Activist Film Fest Comes to Berkeley

Human Rights International Film Festival starts Wednesday.

Throwing a shout out to the modern-day muckrakers, U.C. Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive is hosting the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival starting this Wednesday, February 25, and ending Friday.

The three-day event will showcase six different films, two per day, starting at 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Films include To See if I’m Smiling, a documentary about Jewish girls conscripted into the military. The film focuses on the lives of 18-year-old girls as they participate in the Israeli army's seemingly endless struggles with Palestine within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Another film, Up the Yangtze, is about the Three Gorges Dam project in China, which in its effort to modernize, has ended a way of life for more than two million people along the dammed river’s rising flood path. The film captures the life of the Yu family who are forced to relocate and send their daughter to work on a cruise ship.

Other films that will be shown are The Sari Soldiers, Behave, and Our Disappeared Witness to Hiroshima.

According to Human Rights Watch: “The works we feature help to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and dignity, and celebrate the power of the human spirit and intellect to prevail."

Admission is $9.50 for adults. For more information about the movies, visit hrw.org/en/iff/san-francisco or to buy tickets and get exact show times see bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/hrwiff_2009.

  

Posted at 03:56 PM in Best Of Editor Picks | Permalink