The Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival is a project of the Human Rights Watch Canada Committee. The festival brings to life human rights abuses through storytelling in a way that challenges individuals to empathize and demand justice for all people.
The Canadian premiere of Ali Samadi’s documentary, The Green Wave, about the tumultuous Iranian presidential elections in 2009, will open the 8th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival, co-presented with TIFF, tonight at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The festival will include Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin’s Academy Award®-shortlisted Enemies of the People, which documents in detail the killings that overshadowed Cambodia for years; Laura Poitras’ award-winning, The Oath, is a complex portrait of Yemen as soon through the eyes of Osama Bin Laden’s driver; and Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez’s You Don’t Like The Truth, which documents the interrogation of the child soldier Omar Khadr during his by Canadian agents.
Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese focuses on a theatre production of 12 Angry Men performed by inmates of a Lebanese prison and demonstrates what alternate programs can accomplish in the prison system, and Justin Chadwick’s, The First Grader, follows an 84-year-old ex-Mau Mau rebel’s efforts to become educated.
Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovits’ Familia is the story of Naty, a mother who must leave her family in Peru to work in Spain in order to support them; Illégal is Olivier Masset-Depasse’s harrowing account of living in the new internment camps for illegal immigrants in Belgium; Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All follows Chanda, a 12-year-old girl who must take on the responsibility for her entire family in a small AIDS-ravaged South African township; and When We Leave is Feo Aladag’s emotional account of a highly publicized honour killing in Berlin in 2005.
Tickets can be purchased online at tiff.net, by phone at 416-599-TIFF (8433) and 1-888-599-8433 or in person at TIFF Bell Lightbox Box Office, Reitman Square, 350 King Street West, Toronto. The festival itself will run until March 4th.