MOVIES/UNITED STATES

Time for Justice Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women; Written and directed by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic

The Balkan conflict differs from all other wars in one crucial respect: for the first time ever, rape will be treated as a crime against humanity, and its perpetrators prosecuted at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. If, that is, they can be brought to justice. Although an estimated 20,000 women, mainly Muslim, were raped during the five-year conflict, punishing those responsible for the abuses has proved to be exceedingly difficult.

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of female war victims, South African sociologist Mandy Jacobson and Croatian-American filmmaker Karmen Jelincic have directed a riveting new documentary, Calling the Ghosts, which details the Bosnian Serbs' deliberate use of mass rape as a military tactic. The one-hour film focuses on survivors of the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Croat and Muslim men and women were routinely murdered by their Serb captors in August 1992.

Through a series of interviews with women interned at Omarska, the film addresses their reluctance--for fear of public humiliation and retribution--to testify at the Hague. Though painful, the chilling saga, now touring film festivals in the U.S., should not be brushed aside. Explains women's rights lobbyist Nusreta Sivac, an Omarska rape victim and one of the film's narrators: "If the story is not told, then no one will know about it, right?"

MOVIES/ALGERIA

The Dangers of Chauvinistic Pride Machaho Directed by Belkacem Hadjadj

Machaho is a parable about a crime committed in the name of honor and love; the lesson of the film is that virtue is destructive when it supersedes reason. The movie begins one blizzardy day in Algeria's inhospitable Kabylia Mountains when Arezki, a kind Berber peasant, rescues a snowbound young man named Larbi. While recuperating in Arezki's humble house, Larbi has a discreet love affair with his host's beautiful daughter Ferroudja. When Arezki (played by the film's director, Belkacem Hadjadj) learns that his daughter is pregnant, he vows to kill the treacherous Larbi for besmirching the family reputation. But first Arezki must find the young man, who has left the home hastily. Larbi's disappearance and the news of the girl's pregnancy drive Arezki mad; his quest to find and punish the young man ends tragically.

Machaho, a criticism of the extremism men are bringing to Algeria, unfolds against a backdrop steeped in Berber culture. "I wanted to express the complex relationship," says Hadjadj, "between tradition and modernity, fundamental elements of the Algerian problem." The subtle message of the film, which won awards at European film festivals and is set to open in Algeria in October, is that the feuding men are just plain obtuse, while the women, often overlooked in tradition-bound societies such as Algeria's, are the ones who struggle nobly to keep their families together.

EXHIBITS/FRANCE

The Art of Suffering "Francis Bacon Retrospective"; Georges Pompidou Center

Francis Bacon (1909-92) swore by the political and moral neutrality of his paintings, and for the first major exhibit of the artist's work since 1985, curators at the Pompidou gallery have arranged his artwork with near clinical dispassion. Yet Bacon's vow that his work carry only personal meaning underestimates its profound and universal message. Preserved in the contrast between the tortured figures of his best pieces and the functional halls of the gallery in Paris, Bacon's fundamental project was to illustrate the human psyche's ailing capacity for self-reflection and the human being's own horrific self-alienation.

With strokes fierce and somber, Bacon helped usher in our present Age of Anxiety. Combining the stylistic strands of Titian, Velazquez and Rembrandt, the quintessential European painted from spliced photographs of his human models, represented on canvas in a state of bodily erosion and mental anguish. Despite the poignancy of this motif, Bacon stood by the inaccessibility of his art. "That's why I'm always surprised when anyone likes my work," Bacon once said. "I work for myself. How can one work for a public?"

His surprise might be 10 times as great this year because the Pompidou Center has drawn large crowds since the exhibit opened on June 27. Next, Germans will get a chance to be riled and awed by Bacon's macabre art, as the paintings move to the Haus der Kunst in Munich on Oct. 14.

TELEVISION/LATIN AMERICA

From the Doghouse, Lessons on Life Big Bag; Cartoon Network

A ragtag pooch named Chelli, with mismatched socks for ears and lime and yellow corkscrews for hair, welcomes us into the general store--a stage carefully littered with curios and primary colors--and the play begins. Move over, Big Bird, this canine usurper has designs on children's educational entertainment as host of Big Bag, a weekly preschool series shown on the cable-TV Cartoon Network in the U.S. and Latin America, and due to be released in Asia and Europe this September. This latest product of the Children's Television Workshop, creator of Sesame Street, is an updated grab bag of determinedly perky hosts, "shorties"--or animated cartoons--and addictive ditties, but there's a twist: youngsters get an introduction to the ABCs of morality as well as the alphabet.

Big Bag casts itself as a modern-day Aesop by focusing each episode on honesty, cooperation and other value-added themes. In "One Little Lie," Chelli's face-saving fib grows into a monstrous mess. Lesson: Tell the truth. The moral is reinforced in shorties like Troubles the Cat, which features Latino characters, and Tobias Totz and His Lion. Big Bag glories in the politics of inclusion and the constructive messages from its cast of misfits: the inanimate (a canvas sack named Bag), the outcast (a nerdy inventor) and the foreign (Argyle Sock bickers with his Brooklyn-accented counterpart in a heavy Irish brogue). Entry into this limitless world requires only the passport of the imagination and a willingness to escape into a wacky and wonderful unreality.

--With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Lois Gilman/New York and Carol Poirier/Paris