Human Rights Watch film festival in London
The films and events at the 17th Human Rights Watch Film Festival have been announced.
This year the programme is organised around four themes: traditional values and human rights – incorporating women’s rights, disability rights and LGBT rights; crises and migration; a focus on Asia/South Asia; and occupation and the rule of law.
Running from 13 – 22 March 2013, it includes 14 documentaries and 5 dramas and crosses the globe from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordon, Morocco, North Korea and Norway to Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia and Tanzania.
Many of the films will be followed by question and answer sessions and discussions with filmmakers, experts and the films’ subjects.
Traditional values are often deployed as an excuse to stand in the way of human rights. Five films in this year’s festival consider their impact on women.
The UK premiere of Karima Zoubir’s ‘Camera/Woman’ introduces viewers to Khadija, a Moroccan divorcee who works as a camerawoman at wedding parties in Casablanca.
Khadija talks candidly about the issues and opposition she faces and the competing forces at play in the lives of women in Morocco and beyond.
The Iranian filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s ‘Going Up the Stairs’ is both a portrait of an artist and a glimpse inside a traditional Iranian marriage.
‘Tall as the Baobab Tree’ is about a family in Senegal struggling to find its footing on the edge of a modern world fraught with tensions between tradition and modernity.
‘The Patience Stone’ focuses on the plight of women ruled by archaic laws and traditions, by religion and violence in a war-torn neighbourhood in Afghanistan.
In ‘Rafea: Solar Mama’, Rafea, a Bedouin woman who lives with her daughters in one of Jordan’s poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border is selected for the Barefoot College programme in India.
There is also a chance to see ‘Alias Ruby Blade: A Story of Love and Revolution’ a love story about human rights activist Kirsty Sword and political prisoner Xanana Gusmão and the Timorese resistance to Indonesia.
The festival will begin on 13 March at the Curzon Mayfair with a fundraising benefit and reception for Human Rights Watch, and a showing of Kim Nguyen’s drama ‘War Witch’, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film.
War Witch was shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a cast of non-professional actors, and Rachel Mwanza, the lead, won a Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival 2012.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker Kim Nguyen and David Mepham, the Human Rights Watch UK director.
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