Prague hosts One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
Posted by DocumentaryTech on March 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment
The idea of themed festivals both focuses and excludes. Audiences as this week’s One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival know exactly what they’re getting, and what they’re not.
The New York Times piece today on the festival notes that the festival “will screen 101 films from 30 countries at seven centrally-located theaters. The 12th-annual festival is spearheaded by the Czech charity People in Need, which campaigns for freedom-related causes worldwide, and the former Czech president and longtime rights advocate Vaclav Havel. In addition to the screenings, there will be panel discussions with some 100 directors and human rights advocates attending One World.”
The festival is heavy with environmental pieces, and attempts to not be uniformly heavy.
<Festival director Hana> Kulhankova acknowledged that some film buffs stay away from human rights documentaries, fearing they are too heavy. “We try to include lighter, even funny films as well,” he said. For instance “Auto*mate” chronicles the first mass bike ride in Prague. In the film, police with typical post-communist stiffness complain the cyclists are “complicating traffic,” but eventually become the cyclists’ protectors.
The Prague Daily Monitor also notes that there will be three documentaries exploring the situation in Iran.