14th International Film Festival WATCH DOCS. Human Rights in Film is under way

The 14th International Film Festival WATCH DOCS. Human Rights in Film kicked off on Saturday 5 December. For 14 years this major worldwide human rights film festival has been committed to promoting ambitious, social documentaries among Polish viewers.

The highlight of this year’s festival is a retrospective of the films of an outstanding American filmmaker, Joe Berlinger, whose “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger” launched the 14th WATCH DOCS. The WATCH DOCS award contest spotlights thirteen excellent documentaries which discuss the broad issues of human rights. Among them is “Return to Homs” awarded in Sundance and “Judgement in Hungary”, the most successful Hungarian documentary of the past few years.

In addition, the festival’s audience have the chance to see a retrospective “Searching for Europe” and two film reviews: “Syria – Chronicles of Catastrophe” showing the ongoing drama in Syria and “Ukraine 2014” depicting the situation in Ukraine.

This year, one of the most interesting satellite events of the Festival is a photo exhibition, “The Sochi Project. An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus” by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen. This is the Polish début of the Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra and the reporter Arnold van Bruggen, who have been documenting the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi for the seven preceding years. Their project is not only an original artistic commentary on the condition of the Putinist Russia, but also an attempt to uncover the complex history of the Northern Caucasus region.

The Festival will conclude on Sunday 14 December.

To view the Festival’s programme, use this link.