After Sept. 11, this year's Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which shows movies with a strong social and political conscience, has acquired a new and inescapable resonance. To put it plainly, our blinders are off: it's no longer possible in the United States to imagine that the political and social upheavals in other countries don't affect us.

Since its inception in 1988, the festival has had a remarkable track record for showcasing worthy films, including numerous important documentaries, many of which wouldn't be shown anywhere else, not even on television. Through June 27 the festival is screening 33 films from 15 countries at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center.

The enormousness of the change in perception in just one year is epitomized by one of today's opening films, ''Afghanistan Year 1380,'' which has its world premiere showings at 2 and 6:30 p.m. The video documentary, filmed by the Italian team of Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Alberto Vendemmiati, is the sequel to ''Jung [War]: In the Land of the Mujahedeen,'' which was featured at last year's festival. That film portrayed the devastating human toll of Afghanistan's long civil war and the building of a hospital in Kabul to care for the wounded of both sides.

The sequel follows the efforts by the same humanitarian activists, Gino Strada, a surgeon, and Kate Rowlands, a British medical coordinator, to reopen that hospital, which at the end of ''Jung'' had been shut down by the Taliban. As they try to provide the most basic medical services to civilian war victims, they join the national rebuilding effort, which includes the problematic reconciliation of feuding ethnic groups. Although the country's poverty is as appalling as ever, ''Afghanistan Year 1380'' -- which refers to the current Muslim calendar year -- at least has some notes of hope.

On Sunday at 8:30 p.m., the festival is to show the New York premiere of ''War Photographer,'' the Swiss documentarian Christian Frei's portrait of the American photojournalist James Nachtwey. Philosophically inclined and admittedly shy, Mr. Nachtwey defies the Hollywood image of the combat journalist as a swaggering macho cynic. The movie, which opens at the Film Forum on Wednesday, follows him for two years on assignments that take him from Kosovo to Indonesia to the West Bank.

Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki's documentary ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger,'' which has the first of three festival screenings tomorrow at 4:30 p.m., is an unauthorized biography of the former Secretary of State. The film explores the controversial charges that Mr. Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal, an argument made by the journalist Christopher Hitchens in his book on the same subject.

The film examines his role in the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969, the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in the early 1970's, and the sale to the Indonesian President Suharto of American weapons, which were used in the massacre of a third of the population of East Timor in 1975. At best, Mr. Kissinger -- who did not participate -- emerges from this devastating film as the ultimate modern practitioner of realpolitik, the pragmatic political philosophy of the ends justifying the means. The movie will have its commercial opening at the Film Forum on Sept. 18.

Two documentary-flavored dramas are also worth special mention. Ken Loach's film ''The Navigators,'' which has its American premiere tonight at 8:45, follows a group of rail-track workers in South Yorkshire whose careers are disrupted by the privatization of British Rail. As the values of big business take over the operation, the company issues a mission statement, new rules go into effect, and market values and corporate duplicity undermine the workers' safety. As he has in many other films, Mr. Loach brings a remarkable authenticity (and empathy) to his depiction of British working-class life.

Lastly, Jean Khalil Chamoun's film ''In the Shadows of the City'' tells the story of Rami, a 12-year-old forced to leave his war-ravaged village in South Lebanon in the 1970's. But the Lebanese civil war follows him to Beirut and tears apart the city. This vivid portrait of life during wartime, when violent upheaval coincides with the normal rites of passage, culminates as Rami and his ethnically diverse friends grow up and have to choose sides. The movie has the first of two festival screenings on Wednesday at 4 p.m.

This is just a taste of a festival that is the cinematic equivalent of a backpacking trip through the hot spots of the world.