February : FICCO (Mexico City International Festival of Contemporary Cinema)
ARTICLE 19 participated in the fourth FICCO international film festival held in Mexico City and sponsored the human rights prize for the best documentary “Cine y Derechos Humanos”.

Members of the jury included: Tim Dirdamal, Film Director, Sam Green, Film Director, Francisco López, Director of the Huelva Film Festival (Spain), Mony de Swaan, former General Director of Pfizer, and Dr. Agnes Callamard, ARTICLE 19’s Executive Director.

The winner of the FICCO Prize for best human rights documentary was The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez, from Director Kieran Fitzgerald which recounts, in chilling detail, the 1997 shooting of a Mexican-American high school student by a four-man U.S. Marine border patrol in Redford, Texas. Narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, with testimonials from Hernández’s family and friends, as well as three of the four implicated Marines, Fitzgerald’s film exposes the complete absence of justice and even ten years after the shooting, remains of utmost relevance to Mexico/USA border issues.

February-March, Democracy in Dakar, Dakar, Senegal
In February, ARTICLE 19’s West Africa representative participated in the making of a documentary on freedom of speech in Dakar, the second in a currently two-part episode by the Democracy in Dakar project.

The Democracy in Dakar Project is an interactive multimedia project founded by Nomadic Wax/Notable and co produced by Sol Productions. Its goal is to document the democratic process as it unfolds on the Streets of Dakar through documentary film, audio recordings and ethnographic research. From February 14th to March 12th, the production team was in Dakar working with local activists, politicians, journalists and artists. A mixture of journalism, academic inquiry, internet reality TV, and hip hop activism, the Democracy in Dakar project will document this historic period of time in its entirety.

Click here to view the film

March: Film and Censorship, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London
ARTICLE 19 in partnership with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is co-presenting Deepa Mehta’s film Water, nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007. Water offers the final part of Mehta’s stunning trilogy (Fire, 1996; Earth, 1998) and tells the story of Chuihya, widowed at the age of eight and sent to live in a widow’s ashram in 1930’s India. Filming for Water was to begin in Varanasi, India in 2000, but the production was halted by riots led by Hindu nationalist groups who demolished the set and threatened Mehta in reaction to the film’s controversial subject.

ARTICLE 19 is organising a panel discussion on Film and Censorship on Saturday 24 March with:
 Rex Bloomstein, Filmmaker, Director of KZ (Chair)
 Deepa Mehta , Filmmaker, Water
 Michael Chanan, Filmmaker and Academic, University of the of West of England
 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Filmmaker and Academic, Divorce Iranian Style

More on panel discussion


And finally...
Watch this space for more 20th anniversary celebrations including details of the November Grand Finale.