Press Release

(New York) –Human Rights Watch announced today that it would be closing its long-running film festival. Founded in 1988, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival showcased nearly 1,000 independent films, was presented in over 30 cities across the globe, and is the world’s longest running human rights film festival.

“It’s with sadness and deep regret that we have made the difficult decision to close the Human Rights Watch Film Festival,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The film festival is a celebrated cultural institution that educated and inspired hundreds of thousands of filmgoers and filmmakers around the world over three decades, providing a critical space for connection, conversation, and action on human rights issues.”

The decision to close the festival was part of a wider restructuring due to financial constraints, Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch Film Festivals will take place as planned across the United Kingdom and Ireland, opening on March 14, 2024, and across Canada starting on March 21.

Human Rights Watch is immensely proud of the talented film festival leadership and staff, who built partnerships across the human rights community and film industry. The festival established a mainstream platform for impactful films and in-depth conversations about human rights issues, with a priority focus on underrepresented perspectives from around the world.

The festival staff have been instrumental in pushing for increased accessibility standards in the film industry, resulting in three fully inclusive film festivals in the last two years. During the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that shuttered cinemas, the film festival team created a digital streaming site that tripled attendance figures, encouraged festival members to tune in for live conversations, and ensured that the public would not be isolated at home. The innovative site continued the festival’s work of creating spaces for dialogue, connection, and action on human rights issues.

“We owe the Human Rights Watch Film Festival’s success and impact to the longstanding commitment of our festival staff and consultants, volunteers, partners, the filmmakers, and of course our audiences,” Hassan said. “They helped to nurture the human rights storytelling movement that we see thriving today.”

Written by Fred Abrahams, Associate Director for Program at Human Rights Watch, Originally posted to HRW.org

Controversy swirled last week around the award-winning film Sabaya, which covers the dramatic rescue of abused Yezidi women abducted and enslaved by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq. At the heart of the issue is how to obtain informed consent from film subjects who witnessed or suffered horrible abuse and may not be in a situation, or state of mind, to clearly assess risks.

The New York Times reported last week that some of the women in Sabaya say they never agreed to be in the film. Three of the Yezidi survivors said they did not understand they would be in a film or that it could be seen in Iraq, their homeland. A doctor in the film reportedly told the director, Hogir Hirori, that she did not want to appear.

The Stockholm-based Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, vehemently dispute the claims, saying they “received written, verbal or filmed consent from everyone who appears in our film.”

Exactly who agreed to what and how remains unclear, but one conclusion shines bright: The issue of informed consent for documentary films deserves scrutiny and clearer industry standards, especially for subjects who are in vulnerable or at-risk situations.

Informed consent requires telling a person exactly how their information or image will be used, ensuring that they understand what they are agreeing to, and that they are not consenting under pressure or duress. When the subjects recently survived serious abuse, such as sexual slavery or being held in locked camps, two of the crimes covered in Sabaya, the question of if, and when, they are able to make an informed choice has to form part of the calculation.

Informed consent is also not a one-time event. Especially for abuse survivors, a person has the right to change their mind and should be provided with a simple and reliable way to communicate that wish. These standards apply equally around the world.

The documentary film industry should use the discussion around Sabaya to clarify what it considers acceptable practice on informed consent, and how festivals, distributors, and others will vet films to ensure they respect the safety and dignity of survivors.

Best practices for working with survivors of sexual violence in conflict can be found in the draft Murad Code, a global code of conduct driven by Nadia Murad, the Yezidi Nobel Peace Prize laureate who survived ISIS enslavement.

Film industry professionals should heed the code’s pledge: “We will be careful not to make choices for them.”

Check out a power-packed recorded conversation with filmmaker Alba Sotorra Clua, Kurdish Feminist Activist Sevinaz Evdike and Letta Tayler, Associate Director, Crisis and Conflict, HRW and Maya Foa, Joint Executive Director, Reprieve, moderated by Azadeh Moaveni, Author of Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, and Director of the Gender and Conflict Project, International Crisis Group.

"Countries have a responsibility to keep people safe from harm. As an activist and a staff member of Human Rights Watch, I applaud countries for wanting to keep their people safe, and attacks by Isis are reprehensible. Nobody is saying 'Let's make the world less safe." However, I think it is more dangerous to keep these women and their children in these camps - and the men in their prisons - where they are basically rotting and abandoned by their countries: Women are breaking out, and they are paying traffickers, and most of them just want to get home and rebuild their lives. But the more they are abandoned and ignored by their countries, the more they will become vulnerable - or start thinking twice, about whether or not to join Isis, and the same for their children who know they are abandoned by their home countries." - Letta Tayler, HRW (Excerpt from live discussion.) 

About THE RETURN: LIFE AFTER ISIS: Hoda Muthana and Shamima Begum made world headlines after leaving their homes in the US and UK as teenagers to join the extremist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The Return: Life After ISIS is a unique portrait of a group of Western women who pledged their lives to ISIS, but now want to return home to restart their lives. While facing hostile journalists and governments who have left them de-facto stateless, the women confront their truths and try to heal from their trauma in a locked camp in northeast Syria, with the help of Kurdish women’s rights activists. With its rare access to Roj camp, this film is a sensitive portrayal of just a few of the 63,000 women and children held, in dire conditions with no due process, as ISIS suspects and family members in northeast Syria by a Kurdish-led armed group.

“This film cuts through the stereotypes about Western women who joined ISIS and makes a compelling case for bringing them home. In the process, it reveals an unusual sisterhood between these women and a Kurdish social worker who helps them even though ISIS sought to destroy her community.” – Letta Tayler, associate director, Crisis and Conflict Division, Human Rights Watch

By Carlos Ríos Espinosa

Senior Researcher and Advocate, Disability Rights Division

When I was 4 months old, I got polio, and since then I’ve been a wheelchair user. When I was 10, in 1975, my parents found a summer camp for children with disabilities in California and decided it would be a good experience for me.

Summer camp showed me there was a wider world outside my family and that I was able to navigate it. That summer came back to me when I saw the documentary film Crip Camp, which is slated to start streaming on Netflix on March 25 and which is also featured in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

The film traces the birth of the US disability rights movement to a unique summer camp, Camp Jened, managed by people with disabilities like Judy Heumann and members of the ‘60s countercultural movement. Camp Jened provided a space for self-discovery for many teenagers and young adults with disabilities – a place where they could share common concerns and stories about living with a disability in a predominantly able-bodied world.

Above all, they learned how to love themselves and be proud.

It was in part through this space that a group of Americans with disabilities decided to advocate for their rights, putting political pressure on state and federal authorities. Eventually, this movement led to the passage of the groundbreaking Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

This legislation influenced movements worldwide and inspired many of the main principles in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006. Hundreds of people with disabilities from many countries were key in drafting this treaty, in the spirit of the movement’s motto: “Nothing about us without us.”  

The film made me realize the importance of building spaces for people with disabilities to organize. We need a strong community of people with disabilities who both embrace themselves and are ready to fight for our place in society, to make our voices heard and respected. This is not easy, as Crip Camp shows.

Governments and civil society need to promote political spaces for people with disabilities for them to build self-awareness and empowerment. My experience in summer camp in 1975 lasted only two weeks – I wished I had more spaces like that throughout my life. Generations of people with disabilities around the world will surely profit from looking at this US experience.