UK: Human Rights Watch international film festival

London?s 12th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) will take place from March 12?21, 2008.

The festival will screen 25 films from 19 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Chad, Chile, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, former Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Liberia, Nepal, Palestine, Sudan, Uganda, and the United States.

Among the selected films are Lisa Jackson?s The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, winner of the special jury prize at this year?s Sundance Film Festival (Jackson is expected to attend the screening); Hana Makmalbaf?s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame , about the hardships faced by an Afghan girl trying to get an education, a 2007 San Sebastian Film Festival special jury prize winner; and Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi?s Persepolis, up for an Academy Award for best animated feature and co-winner of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival?s jury prize. Paronnaud and Satrapi are expected to attend the two scheduled screenings – the first one will be a benefit gala on March 12; the following day, Persepolis will officially open the festival.

The HRWIFF will be held at The Ritzy, Clapham Picture House, Gate Cinema, Greenwich Picturehouse, Renoir, and ICA. For more details, visit www.hrw.org/iff.

Human Rights Watch launched its International Film Festival 19 years ago to educate and galvanise a broad cross-section of supporters through the power of film, and this year one festival title links directly to the work of Human Rights Watch. In The Dictator Hunter , Human Rights Watch?s Reed Brody is tireless in his pursuit of Chadian dictator Hissene Habré. "If you kill one person, you go to jail. If you kill 40 people, they put you in an insane asylum,? says Brody, who will attend the festival screenings. "But if you kill 40,000 people, you get a comfortable exile with a bank account in another country, and that?s what we want to change here."

The pursuit and documentation of dictators underpins three other films in this year?s festival. The 2,000 hours of footage from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is culled to 69 minutes to create a taut and stirring narrative in Michael Christoffersen?s Milosevic on Trial. And in Kalinovski Square, the celebrated Belarussian director Yury Khashchavatski continues his longstanding and personally dangerous film confrontation with "Europe?s last dictator," President Lukashenko of Belarus. The film addresses the rigged 2006 elections, including Lukashenko?s surreal propaganda machine as well as astonishing scenes of the pro-democracy rallies and protests in Kalinovski Square.

Former cultural advisor to Salvador Allende and internationally respected playwright Ariel Dorfman will attend screenings of A Promise to the Dead, which documents his return to Chile with filmmaker Peter Raymont in late 2006, at the time Augusto Pinochet, Dorfman?s long-time nemesis, is dying. On September 11, 1973, Dorfman was spared the fate of most of his colleagues when Chile?s military, led by Pinochet, attacked and killed democratically elected President Allende and his ministers at the presidential palace. Years later, Dorfman discovered that his name was struck off the list of people who Allende called to stand against the attackers, so that he could live to tell what happened that day.

More info
www.hrw.org/iff/2008/london