London's 12th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) will take place from March 12–21, 2008.
The festival will screen 25 films from 19 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Chad, Chile, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, former Yugoslavia (I'm assuming that means Serbia), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Liberia, Nepal, Palestine (true, not officially a country — yet), Sudan, Uganda, and the United States.
Among the selected films are Lisa Jackson's The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (left), winner of the special jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival (Jackson is expected to attend the screening); Hana Makmalbaf's Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (top photo), about the hardships faced by an Afghan girl trying to get an education, a 2007 San Sebastian Film Festival special jury prize winner; and Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, up for an Academy Award for best animated feature and co-winner of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival's jury prize. Paronnaud and Satrapi are expected to attend the two scheduled screenings. (The first one will be a benefit gala on March 12; the following day, Persepolis will officially open the festival.)
The HRWIFF will be held at The Ritzy, Clapham Picture House, Gate Cinema, Greenwich Picturehouse, Renoir, and ICA. For more details, visit www.hrw.org/iff.
The information below were taken from the HRWIFF press release:
Human Rights Watch launched its International Film Festival 19 years ago to educate and galvanise a broad cross-section of supporters through the power of film, and this year one festival title links directly to the work of Human Rights Watch. In The Dictator Hunter [right], Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody is tireless in his pursuit of Chadian dictator Hissene Habré. "If you kill one person, you go to jail. If you kill 40 people, they put you in an insane asylum," says Brody, who will attend the festival screenings. "But if you kill 40,000 people, you get a comfortable exile with a bank account in another country, and that's what we want to change here."
The pursuit and documentation of dictators underpins three other films in this year's festival. The 2,000 hours of footage from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is culled to 69 minutes to create a taut and stirring narrative in Michael Christoffersen's Milosevic on Trial. And in Kalinovski Square [left], the celebrated Belarussian director Yury Khashchavatski continues his longstanding and personally dangerous film confrontation with "Europe's last dictator," President Lukashenko of Belarus. The film addresses the rigged 2006 elections, including Lukashenko's surreal propaganda machine as well as astonishing scenes of the pro-democracy rallies and protests in Kalinovski Square.
Former cultural advisor to Salvador Allende and internationally respected playwright Ariel Dorfman will attend screenings of A Promise to the Dead [above], which documents his return to Chile with filmmaker Peter Raymont in late 2006, at the time Augusto Pinochet, Dorfman's long-time nemesis, is dying. On September 11, 1973, Dorfman was spared the fate of most of his colleagues when Chile's military, led by Pinochet, attacked and killed democratically elected President Allende and his ministers at the presidential palace. Years later, Dorfman discovered that his name was struck off the list of people who Allende called to stand against the attackers, so that he could live to tell what happened that day.
The festival will also show two other films to celebrate Ariel Dorfman's life and work: Prisoners in Time (1995), which Dorfman wrote with his son Rodrigo Dorfman, stars John Hurt as Eric Lomax, a former British soldier who was tortured as a POW of the Japanese and who, 50 years on, still suffers daily bouts of post-traumatic stress. Prisoners in Time will be shown in a double bill with My House Is on Fire (1997).
Chile and memory also feature strongly in Calle Santa Fé [above], which director Carmen Castillo will introduce. In this deeply personal documentary Castillo retraces the path from resistance to exile, from the inspiring days of Allende to the long, sombre years under Pinochet, and remembers the men and women who rose up against his tyranny. Staying in South America, documentary filmmaker Maria Ramos turns her lens on Rio de Janeiro's juvenile courts and detention centres in Behave. Ramos allows us to watch court cases play out, successfully and subtly getting around a law which forbids the filming of juveniles in court, and reveals a system overwhelmed despite the efforts of the no-nonsense Judge Luciana Fiala.
Accelerating globalisation, and the failure of governments and corporations to protect environments and citizens, is explored in three documentaries at this year's festival. Filmmaker Daniel Gold will attend his "toxic comedy", Everything's Cool, which explores one of the most intriguing and troubling questions among international environmentalists: why have Americans lagged so far behind the rest of the world in accepting global warming?
Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes [above] is a stunning portrait of Edward Burtynsky, an internationally celebrated photographer who specialises in large-scale studies of industrial vistas. The film is also an exploration of the aesthetics and social dimensions of Asia's massive industrial revolution. Baichwal follows Burtynsky to China and to Bangladesh, and compares Burtynsky's epic photographs with the tedium workers endure and the sometimes toxic and alienating impact of globalisation on the very people the transformations are supposed to benefit. The spotlight stays on China in Up the Yangzte, in which Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang focuses on the building of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River and how it represents the end of a way of life and livelihood for 2 million people.
The festival explores the devastating effects of violence and warfare in five deeply dramatic films. In White Light / Black Rain [above], the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki talks to 14 survivors of the US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of whom have never spoken publicly before, as well as to four Americans intimately involved in the bombings. The interviews reveal deep suffering and extraordinary resilience. In 2008, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Okazaki's film stands as a powerful warning to today's world that we cannot afford to forget what happened on those two days in 1945.
Three films in this year's festival look at the consequences of the continuing violence in the Middle East. Lebanese filmmaker Philippe Aractingi walks a fine line between fiction and documentary in his award-winning film Under the Bombs. Filmed in Lebanon on the first day of the ceasefire of the Israeli-Hezbollah war of summer 2006, Under the Bombs combines real footage of the massive destruction with a moving narrative story that highlights the suffering of ordinary civilians. Aractingi will attend festival screenings with actress Nada Abou Farhat.
Georgi Lazarevski's documentary This Way Up is about an old-people's home for Palestinians in the West Bank. A few metres from their front door rises the wall of separation that the Israelis built to stop suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel. But the wall, much of which is built within the West Bank, has isolated the residents from their children's visits, the outside world, and even the staff that look after them. The brilliant use of a quietly humorous "guide" with his trademark knitted cap, weathered face, and appreciation of a cigarette serves to emphasise the human tragedy of this divider. Playing in the same programme as This Way Up, Open Heart highlights the plight of the Palestinian healthcare system struggling under occupation. The life of a Palestinian couple's baby is threatened by congenital heart disease. Their challenge is not only to get lifesaving surgery for their son, but also to make the uncertain trip through Israeli checkpoints.
Violence has raged across Sudan's region west of Darfur since early 2003 and claimed at least 200,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Ted Braun's Darfur Now [above] follows six individuals, who adopt different strategies to achieve one goal — to end the crisis. In the production notes for The Dictator Hunter, Reed Brody says, "I feel lucky to have grown up when more people believed in their ability to change the world." Darfur Now is an inspiring example of how committed individuals can still make a difference.
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The 2008 New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival will be held this April 10-20 in New Orleans. Highlights include Jonathan Demme's "Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower Ninth Ward," The Academy Award-winning director will be present to lead a panel with 9th Ward Residents about housing, screen his film and answer questions. Alfo featured are 50 films from around the world and New Orleans. Included in this list are "Taxi to the Darkside" the 2008 Academy Award Winner for best Documentary; Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron; Wade in the Water, a Film made by New Orleans kids after Hurrican Katrina; Vows of Silence made by Jason Berry about corruption and abuse in the Catholic Church and many others. Visit http://www.nolahumanrights.org for a full listing and schedule of events.