Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2000

In providing a window on how others live, film fosters understanding across borders. Its ability to capture humanity in all of our struggles and triumphs is the reason that Human Rights Watch has developed an International Film Festival.

Our film festival has brought together the top international filmmakers, human rights advocates, film industry executives, and other prominent guests in New York, London, and various other cities where the festival travels. In New York, the festival opens each June at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with a two-week run showcasing thirty films from around the world. Following many of the screenings, our staff and the involved filmmakers lead discussions about the significant human rights issues represented in each work.
In June, more than 7,000 people attended one or more of the New York screenings, and the festival received press coverage in every major New York daily newspaper. Among the highlights of this year’s New York festival was the opening-night showing of Twilight: Los Angeles, Marc Levin’s screen adaptation of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman dramatic monologue about the violence that engulfed Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict.

In London, we featured the U.K. premieres of Three Kings, David O. Russell’s ironic portrayal of the adventures of American soldiers in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, and The Hurricane, Norman Jewison’s film about the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, played by Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington. In the coming year, we hope to open additional film festivals in San Francisco and Boston.
The international film festival enables Human Rights Watch to dramatize and personalize the collective search for human dignity, a theme that inspires all of our work.



website: www.hrw.org/iff