Human Rights Film Festival

I am president of my university’s Amnesty International chapter— an organization that works to defend and fight for human rights no matter where you live, what you believe in, or who you are.

Last week, we partnered with the Dept of Human Rights Studies to bring about the 9th (not so annual) Human Rights Film Festival.

Film challenges people to act in ways that lecture or text simply can’t. We worked purposefuly to showcase films that would move everyone. Here are the three films we chose and a little about them.

A Cambodian Spring

This documentary follows an unlikely group of activists- a monk and two fearless women, as they fight an aggressive fight against land grabbing and forced evictions in the name of “economic progress”. This film was shot over the course of 6 years, garnered the attention of American diplomats and celebrities, and called out the World Bank for wrongly financially supporting a corporation committing mass human right violations.

Roma

Upon first watching you might be too engrossed in the cinematic poetry that is Cuaron’s (autobiographical) masterpiece, but with a bit more studying you will also catch moments of blatant political violence during 1970’s Mexico. There is no prerequisite in watching the film, but I would do some fine tuning on the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and the leaked report by the Mexican Government that came out in 2006.

The Sentence

This documentary is probably the hardest to watch out of all of them. A woman gets sentenced for a crime committed years ago on conspiracy charges interrupting her life as a mother, a wife, a sister, and a daughter. She gets sentenced for 15 years— harsh and unnecessary, but speaks to the realities and the injustices of mandatory maximum drug sentencing. But this sentence does not only affect her— now her marriage, her daughters, and her family have all been sentenced with her.

add these to your watching list!