About

About Us

HUMAN International Documentary Festival is Norway’s largest documentary film festival. The festival takes place in Oslo, for one week in March, at Vega Scene and Cinemateket. It was founded in 2008.  The festival presents the newest Norwegian and international documentaries in combination with debates, talks,  art exhibitions, stage performances, and more. The heart of the festival is current issues and human rights, but our program includes all types of documentaries, from all over the world.

The festival consists of two competition programs for best human rights focused film, and for best Norwegian documentary, and a diverse film program outside of competition, including short documentaries.

We are highly focused on quality, both in our highly selective programming, our state-of-the-art screening venues, and in the directors’ talks and discussions around the topics of the films. We provide space and time for the filmmakers to discuss their films with the audience, and arrange panel talks with highly competent participants diving deep into the topics of the films.

The festival was founded by several partners, and today the festival has a collaborative network of over a hundred organizations, cultural and educational institutions.

We are also a member of HRFN, the Human Rights Film Network, which favors human rights film festivals all over the world.

Community and participation

The festival should be an inclusive forum and a meeting place, and you should be able to participate in the debate regardless of your background.

Through our unique and long-standing collaboration with civil society and knowledge institutions, we will ensure that the festival is a meeting place for both a broad audience and for activists, professionals, politicians, etc., and that our program and panels are solidly rooted in science, and have a broad representation.

HUMAN is a leading festival on human rights themes in Norway, and the combination of documentary film and debate is a format we have worked on and refined over 17 years.

We work purposefully with representation by sourcing films from all over the world, and by building a debate program about current social issues from both a global and local perspective in a way that everyone can participate in. This creates an important democratic space.

HUMAN idff is an important meeting place and launch platform for Norwegian documentary filmmakers. We want to offer Norwegian and international filmmakers a unique forum where we take the themes they deal with in their films seriously and give them both applause and resistance.