Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center
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The Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be presented from June 11 to 21, 2015 with 16 films from across the globe that celebrate the power of individuals and communities to effect change, said Human Rights Watch. Now in its 26th edition, the festival is co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center.
This year’s film festival is organized around three themes: Art Versus Oppression, Changemakers and Justice and Peace. The festival also features a series of special programs, including a discussion around the ethics of image-making in documenting human rights abuses, a master class on international crisis reporting and digital storytelling, and a multimedia project on the women activists of the Arab Spring.
“This year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival is all about challenging the status quo,” said the festival’s creative director, John Biaggi. “From fighting government corruption in Guatemala, to fighting to bring back the female voice in Iran, to fighting against the stereotyping of young African-American men in the US, the films this year showcase both the need and determination of individuals to reform unjust social, cultural and political systems worldwide.”
The festival will begin on June 11 with a fundraising Benefit Night for Human Rights Watch featuring Matthew Heineman’s harrowing look into Mexico's drug war, Cartel Land. Winner of the US documentary directing and cinematography awards at the Sundance Film Festival, the film exposes two contemporary vigilante movements, one on either side of the US-Mexico border.
Director Marc Silver and special guests will be at the June 12 Opening Night screening of another Sundance award-winner, 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets. This documentary centers on the 2012 shooting death of a black teenager, Jordan Davis, at a Florida gas station and the trial of his killer, Michael Dunn.
The Closing Night screening on June 21 will be the renowned documentarian Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, a history of the Black Panther Party in the US, featuring rare archival footage, from the Party’s beginnings to its ultimate dissolution. The director and some of the film’s subjects will be on hand for a discussion afterward.
Art Versus Oppression
The Iranian filmmaker Ayat Najafi's musical journey No Land’s Song follows his composer sister Sara’s attempts to organize a concert in Tehran despite restrictions prohibiting female solo singers from performing before a mixed audience. The festival is pleased to present Najafi with its 2015 Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking.
Winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s audience award for documentary, Hajooj Kuka’s Beats of the Antonov immerses viewers in the world of the Sudanese farmers, herders and rebels of the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain regions, who defiantly continue to tend their lands and celebrate their musical heritage in the face of a government bombing campaign.
Filmed before, during and after the Arab Spring, Francois Verster’s kaleidoscopic The Dream of Shahrazad uses the metaphor of Shahrazad—the princess who saves her life by telling stories—to explore the ways in which creativity and politics coincide in response to oppression.
New York’s own The Yes Men team with the filmmaker Laura Nix for The Yes Men Are Revolting, which follows the activist-pranksters as they pull the rug out from under mega-corporations, government officials and the media in a series of stunts designed to draw awareness to climate change.
Changemakers
Joey Boink's intimate documentary Burden of Peace follows Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala's first female attorney general, as she prosecutes the former dictator Efraín Rios Montt for his role in the genocide of nearly 200,000 Mayan Guatemalans.
Andreas Dalsgaard's Life Is Sacred reveals how the unorthodox presidential candidate Antanas Mockus and his enthusiastic young activist supporters attempt to reverse the vicious cycle of violence that is part of everyday life in Colombia.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Gini Reticker’s The Trials of Spring, which will be shown in its world premiere, tells the stories of three Egyptian women who risk everything to fight for change in their country. This feature documentary anchors a larger multimedia project at the festival about women activists from the Middle East and North Africa.
Beth Murphy’s What Tomorrow Brings, which will be presented as a work-in-progress screening, chronicles a year in the life of the first all-girls school in a remote, conservative Afghan village.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, the closing night film, is also featured in this theme.
Justice and Peace
Joshua Oppenheimer's multi-award-winning The Look of Silence, the companion piece to hisThe Act of Killing (HRWFF 2013), focuses on a village optometrist who confronts the men who murdered his brother during Indonesia's anti-communist purges of the 1960s.
The psychological toll of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is laid bare in Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, which looks at a group of combat veterans at a group therapy center as they struggle to overcome their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and rebuild their lives.
Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe’s (T)ERROR puts the filmmakers on the ground during an active FBI counterterrorism sting operation as they follow “Shariff,” a black revolutionary-turned-informant, in his attempt to befriend a suspected Taliban sympathizer and build a case against him.
The Israeli-born director Tamara Erde’s This Is My Land takes viewers inside six independently run schools in Israel and the occupied West Bank to investigate how history is taught in this contested region.
Through stop-motion animation, drawings and interviews, Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s The Wanted 18 recreates the true story of the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.”
The Benefit Night’s Cartel Land and Opening Night’s 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets are also featured in this theme.
Special Programs
A Right to the Image
By examining various bodies of work from the worlds of human rights filmmaking and photography, documentarian Pamela Yates, photographer Susan Meiselas and Charif Kiwan, co-founder of Abounaddara Collective, will explore the notion of “a right to the image” that protects the dignity of subjects, as well as the integrity of the journalists, image-makers and researchers who work in these situations.
The Trials of Spring: A Multimedia Initiative
The Trials of Spring is an initiative that aims to elevate the stories of the women who were on the front lines of the uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011. The project includes six short films profiling women from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, a feature documentary focused on Egypt, and an outreach campaign that will bring these stories to stakeholders, educators and grassroots organizations around the world. This program will feature a selection of the short films and a discussion with the multi-disciplinary team.
The Unravelling: Human Rights Reporting and Digital Storytelling
During this master class, the Human Rights Watch emergencies director, Peter Bouckaert, and leading photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale will focus on their multimedia project The Unravellingto show how Human Rights Watch used the techniques and strategies of international crisis reporting and digital storytelling to reveal the little-known humanitarian crisis in the Central African Republic. Bleasdale was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal by the Associated Press in 2015 for his work for Human Rights Watch in the Central African Republic.
In conjunction with this year’s film program, the festival will present Turkana, an exhibition by the photographer Brent Stirton that documents the challenges that the Turkana people of Kenya face in accessing their rights to water, health and livelihood. It will be featured in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for the duration of the festival.
TICKET INFORMATION: Tickets are available online at filmlinc.com for the screenings at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and ifccenter.com for the IFC Center, as well as directly from each of the organization’s box offices. Film Society of Lincoln Center: $14.00 General Public, $11.00 Seniors & Students, $9.00 FSLC Members. IFC Center: $14.00 General Public, $10.00 Seniors & Children, $9.00 IFC Center Members. A discount package is also available for screenings at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Ticket On Sale Dates: May 19 – Pre-sale to Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center Members; May 21 – General Public. For discounted tickets and festival updates, sign up for the mailing list at www.hrw.org/filmconnect. Follow the festival on Twitter @hrwfilmfestival.
For Complete Program and Schedule Information: ff.hrw.org
For more information, call the Film Society at 212-875-5600 or IFC Center at 212-924-7771 or visit ff.hrw.org.