What so proudly we hailed in the twilight's last gleaming

The Human Rights Film Festival has come once again to Wellington, and since my entire job revolves around human rights (it's even in my title), I think I'm pretty much duty bound to go. More than once.

The first film was about the restriction of free speech among journalists in Belarus after the 1994 elections, which is an awesome topic, but was told from a biased point of view, never found its message and came complete with subtitles brought to you by google translator. Which if you have never used it before, is downright hysterical. In fact, I think it's where Sasha Baran Cohen's whole act comes from.

I'm always interested in the artistic choices people make when they are engaging in their chosen medium. This film featured a close up of a dripping faucet and panned in on a bottle of dishwashing liquid. For, like, thirty seconds. Why? Unknown. What did this do to advance the story? Nothing.

Ironically, the film on the whole (even though it was not produced by New Zealand journalists) evinced everything I find faulty in New Zealand journalism. Which is to say that it left me with far more questions than it answered.

The second film, Tattooed Under Fire was the perfect bookend to the first film, because it was everything that the first one was not. It was beautifully shot, wonderfully told, thought-provoking and emotive and has left me still thinking about how to talk about it 24 hours later.

Tattooed Under Fire is set in a seedy tattoo parlour in Fort Hood, Texas, and tells the story of soldiers who are getting ready to be deployed to Iraq and picks up their stories once they get back. It is told through the confessions made to tattoo artists.

It was, quite simply, brilliant.

I've been trying to find the words for why it is so hard to talk about. Which, naturally, is a difficult exercise. But I can start here.

I remember sitting in the theatre full of Kiwis, and feeling one million emotions at once, and listening to the Kiwis around me chuckle. When, among the one million emotions I felt, none of them was humour. I think there were aspects of the film that looked to the outsider like a caricature. When I knew, having grown up in Texas, that those aspects were simply the reality of life in a small town in the South in the US.

And I guess what struck me in that moment, and in the moments that have followed as I've tried to explain the movie to other Kiwis, is how very "other" I sometimes feel here. There are ways in which, even if I go back to America, I will never be able to go back to America entirely. Because I've looked at it from the outside and seen it through a new lens.

In so many ways, my country is no longer the country in which I grew up. I think I have a new perspective having not only been overseas but worked for foreign governments, but what I see is a country inextricably divided. With two factions clinging with white fingertips to a single document, based on their own varying interpretations of it, but who no longer agree on the fundamental principles that underpin it. And I worry that that division cannot be overcome. That much is evident to me as it is to the rest of the world, to those who would seek to tear us down and to those who look upon us cautiously hoping we survive.

And yet, there remain the ties that bind. I felt such a kinship with the men and women in that movie. Such a sorrow to be a part of the machine called America that keeps sending them over there. And such a genuine need to comfort them. For no other reason than, like me, they are American. We share the same homeland and there is a bond there that probably will never be broken.

You see, I am not and will never be truly home here in New Zealand. Every time I open my mouth, my accent creates an impression that carries with it all of the stereotypes and preconceived notions that go with an outsider's view of America. Beyond that, though, there are what I will call environmental differences. I was, as my grandma would say, just brought up different. I have views about community and country that don't necessarily jive here.

But still, as they say, you just can't go home again.

And, I think, that's the nut of it. I felt a profound sense of sadness coming out of Tattooed Under Fire. And most of that was the subject matter. But more than that, it was the pervasive feeling that there isn't a single person I could talk to about it who would understand this feeling of "otherness". No one here who will get the patriotic ties that continue to link me to America and, more importantly, to Americans. And no one there who will understand the perspective of someone who's taken a step back to look at the whole mess from the outside.

This is the point in any entry where I would try to bring it all back home, and hopefully with something positive to say. I fear I haven't thought this topic through enough to do that, or maybe there just is no clean finish to it. I will say that I'm glad to be an immigrant and an emigrant and think the decision has added to my life and perspective. It is not without it difficulties, but then again, nothing in life worth doing is.