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Human Rights at Home Blog
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Coming to Your Town or Campus: Human Rights Film Festivals Bring the Issues Home

By humanrightsathome

Human rights film festivals are an effective way to bring human rights home, particularly in campus communities.  Many festivals are staged around the country each year.   The 14th Annual Human Rights Film Festival will be held at the University of San Francisco from March 31- April 2, 2016.   The Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York will be June 10-19, 2016.  Another upcoming festival is the United Nations Association Film Festival in Palo Alto, to be held October 20-30, 2016.  The 16th Annual Bellingham Human Rights Film Festival just closed at the end of February — presumably there will be a 17th annual festival at around the same time in 2017.   Some groups also put on human rights film series spread out over several months or a year.  For example, the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and Advocates for Human Rights are hosting a series of films on women’s human rights.  The final film in the series, “The Path Appears,” to be shown on March 11, deals with sex trafficking in the U.S.  Similarly, the Duke University Human Rights Center sponsors an ongoing series called “Rights, Camera, Action.”  April 19th’s screening will be “From Swastika to Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars in the American South.”  In Fort Worth, Texas, the local Human Relations Commission co-sponsors a quarterly human rights film series. 

 To support these disparate, community-based efforts, the Human Rights Film Network has published a guide to putting together a human rights film festival.  According to the manual authors, “Human rights-themed films aim for maximum impact, and human rights film festivals play a crucial role in ensuring that the films reach their target audiences, which include key influencers, social movements, activists and everyday citizens.  This manual seeks to strengthen the collaboration between these communities by providing existing and emerging film festivals with the tools necessary to create an effective human rights eco-system that can lead to social transformation.” 

For more thinking about how to teach from human rights films, see the recent essay by Sarah Hamblin, “The Form and Content of Human Rights Film,” appearing in The Radical Teacher.  And for a general resource on human rights films, see Mark Gibney, Watching Human Rights: The 101 Best Films.