Human Rights Watch Film Festival–New York Starts Next Week

The New York iteration of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be held June 12-22. A list of films to be screened in New York is available here. HRW explains the goal of the festival:

Through our Human Rights Watch Film Festival we bear witness to human rights violations and create a forum for courageous individuals on both sides of the lens to empower audiences with the knowledge that personal commitment can make a difference. The film festival brings to life human rights abuses through storytelling in a way that challenges each individual to empathize and demand justice for all people.

In selecting films for the festival, Human Rights Watch concentrates equally on artistic merit and human rights content. The festival encourages filmmakers around the world to address human rights subject matter in their work and presents films from both new and established international filmmakers.

A trailer for the festival is on Youtube. I have not yet looked through all of the film and event descriptions, but four that that caught my attention include the screening of collection of short films from Syria, followed by a discussion of “emergency cinema;” E-Team, about HRW’s war crimes investigations team; Watchers of the Sky, tracing responses to genocide from Nuremberg to the Hague; and Sepideh–Reaching for the Stars, the story of a young Iranian woman who wants to become an astronaut. Every film description I looked at, though, seemed very interesting. Check out the whole list.

Unfortunately, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is coming to the end of its 2014 tour but here is a listing of cities where it has played. Dates/ locations of the 2015 festival to be announced.