Bologna Human Rights Festival update: preaching to the converted?

“We don’t talk enough yet about human rights issues,” Giulia Grassili tells me. We’re sitting in the bar area of the festival while volunteers carry tables, pull beers and serve Bolognese specialities like crescentini (fried bread with pancetta). Giulia is the festival’s artistic director - a petite woman with boundless energy. All week I’ve watched her scrolling messages on her Blackberry while racing between cinemas.

Guilia explains that the festival is part of the international Human Rights Film Network, a series of festivals that occur every year in cities such as Paris, Buenos Aires, New York and Seoul. She was one of the Network’s founding members, along with Professor Todd Waller (formerly of John Hopkins University, Bologna), and says, “There are not enough events to promote different visions that show respect for human rights”. Her goal for the festival was “to reach people not interested in human rights at all.” She wanted them to “come and experience something that would make them think.” By mixing “Bologna’s fragments” she explains, participants interact with a high cultural institution (like a university), but they can still be touched by marginalised people. “I didn’t want it to be depressing! But film stays inside you. You think about it.”

She tells me it’s the first time she’s really thought about any of this, but I don’t believe her. The films on show have been so thought-provoking and of such quality that they could only have been chosen after deep consideration and care, belying the casualness of Guilia’s tone.



My only quibble about the festival is that it does not seem to reach out to audiences who might be challenged by it’s themes and ideas – the festival-goers have been overwhelmingly young and ‘converted’. The presence of the B-Boys Bologna, who are DJing behind us before the Closing Party, triggers a deliberately leading question: is the festival doing enough to attract a more diverse crowd beyond the young believers? Giulia nods but not because she fully agrees with the first question. “It’s the nature of the cultural business”, she says. Bologna is, after all, a university city. But she admits that they need to engage with an older audience. One way of achieving this was to prepare festival food with the help of a nearby centre for elderly people.

The Award for Best Documentary went to Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney, a film about the Bush Administration’s techniques of repression and torture in the War on Terror. Now that Guantanamo Bay is closed and America’s extra-judicial activities there are under closer scrutiny, the Oscar-winning film is a prism for examining how the most marginalised and unpopular people (terror-suspects) are extremely vulnerable to human rights abuse; it alludes to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 'No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’

It is a reminder that the more conscious we are of abuses, the more universal human rights become. Events like the Network Human Rights festivals help to enrich our understanding of such abuses, and entrench and spread the rights that guard from them.