5th Edition of Human Rights Film Festival

The 5th Human Rights Film Festival is scheduled to take place between 8 and 14 February at Zagreb’s Europa film theater. This year, exceptionally, the festival takes place in February and not in its traditional slot during the International Human Rights Days in the first half of December.

This year’s International Human Rights Film Festival will last a whole week and offers to its audiences a number of films on human rights which were produced around the world, discussion panels and round tables, lectures and exhibitions. The festival is organized as a review by the Association for Culture Development and the Multimedia Institute in cooperation with the Students’ Center. Human rights are the focus of the work of many organizations. Initiatives such as the Human Rights Film Festival revolve around the topic of human rights which is presented on the cinema screen through the different film genres. The underlying idea behind the festival is to use this popular and artistic media to initiate debate, to open the media to the issue of human rights and to raise awareness of the most topical social issues. Despite the very clear orientation and very well defined content-driven guidelines, the festival’s program is primarily determined by the quality criteria. One of the festival’s principal long-term ambitions is to actively promote and popularize a critical approach to the focal issues of the contemporary global and local environments. With that goal in mind the festival is organized as a broad platform whose various activities involve a number of players who already play an active role in promoting human rights and it aims at establishing a permanent space for critical public discourse. In addition to the film program, there are also a number of other events such as guest appearances, presentations, round tables, exhibitions and concerts. The central event in Zagreb will be subsequently followed by 3-day festival presentations in some 15 Croatian towns and cities in collaboration with the local cultural initiatives and activist groups. 

The film program is marked by the variety of film types, genres and styles. As always, particular attention is paid to the diversity of the presented cinema productions, some of which the local audiences may not be too familiar with. When it comes to maintaining and promoting the film culture, a special place is devoted to the retrospectives of international film masters and works by authors who are closely connected to film art.