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The 2021 Human Rights Watch Film Festival celebrates 25 years with a digital edition featuring 10 powerful and uplifting new documentaries.

Private Violence

The 25th edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival will run from June 12 to 22, 2014 with a program of 22 films that bring human rights struggles to life through storytelling, and remind us that film can be a powerful source of change and inspiration. The festival is co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center.

Twenty documentaries and two fiction films will be featured, including 19 New York premieres and an unprecedented 16 features by women. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is especially proud to be celebrating its 25th anniversary. What began as a series of films shown on a modest-sized television in a small New York City theater is now experienced on the big screen by over 100,000 passionate audience members in more than 20 cities worldwide.

DANGEROUS ACTS STARRING THE UNSTABLE ELEMENTS OF BELARUS

 The 18th edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London will run  from March 18 to 28, 2014 with a lineup of 20 award-winning documentary and feature films. The festival will take place at the Curzon Mayfair, Curzon Soho, Ritzy Brixton and for the first time at the Barbican. This year’s program is organized around five themes: Armed Conflict and the Arab Spring; Human Rights Defenders, Icons and Villains; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Rights; Migrants’ Rights and Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights.

Matthew Smiley’s hard-hitting documentary HIGHWAY OF TEARS

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns for its 11th year in Toronto with eight films that the festival describes as bravely bearing witness to human rights violations in Canada and around the globe, and make an impassioned call for social change through their empowering stories of perseverance, resilience and hope. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival opens at Toronto International Film Festival TIFF Bell Lightbox on February 27 with THE SQUARE (2013), director Jehane Noujaim’s (Control Room) thrilling documentary chronicle of activism, unrest and revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and closes on March 6 with the world premiere of Canadian director Matthew Smiley’s hard-hitting documentary HIGHWAY OF TEARS (2013).

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns to New York from June 13 to 23, 2013 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center. Eighteen documentaries and two fiction films will be featured, including 15 New York premieres.  The festival kicks off on June 13 with the HBO documentary Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington.

The 10th Human Rights Watch Film Festival with a 10-film lineup of “politically charged, inspiring and empowering stories covering themes of oppression, struggle and resilience” opens on February 26, 2013 at TIFF Bell Lightbox with Lise Birk Pedersen’s Putin’s Kiss (2012), a documentary/coming-of-age story about life in contemporary Russia as experienced by Masha Drokova, a middle-class youth activist and member of the anti-fascist group Nashi. The festival runs until March 7. 

Highlights include a focus on women’s issues with Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree (2012), set in a rural African village poised at the outer edge of the modern world where a girl hatches a secret plan to rescue her 11-year-old sister from an arranged marriage, and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone (2012), a gripping film about a woman in an unnamed, war-torn Middle Eastern country who delivers an engrossing, liberating monologue to her comatose husband.

The full lineup of films:

The 9th Human Rights Watch Film Festival opens on February 29, 2012 in Toronto Canada at TIFF Bell Lightbox with Fernand Melgar’s documentary Special Flight, a portrait of the legal limbo that faces thousands of detainees in Switzerland’s Frambois detention centre as refugees anxiously await confirmation of their requests for asylum. The festival is a co-presentation between TIFF and Human Rights Watch, and will run until March 9. Festival highlights include Jon Shenk’s The Island […]

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