Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Followed by Q&A with Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, chair of Women Studies at SDSU and moderated by  Lynn Hiestand, Heartland Alliance

 

Jailed for running away from home to escape abuse, for allegations of adultery, and other “moral crimes,” the women of Afghanistan’s Badum Bagh prison band together to fight for their freedom. The film follows three young prisoners as they go to trial, revealing the pressures and paradoxes that women in Afghanistan face today, and the dangerous consequences of refusing to fit into society’s norms. 

 

Followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers and moderated by Milburn Line, Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.

 

Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito takes us through a haunting tale of genocide and justice that spans four decades, two films, and filmmaker Pamela Yates’s own career. Granito is a story of destinies joined together by Guatemala’s past and of how a documentary film from 1982, When the Mountains Tremble, emerges as an active player in the present by becoming forensic evidence in a genocide case against a military dictator.

 

Followed by a Q&A session with Granito filmmakers and moderated by Milburn Line, Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.

 

In the early 1980s, death squads roamed the Guatemalan countryside in a war against the unarmed indigenous population that went largely unreported in the international media. Filmmakers Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel, threw themselves into the task of bringing the crisis to the world’s attention by making a documentary that took them into remote areas of the country where massacres of civilians were taking place. 

 

 

Followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker Mimi Chakarova.

 

Intimate and revealing, The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who have been drawn into a world of sex trafficking and abuse. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives.

 

 

Followed by a Q&A session with Andrea Prasow, senior counsel, Human Rights Watch.

 

How far would you go to create change?In December 2005 Daniel McGowan, a prominent New York City social justice organizer, was arrested by federal agents in a nationwide sweep of activists linked to crimes by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—a group the FBI has called America's "number one domestic terrorism threat."  By providing a closer look at the group’s disillusionment with the strategies of non-violent protest – in which they suffer police abuse and public indifference – the film poses difficult questions about the possibility of effecting change from within the system and examines the raised stakes post 9/11 where the “terrorist” tag is broadly applied.

 

 

Followed by a Q&A session with Andrew Prasow, senior counsel, Human Rights Watch

 

Free for Title I Schools – Call 619.238.7559 X229 to reserve.

Followed by a Q&A session with Ethan van Thillo, executive director, Media Arts Center

 

Teen filmmakers turn the camera on their own struggles for human rights and invite audiences to experience the world as they do – as a Kenyan teenager living in Africa's second largest slum, as a 15-year-old girl in India who needs to choose between supporting her family or getting an education, or as a 14-year-old Afghan seeking asylum in the UK after fleeing the war-torn country where his father was killed. Youth Producing Change shares 11 powerful stories made by teens from across the globe as they share their vision of change.