» Human Rights Watch Film Festival to Feature Palestinian Film ‘Screwdriver’ (Trailer)
IMEMC News - February 2, 2019
▻http://imemc.org/article/human-rights-watch-film-festival-to-feature-palestinian-film-screwdriver
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be presented in London from March 13-22, 2019, featuring 15 award-winning documentary and feature films, Human Rights Watch said today. The international line-up of films from Venezuela, South Africa, Palestine, Thailand, and more offer critical insight into local and global human rights concerns impacting people around the world today, PNN reports.
Many filmmakers, protagonists, Human Rights Watch researchers, and activists will take part in in-depth post-screening Q&A and panel discussions at the Barbican, BFI Southbank, and Regent Street Cinema.
The festival will open at the Barbican on March 14, with Hans Pool’s Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World, which follows the revolutionary rise of the “citizen investigative journalist” collective known as Bellingcat, dedicated to redefining breaking news by exploring the promise of open source investigation. The screening will be followed by an in-depth discussion with Hans Pool and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins.
“At its heart, the work of Human Rights Watch is front-line investigations by expert researchers who check and cross-check facts,” said John Biaggi, director of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. “In this so-called ‘post-truth era’, it is particularly relevant for us to open the 23rd edition of the festival with a film that considers the possibilities and implications of citizen journalism. We are excited to open with ‘Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World,’ a compelling look at the methods and means of this media disrupter”.
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Shot entirely on location in the West Bank with a largely Palestinian crew, the award-winning director Bassam Jarbawi’s debut feature Screwdriver highlights the universal trauma of reintegration after incarceration. Ziad returns home after 15 years in an Israeli jail. Hailed as a hero, with high expectations to settle back quickly into work and love, he is lost in a world he barely recognizes. Effectively capturing this unsettling inability to distinguish reality from hallucination and the haunting of memory, the film immerses viewers in a distinctly Palestinian story.
This year’s Human Rights Watch benefit gala and reception will take place on March 13 at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), screening Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s documentary The Cleaners, which raises essential questions over internet control and the life-threatening erasure of entire resistance movements from the world’s sight.
Audiences also have an opportunity to watch selected festival titles online thanks to the continuing partnership with MUBI mubi.com/humanrightswatch.