March 16-25, 2005
Curzon Mayfair, The Ritzy, ICA Cinema, Gate Cinema,

The festival is delighted to announce the Benefit Gala Premiere of Raoul Peck's powerful Sometimes in April www.hbo.com at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival Benefit Gala (March 16, Curzon Mayfair, HRW fundraiser) and Opening Night Film (March 17, Ritzy), both attended by Raoul Peck. Shot on location in Rwanda, Sometimes in April is a compelling retelling of the tragedy of the some 100 days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Written, directed and executive produced by acclaimed director Raoul Peck, the film's epic canvas follows a Rwandan family as it is torn apart by the genocide. It also explores the response of the international community, particularly the United States, to the atrocities and efforts to seek justice for the crimes committed. Playing "In Competition" at the Berlin Film Festival, Sometimes in April will have its UK Premiere at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival some 4 weeks later.

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival gets people thinking and talking. This year's programme tackles subjects as far ranging as the birth of Independent Black Cinema; legal rights denied gay couples; post-war reconciliation and adjustment; children and young people's rights; filmmaker responsibility in the face of dire poverty; the life-affirming qualities of music; the devastation of civil war; and stories of occupation.

The festival will preview three features which will receive UK releases in the following months, Baadasssss!, Innocent Voices and Private:

Mario Van Peebles's Baadasssss! www.bfi.org.uk is the triumphant evocation of the tough, uncompromising world of guerrilla filmmaking and one of the best and most entertaining movies about the making of a movie. Baadasssss! re-tells the making of his father Melvin's Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song, the legendary 1971 film which sparked the birth of Independent Black Cinema and was embraced by the Black Panthers as a 'revolutionary masterpiece'. Mario Van Peebles and Melvin Van Peebles will attend the screening.

Luis Mandoki's (acclaimed Mexican director of Gaby - A True Story) Innocent Voices, one of five films in the festival from Latin America, is set in El Salvador during its bloody civil war (mid 1980s), and is a resounding celebration of the small acts of resistance performed by ordinary citizens, no matter their age. Weakened by two years of fighting, the El Salvadorian army decides to replenish its ranks with the nation's young sons. Our protagonist, the fatherless 11-year-old Chava manages to escape the fate of many of his young friends but feels powerless against the ceaseless violence everywhere, but his life is changed forever by the visit of guerrilla-fighting uncle Beto.

Saverio Costanzo's Private -- winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Silver Leopard for Best Actor for Mohammad Bakri (Locarno Film Festival 2004) -- approaches the Israeli Palestinian conflict through the eyes of one Palestinian householdóa well-educated, middle-class family who are totally divided about whether to leave or stay in their house. Soon, their domestic arguments give way to a harsher reality when a group of Israeli soldiers enters the home unannounced and occupies it as an observation post. They divide the house into three areas: one for the Israelis, one for the Palestinian family, and a common space to be shared. As the two parties get to know each other and come to an uneasy equilibrium, we begin to hope that some kind of understanding will follow. However, Saverio Costanzo, who will attend the festival, provides no easy outs, no Hollywood resolutions; this war offers no obvious answers and the director captures its harrowing complexities with unerring accuracy.

Easy answers are equally hard to find in acclaimed filmmaker Randa Chahal-Sabbag's (Civilized People/Civilisees, winner of the HRWIFF 2001 Nestor Almendros Award) The Kite, a beautifully rendered drama set in her native Lebanon which tells the story of 16-year-old Lamia, who, on her wedding day, must cross the barbed wire barrier that separates her Lebanese village from that of her cousin and fiancÈ Samy, whose village has been annexed by Israel. Between the villages, the border is heavily patrolled. The checkpoint, controlled by both sides, permits newlyweds and corpses to return to their home villages. Lamia reaches the family of her fiancÈ, abandoning her younger brother, her school, her kite, her mother, her past. But she refuses to consummate her marriage; instead she gradually falls in love with a young Israeli soldier who has been watching her since the day she crossed the border for the first time. Randa Chahal-Sabbag will attend the festival.

War is never far from the news headlines but we rarely witness the true realities of war. Many filmmakers this year have turned their lenses to post-war adjustment and reconciliation: Pulled From The Rubble; Video Letters; Midwinter Night's Dream; and Dias De Santiago all focus on different aspects of this complex subject. Whilst two very different films from West Africa reveal two converse aspects of war: the brutality of conflict in Liberia: An Uncivil War; and triumph over conflict in The Refugee All Stars from Sierrra Leone.

Pulled From The Rubble www.beguiledeye.com is the extraordinary first film from Margaret Loescher, about her father Gil Loescher who was the only survivor of a high-level meeting at the UN following the bomb attack on the building in Iraq, August 2003. Through poignantly honest narration and observational scenes of high emotion, his daughter records the family's recovery during the months following the bombing. Margaret Loescher will attend the screenings.

Ten years after the signing of the Dayton peace agreements that ended the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, the populations of the war-scarred former Yugoslavia are still struggling to achieve reconciliation. Videoletters www.videoletters.net , a groundbreaking and emotionally uplifting series of short documentaries by Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek, attempts to bring together old friends and neighbours of different nationalities who have had no contact since the war. In each episode, two people exchange a video letter, explaining how this situation has come to be. Many of the participants then agree to meet - the first time since the war started. The significance of Videoletters becomes more apparent with the knowledge that every public television station in the former Yugoslavia has agreed to broadcast at least ten of the video letters this year, the first time the stations have collaborated on joint programming since before the war. Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek will attend festival screenings.

The scars of the Balkans war are further highlighted in Goran Paskaljevic's (The Powder Keg, aka Cabaret Balkan) powerful Midwinter Night's Dream, www.bavaria-film-international.de a work that explores post-war Serbia and the quiet tragedy that is unfolding in this psychologically devastated country. Set in the winter of 2004, Lazar (Lazar Ristovski), a Serbian Army deserter sent to prison for many years, returns home to find his home occupied by Jasna (Jasna Zalica), a single mother who is raising her 12 year old autistic daughter Jovana (stunningly played by Jovana Mitic who is severely autistic). Mother and daughter have nowhere else to go and Lazar doesn't have the heart to make them leave. Paskaljevic's story is ultimately tragic, and yet the characters are so determinedly optimistic that it's hard not to see hope in these three people lost in their own worlds. Goran Paskaljevic will attend the screenings.

Through uplifting music and emotional stories of six characters in The Refugee All Stars www.refugeeallstars.org we begin to understand the brutal realities of a war so often dismissed by the mass media and are witness to the ability of individuals to sustain hope and create art in a landscape dominated by rage and loss. The festival will feature a Preview Screening of The Refugee All Stars which tells the remarkable and ultimately life-affirming story of a group of six Sierra Leonean musicians who come together to form a band while living as refugees in the Republic of Guinea. First-time filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White will attend the screenings.

In Liberia: An Uncivil War www.gabrielfilms.com filmmaker Jonathan Stack and London based photo-journalist James Brabazon (who will attend the screenings) reveal the insanity of civil war. Liberia, 2003: two armies are in the final battle of a decade-long civil war, holding the capital under siege while thousands die from mortar shells launched from afar. As the soldiers, mostly teenagers, fight a bloody urban battle, the nation prays that American forces show up to put an end to the violence. James Brabazon travels with the rebel army, the Lurd, as they march on the capital city whilst Jonathan Stack films in Monrovia capturing the last months of President Charles Taylor's regime, including a series of exclusive interviews with the elusive Charles Taylor, a man since indicted for heinous abuses against civilians, sexual slavery, and the use of child soldiers. Both filmmakers gained extraordinary access to both sides in the conflict and the film gives palpable sense of life in a war zone. The filmmakers won the International Documentary Association's 2004 Courage Under Fire Award for their camerawork in the film.

Post-conflict trauma affects soldiers as well as civilians and this subject is strikingly explored in the critically acclaimed and award-winning Peruvian drama Dias De Santiago which is also one of five films in the festival from Latin-America. Director JosuÈ Mendez (debut feature as director) skillfully interweaves black and white and colour footage in a way that both heightens the film's realism and the protagonist, Santiago's, sense of despair. After serving several years in the Peruvian army fighting terrorist subversion and drug-trafficking inside his own country, Santiago, an intense, angry, and frustrated 23-year-old, returns to present-day Lima in hopes of living a normal life. He quickly finds his native Lima an unwelcoming place - his army buddies have turned to crime; prospective employers won't hire him; his applications for credit are refused. But worst of all, Santiago finds that his friends, family, and young, professional wife are unable to understand him.

Swedish photographer and journalist Mikael Wistrˆm's Compadre documents a Peruvian family who struggle to make ends meet, and examines the dynamics and difficulties of the relationship between the filmmaker and the father Daniel Barrientos, who first came across each other in 1974. Mikael Wistrˆm will attend the festival.

Six years ago the festival screened Patricio Guzm·n's seminal 1975 documentary The Battle of Chile together with his documentary Chile, Obstinate Memory. Exiled Guzm·n continues to chronicle his country's political history and this year the festival screens the director's Salvadore Allende which interweaves his own footage of Allende's rise and fall with interviews with friends and family, to piece together a portrait of the complicated, passionate man who took his political philosophy from a shoemaker. The film includes a frank interview with the former US Ambassador to Chile, who recalls looking on in dismay as the CIA plotted Allende's demise.

Basic rights are for many people taken for granted but for some it's not so easy. Tying the Knot www.tyingtheknotthemovie.com explores legal rights denied to gay couples because their civil marriages count for nothing in the eyes of the law. Filmmaker Jim De Seve (who will attend the screening) has constructed a compelling and affecting film which digs deeply into the past and present to uncover the meaning of civil marriage. For many children and young people basic rights are denied, and in Living Rights www.dovanafilms.nl filmmaker Duco Tellegen (Behind Closed Eyes), who has made a career of exploring the rich psychological terrain of children and young adults in critical moments of change, explores dilemmas facing three different young people on different continents. Yoshi tells the story of 16-year-old Yoshinori who has Aspergers Syndrome whose dream is to attend a regular Japanese high school. Yoshi makes a strong case for all of us to believe he should; Toti is a Masai girl of fourteen. When she was eleven, her mother told her that she would be married off. The cattle her family would receive from her marriage were badly needed for the family to survive. Toti decided to run away, so her twin sister was married off in her place. Three years later, Toti decides to try and reconnect with her sister and family; eleven-year-old Lena lives with her foster mother Galah in a village near the nuclear reactor of Chernobyl. Lena's biological mother lives in Minsk, where radioactivity readings are much lower. She is unable to take care of Lena who is exhibiting health problems, and hopes Lena will choose to go live with an Italian family that has offered to adopt her. Pulling Lena the other way is Galah, who hopes Lena will choose to stay with her.

Whilst the festival focuses on film it also acknowledges the power of other art-forms to inform and empower. The Royal Court Theatre's International Playwrights Programme has collaborated with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival since 2002, introducing specially commissioned short human rights plays from over a dozen countries. Some of these plays will be presented before related screenings, plus for the first year, a co-presentation between Trolley Books and the festival of a special photo exhibit Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 by Stanley Greene which takes place at Trolley Gallery from March 16-27.

For full programme details click on: www.hrw.org/iff