The nominees for The HUMAN Rights Human Wrongs Film Award 2018
Nine documentary films have been nominated to The HUMAN Rights Human Wrongs Film Award 2018 for the best international human rights documentary.
For the first time, HUMAN International Documentary Film Festival will grant 30.000 NOK to the best international documentary film focusing on human rights issues. The prize is awarded by Amnesty International Norway and The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, two organizations that have been close partners of the festival since its beginning. With this award they wish to highlight filmmakers’ efforts to make a human rights case better known to an international audience.
The festival’s program committee has visited major international film festivals in their search for films for the competition program.
– We have chosen nine outstanding documentaries that all highlight relevant human rights topics. The films nominated for The HUMAN Rights Human Wrongs Film Award manage to communicate to a wider audience, they tell the stories of remarkable and courageous human rights activists, and they have the power to influence their audiences, says Program Manager Silje Viki.
In the selection of films, the Program Committee has also taken into account geographical and thematic variety to create an interesting and comprehensive film program for the festival audience.
THE NOMINATED FILMS ARE:
PIRIPKURA
by Renata Terra, Bruno Jorge, Mariana Oliva
Jair Candor, an official with Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency FUNAI, is looking for the two last known members of the Piripkura people that are living in the Mato Grosso region of the country. The area can only remain protected if the existence of the two men can be proved. Jair therefore treks into the jungle to find them.
SILAS
by Hawa Essuman, Anjali Nayar
Multinational companies own as much as one fourth of Liberia’s land mass, and has displaced a great number of its population from their homes. Thriller-like, we follow the trail against former laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize and Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who is accused of corruption. In the midst of this, Silas Siakor fights for a just development for Liberia.
BURMA STORYBOOK
by Petr Lom, Corinne van Egeraat
There is a saying that everyone is a poet in Myanmar. But even poetry cannot escape censorship’s tight grip in an authoritarian regime. In Burma Storybook we meet several of the country’s leading poets, who’s poems also serve a therapeutic function after serving years in prison for practising their art. The film is a visual portrait of Myanmar, filled with both beauty, seriousness and humour.
A CAMBODIAN SPRING
by Chris Kelly
Over a period of six years we follow three people fighting against a development project that will tear down their neighbourhood in Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh. Do these development projects really denote a new spring for the country? Nevertheless, the people remain the focus in A Cambodian Spring, as we closely follow their lives as activists, where the consequences turn out to be great, both on a political and a personal level.
DEAD DONKEYS FEAR NO HYENAS
by Joakim Demmer
In Ethiopia farmland is called “the green gold”, and foreign investors poure into the country and is buying up land, supported by the Ethiopian government’s plans for “economic development”. Simultaneously, the amount of people in desperate need of food aid increases. Local villages try to take The Wold Bank to court in an attempt to hold someone responsible for the gross human rigths abuses they suffer under, but fail. How can this continue?
THE DEMINER
by Hogir Hirori, Shinwar Kamal
With a small pair of clippers and his own bare hands, Fakhir works as a deminer in Iraq, and has become a sort of cowboy hero persona among the local population as well as in both the American and Iraqi military forces. In intense scenes that will leave you with your heart in your mouth, a sneaky feeling lurks beneath the surface. Because for a deminer, it is just a question of time, right?
FREEDOM FOR THE WOLF
by Rupert Russell
On a journey through five countries over the course of three years, director Rupert Russell attempts to understand how the personal freedom to shop is connected to the idea of political freedom. Through powerful images, animations and thought-provoking interviews, the film is a sharp insight into the crisis of democracy in a world that is searching for new solutions.
WHEN GOD SLEEPS
by Till Schauder
The Iranian musician Shahin Najafi has been called “the Salman Rushdie of rap” after he got issued a fatwa against himself in 2012. Shahin is constantly changing his appearance using makeup, hair dye, various hats, scarfs and forms of facial hair to go unnoticed while simultaneously fighting publicly for freedom of speech. The film investigates satire as an expression in today’s political climate.
500 YEARS
by Pamela Yates
In 500 Years we follow the Maya peoples’ struggle for how history itself is told. The film begins with the trial against the former dictator General Ríos Montt, who is accused of orchestrating the genocide against the Mayans in the 80’s. We are led through the conflictual history of Guatemala, but 500 Years is also a film about the value of popular resistance against a corrupt and unjust power.
