Culture

Iraq, hip-hop and gay jihad: the 9th Human Rights International Film Festival

April 02, 2009
A Jihad For Love: "human rights" films are not all doom and gloom
A Jihad For Love: "human rights" films are not all doom and gloom

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A Jihad For Love: "human rights" films are not all doom and gloom.

Ten days and nights of human rights films doesn’t sound like casual entertainment. It sounds like work, and chastening work at that. But the 9th Human Rights Nights International Film Festival, which runs until 5th April in picturesque Bologna, combines cinema with arts and music to create an uplifting atmosphere, despite the often harrowing topics explored.

The theme of this year’s festival is "in-difference"—a kind of treble entendre on the differences that motivate discrimination, the right to be different, and the indifference with which we watch persecution happen.

All the film-makers consciously explore human rights issues, but offer disparate insights and approaches. A film about bomb disarmament in Iraq is followed by a documentary about polemical hip-hop artists in Senegal. Parvez Sharma's 2007 film A Jihad For Love is a playful look at Islam and homosexuality. Amidst the painful and heart-rending stories examined, there is levity.

Some use documentary film to portray the human condition, some to indict abusers, while others use fiction to project dreams of a better world. As well as offering a platform for lesser-known films, the festival also features the work of established film-makers such as veteran journalist John Pilger's The War on Democracy, or The Times of Harvey Milk by Rob Epstein (the inspiration for Gus Van Sant's oscar-winning biopic Milk).

Many of the films were made in places where human rights are still being violated; in that respect, they are testimonials to both abuse and acts of bravery. Each helps to take human rights issues out of academic circles and European commissions, and instead places them in the public consciousness. Over the next few days I'll be blogging from Bologna, in the hope of sharing some of the stories and insights the festival has to offer.