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Human rights film festival

A human rights film festival is an activist film festival that screens films on human right related topics and hosts pre/post-screening events to promote awareness for human rights causes. Human rights film festivals fall beneath the category of topic specific film festivals. These festivals employ the use of universal human rights language, made popular by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, to convey the importance of the festivals' programmes to their audiences. The first human rights film festival to take place anywhere around the world was the New York City based Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) in 1988. Since then many other human rights film festivals have formed around the world with the most notable festivals being One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Movies that Matter in The Hague, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Festival Internacional de Cine de Derechos Humanos (FICDH) in Buenos Aires, and Freedom Film Festival (FFF), organized in Kuala Lumpur. Movies that Matter has also created The Human Rights Film Network which aids in facilitating the creation of new human rights film festivals, while also allowing existing human rights film festivals membership to their network by agreeing to abide by their Charter. Although human rights film festivals are widely praised for their efforts to raise awareness on human rights issues they have also been subject to criticism surrounding issues of the "humanitarian gaze", NGOization, and commercialization.

History
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) was the first film festival to focus specially on human rights films. == Notable festivals ==
Notable festivals
Amnesty International Film Festival, which began in 1995, became Movies that Matter International in 2006. Over the years it has dealt with issues of the military dictatorships in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. It has taken place every year since 2003 and is supported by the largest local human rights NGO Komas. It is the country's only international human rights film festival. The festival acts as a meeting place for activists and filmmakers to show films/videos while also functioning as a local distribution network where copies of films are exchanged. Freedom Film Festival films screened in 2012 and 2014 at StoS Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia, funded by partner NGO EngageMedia. This allowed the Indonesian audience to see similar activism happening across the region creating a solidarity network. It also allowed films strictly censored in Malaysia to reach an audience in Jakarta. == Criticism ==
Criticism
Some criticisms levelled at human rights film festivals, according to social work studies scholar Sonia Tascón, are their tendency, in a 'Western' context, to look out. Film festival scholars Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin also explain that since film festivals are commercial spaces, depicting human rights in this context raises questions regarding their commodification under capitalism and neoliberalism. These criticisms have been levelled by Winton and Turnin to consider how films on human rights topics can be shown in a film festival setting without losing their radical and revolutionary characteristics, to make the audience feel activated rather than only empathetic. == References ==
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