The Human Rights Watch Canada Film Festival: A Festival of Free Films About Freedom
By Liam Lacey
Can we all agree that there’s not much these days we can agree on? At a historical moment when we’re choking on disinformation, misinformation, and brain-wasting social media, we need reminders of uncontested good things, such as stories that are true. Also, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Klabona Keepers
That idealistic document, drawn up by the fledgling United Nations in 1948, asserted people everywhere were entitled to be “born free and equal in dignity and rights" regardless of "nationality, place of residence, gender, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status.” The UDHR has been called the foundation stone of Amnesty International and the inspiration for the entire field of international human rights law.
It is also, indirectly, the inspiration for the annual Human Rights Watch Canada Film Festival, running May 26 to June 2. One of the earliest of the noble cause-based film festivals, which takes place in 20 countries, the Festival was founded 33 years ago as an offshoot of the New York-based, Nobel Prize-winning human rights monitoring organization, Human Rights Watch. Although nowhere does the UDHR’s insistence on universal freedoms include free movies, the festival offers that as well.
This year’s online Canadian version, curated by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick De Pencier, includes five documentaries, which can be watched in person in Toronto at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema (May 26-29) and, subsequently, across the country via digital streaming (May 30-June 2).
The festival opens with the world premiere of Canadian entry Klabona Keepers, directed by Tamo Campos and Jasper Snow-Rosen, set near the community of Iskut in northwest British Columbia, where the Indigenous Tahltan people are involved in a prolonged conflict with gas and mining companies to preserve the health of three watersheds and salmon-bearing rivers.
The Last Shelter, a documentary from Mali-born director Ousmane Samassekou, takes us to a migrant hostel financed by the Red Cross and the Catholic charity organization, Caritas, in the small city of Gao, in northeastern Mali, a gateway for tens of thousands of African migrants attempting to make their way across the Sahara to the Mediterranean and Europe.
The Last Shelter
Considered the last safe spot before the six-day journey across the desert, the city is a hub of human smuggling with high risks of robbery, enslaved prostitution, and death from either natural causes or violence. The film focuses on two 16-year-old girls from Burkino Faso, who are determined to escape to Europe to escape their unhappy home lives.
March For Dignity, by English director John Eames, follows the attempt to organize the 2019 Pride Parade in Tblisi, Georgia, against opposition from the Orthodox Church, counter-protesters, and the government. What makes this fight distinctive, and unexpectedly timely, is that the battle for queer rights in Georgia is understood as a proxy battle of Russia and the European Union, with Russia directly financing anti-LGTQ activists.
The Peruvian documentary Mujer de Soldado (Soldier’s Woman), directed by Patricia Weiss Risso, follows Magda Surchaqui Cóndoris who, as a teenager in 1984, was raped by a soldier during the fight against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). She was left socially ostracized, with a child to care for. Thirty years later, she joins a group of women in bringing charges against the men who abused them.
Tacheles - The Heart of the Matter, co-directed by Jana Matthes and Andrea Schramm, takes us back to the rise of totalitarianism and the devastation of the Second World War that inspired the Human Declaration of Human Rights.
The film involves the unsettling combination of the Holocaust and a video game, developed by two young men in Germany: one, Yaar, who has German Israeli dual identity, and one, Marcel, who is a German national who had a SS officer in his family.
In the game, called While God Was Sleeping, there are two characters —a young Polish Jewish girl and a German SS officer. The film becomes an exploration of the Holocaust and its significance to Jews and gentiles still struggling with its legacy.
The Human Rights Watch Canada Film Festival, running May 26 to June 2. Tickets are free (or with a $10 donation) both for in-person and online screenings and available through Hot Docs.