in damages and dropped the idea of outlawing the books.
   But the court ruled on Friday that Hugo’s novel was in the public domain, meaning Ceresa was therefore free to invent a sequel.
   ‘Francois Ceresa, who does not pretend to have Victor Hugo’s talent, is free to pursue his own personal expression, which does not necessarily act on all the levels that Victor Hugo was able to access,’ the judges ruled.