HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL

With the rapid advances in technology and global communications, the visual media are playing an increasingly important role in the evolving international dialogue on human rights. Human Rights Watch has developed the capacity through our film festival and related activities to promote and distribute the enormous wealth of important human rights-related films and videos from around the world. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, established in 1988, advances public education on rights issues and concerns by exhibiting the finest works each year in commercial and archival theaters in the U.S. and on television and in film festivals internationally.

Since its inception, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival has presented 150 fiction, documentary, and animated films and videos from more than fifty countries. The sum of the festival's first four years of programming constitutes a unique, cumulative visual record of the contemporary global struggle for human rights.

The film festival opened its 1993 season in New York in May. Films presented over a two-week schedule, on two screens in a Manhattan theater, included sixty films and videos (of which thirty-eight were premieres) from more than thirty countries. The works ranged in type from fiction and documentary to experimental and animated, and formats ranged from feature-length to shorts to works-in-progress.

In 1992 the festival had presented the first-ever retrospective of the works of acclaimed documentarian Marcel Ophuls ("The Sorrow and the Pity," "Hotel Terminus"). The 1993 festival featured a retrospective of the films of Argentina's internationally-known director Fernando Solanas.

In its brief history, the festival has premiered works from familiar directors like Agnieska Holland ("Europa, Europa"),Jonathan Demme ("My Cousin Bobby"), Bertrand Tavernier ("The Undeclared War"), and Andrzej Wajda ("The Katyn Forest"); and has introduced the artistry and potent moral voices of emerging directors like Pawel Pawlikowski ("Serbian Epics"), Iris F. Kung ("Escape from China"), and Harriet Eder ("Mein Krieg").

Additional films appearing for the first time in the U.S. have included Suzanne Osten's "Speak Up! It's So Dark," a Scandinavian meditation on the renewed fervor of neo-Nazism among European youth, and Sahin Gok's "Siyabend and Xece," the first film made in the Kurdish language.

The 1993 festival schedule included customized daytime programming for high school audiences, accompanied by panel discussions on related human rights themes. Students participating in the project to date have come from seventeen, mainly inner-city schools throughout the New York area.

In selecting films for the festival, Human Rights Watch concentrates equally on artistic merit and human rights content. The festival's full-time programmer travels extensively and maintains close contacts with film appraisers around the world who scout for deserving works. The festival's programming committee has screened more than 400 films and videos each year; once a film is nominated for a place on the program, staff of the relevant division of Human Rights Watch also view it, primarily to confirm accuracy in the portrayal of human rights issues.

In conjunction with the opening night festivities each year in New York, the festival awards a prize in the name of the legendary cinematographer and director Nestor Almendros, who was a cherished friend of the festival. The award, which includes a cash prize of $5,000, goes to a deserving filmmaker in recognition of his or her contribution to human rights. The 1993 recipient was German director Helke Sander for "Liberators Take Liberties," her inquiry into the prevalence of rape during World War II.

The traveling sections of the festival expanded significantly in 1993, a reflection of both the national scope of the festival and the increasingly global appeal that the project has generated. The festival has itself become a worldwide distribution vehicle for the human rights films in our program.

In June 1993, the festival sent a special film showcase to Vienna in conjunction with the World Conference on Human Rights. A European television station, SuperChannel, whose broadcast market covers East and Western Europe and former Soviet republics, also aired a collection of films from the festival showcase following the conference.

In early September, selections from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival appeared in the Venice Film Festival and the Boston Film Festival; festival selections were also programmed in September at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. In October, the festival as a whole appeared at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles, and selections from the festival were featured in the Sarajevo Festival, held in Bosnia.

The schedule for the remainder of 1993 included showings in Portland, Seattle and Olympia, Washington; and Hong Kong, where the Festival was presented under joint sponsorship with Amnesty International.