It's the End of Human Rights (Watch Film Festival)

The festival's closure isn't just a threat to film fests, but empathy itself.

Manufactured Landscapes

In my first year of journalistic writing, over 25 years ago, I wrote about the now defunct Human Rights Watch Film Festival for IndieWire. Somewhat pretentiously, I lead with the following: “If the pen is mightier than the sword, how powerful is a film or videocamera? Powerful enough to topple totalitarian regimes, cease the prejudices of the past, stop the exploitation of women? The films and videos collected in this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival attempt these feats and attempt them unilaterally, creating a multi-faceted picture of the world’s human rights blight.”

I didn’t know it then, but in my coverage of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which announced yesterday it was ending its run after more than 35 years “due to financial constraints,” I think I found my voice as both a writer and a film programmer. At the time, I didn’t know my primary job would be in the documentary field. But in those early years of writing about movies, I must have realized the power of film as political action, something that I still, perhaps naively, believe. Which is why it hurts so much that the festival is no more.

It was at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival that I first discovered and wrote about the incredible and visually stunning work of Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (The Devil Came on Horseback), Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes), James Longley (Sari’s Mother), and Laura Dunn (The Unforeseen). “With images that are as beautiful as they are disturbing,” I wrote, “you’ll be forced to look rather than turn away.” And that was just one stellar year, 2007.

For the Village Voice, in 2012, I wrote about other memorable works, from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry to Call Me Kuchu, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s The Invisible War to a Swiss documentary that has probably vanished in our digital entertainment-scape, Special Flight, which follows a group of close-knit illegal immigrants awaiting deportation in a Swiss detention center in which “the genteel surroundings and tender treatment belie the painful hypocrisies of their situation.”

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival programmers had a knack for programming “issue” films that were also artful and complex—which all good documentaries should be. They didn’t pander to audiences; they didn’t preach; and they showed that the world’s troubles could be conveyed—and perhaps best conveyed—through indelible individuals who audiences could not forget.

The festival’s shuttering is not a good sign for a number of reasons. Let me count the ways. It’s bad for documentaries—the festival, as I mentioned, was an important showcase for some of the year’s most acclaimed nonfiction films. This year’s (final) London Film Festival edition includes strong documentaries such as Tree of Violence, about an anti-war Russian activist and artist, and Mediha, which won the top prize at DOCNYC, but has yet to show much elsewhere in the U.S. What other film events not only harbor but embrace difficult stories about our society? It’s bad for film festivals: a lack of funding and foundational support is hurting film festivals, and when a 30-year-plus event goes down, it shows that even longevity can’t protect an in-theater event.

And lastly, and this is probably the scariest outcome: It’s bad for empathy. Maybe audiences for these kinds of films in theaters has declined, but shouldn’t this be the place to experience these cinematic expressions of pain, suffering, and injustice—as a collective, where we can come together, cry together, and call for action together. You don’t spark change by watching Netflix on your couch.

You feel it in a crowded theater with the filmmakers there to offer context and stories, and perhaps even a real person who has lived through atrocities that you can’t imagine. And then you linger after the screening; you meet the filmmaker or the subject and you’re galvanized even more; you talk with your friends and fellow audience members in the lobby; then you read more about the subject matter, and you become more aware, more empathic, and a more concerned global citizen. If places like this are in shorter supply, that’s bad for, well, humanity.

Okay, maybe that’s all a little too much. But I’m beginning to prep my own little film festival, Doc10, in Chicago, which is now entering its relatively young 9th year, and where I strive to create the same kind of experiences, and I can’t help but worry. If the Human Rights Watch Film Festival can’t make it, can other festivals devoted to documentaries and social issues be far behind?