16th IFF WATCH DOCS kicks off in two days!

The 16th International Film Festival WATCH DOCS. Human Rights in Film will start on Friday 9 December at the Muranów Cinema. WATCH DOCS is one of the major human rights film festivals worldwide. The agenda of the 7-day festival includes more than 60 films from all over the world. The Festival will conclude on Thursday 15 December.
The special guest of the 16th IFF WATCH DOCS will be Jonathan Littell, the author of Les Bienveillantes and a winner of the Prix Goncourt. The Festival’s opening ceremony will be highlighted by the Polish premiere of Littell’s film debut, Wrong Elements, a story of child soldiers forcibly enlisted to Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda in the late 1980s. The film’s global premiere took place earlier in this year in May, at the Cannes Festival.

Twelve outstanding documentaries will compete for the WATCH DOCS Award this year. Apart from the opening film, the competition lineup includes Hooligan Sparrow directed by Nanfu Wang, Maya Zinshtein’s Forever Pure, A 157 by Behrooz Nooranipoor and DIY Country directed by Antony Butts.

This year’s Festival will be an opportunity to take a good look at the primary problems of today’s world – populism and freedom of speech. We will show documentaries that depict people who stubbornly fight the good fight for human rights. We will tell stories of protagonists, activists and filmmakers whose work is a tangible proof of the struggle for values in which they incessantly believe. Our documentaries are like watchdogs – their voices are to warn us all.

Festival’s screenings will take place at the Muranów Cinema, CSW Ujazdowski Castle and the Antropos Cinema. The special screening of The Last Laugh will take place at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN. Admission to all the Festival’s events is free, entrance is ticketed.
To find out more, go to www.watchdocs.pl.