For the second year in a row, the Echoes of One World film festival comes to Washington, bringing the highlights of the Czech Republic’s foremost documentary film festival to the United States.
The One World International Human Rights Film Festival has found massive success in the Czech Republic, to the tune of more than 100,000 paid admissions last year, according to the festival’s director, Igor Blazevic. The festival is sponsored by People in Need, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to relief work and development assistance for countries where human rights aren’t guaranteed.
Born of the Velvet Revolution, the Czechoslovak student uprising of 1989 that resulted in the overthrow of that country’s Communist government, People in Need conceives of itself as a way of giving back to the world after the world aided it in its struggle against communism.
“Some of the people with the dissident background from the anti-Communist media underground … [thought] we should mobilize the post-Communist society in assisting others [the same way] the dissidents have been assisted,” said Mr. Blazevic.
Considering the large number of artists involved in the Velvet Revolution — foremost among them the playwright, essayist and Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Vaclav Havel — it’s little wonder that the medium of film would be employed to further their agenda.
“We started to organize the Human Rights Film Festival in order to use the power of film to basically bring closer the stories of our time,” Mr. Blazevic said.
Since its founding in 1999, the festival has expanded immensely: The festival screens its program in Prague and then takes the show on the road, traveling to other parts of the Czech Republic; 2008’s record attendance of 100,000 was split roughly 50/50 between Prague and the hinterlands.
But the festival now reaches far beyond the borders of the Czech Republic. Satellite festivals, like the one this week in Washington, take place all around the globe. Some, like Washington’s, are easy to organize and face little opposition from the government . Others, however, are a little trickier. Consider Belarus.
“Basically, how it worked is that we are in contact with democratic forces in Belarus,” Mr. Blazevic says of how the festivals in less-free countries get started. “They have expected already in advance that authorities will basically cancel it. Usually an easy way to do it is to [put] pressure on somebody who’s running the cinema … then the person running the cinema basically pulls his agreement to let us use the cinema a day before the official screening.”
Bereft of a home base from which to launch the festival, Mr. Blazevic and his Belarussian co-hosts decentralized the proceedings and bring movies to people in less traditional settings.
“Since our colleagues in Belarus have expected that, they have already in advance prepared the DVD copies with the Belarussian subtitles,” he said, and explained that they “are very quickly able to distribute the DVDs around the network of people who are operating peacefully to engage the regime. And then they screen them in their homes. If you can’t do it in a public space, you can always organize it at a home screening or screening in an office.”
Mr. Blazevic notes that this is another lesson drawn from the Czech dissident movement, which would often organize theatrical performances, concerts, lectures and readings in people’s homes to stay out of the spotlight of the authorities.
Fortunately, here in Washington it’s not necessary to go to such extremes. The festival began Wednesday evening with an Avalon Theatre screening of Jana Sevcikova’s powerful documentary “Gyumri,” about the devastating 1988 earthquake in the eponymous Armenian city. Screenings continue through Saturday at the Avalon and the Goethe-Institut.
Miss Sevcikova’s film is a prime example of the festival’s commitment to quality over simply making political points.
“We have been very strict in artistic quality of the filmmaking,” said Mr. Blazevic, noting that they’re not willing to compromise that quality in order to get a film on a particular topic that might be of interest. Judging from Miss Sevcikova’s entry, it’s obvious that their dedication to quality is paying off.
It’s an artistic work, neatly combining archival footage of the earthquake’s destruction with filmed testimonials and interviews. Miss Sevcikova has managed to capture the heartbreak of the town — in which tens of thousands of children were killed during the earthquake — and what it means to lose almost an entire generation to a natural disaster.
“You don’t see any tears in the film,” Miss Sevcikova said through a translator. “That would be too easy. It’s important that you know one thing about the film, and that is that we refilmed the testimonies several times so it’s not the first take. We wanted the people to talk several times on camera, so their pain is really the crystallized pain they have inside and not the outside pain brought out by tears and emotional breakdowns.”
Friday and Saturday’s screenings at the Goethe-Institut are free to attend, so film lovers have little excuse not to go. Friday evening’s features are “We,” a documentary about Chinese citizens committed to political change, and “Reckoning,” a feature following the efforts of International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno to bring members of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the Congo to justice.
The highlight on Saturday night is “Life After the Fall,” a look at the life of a regular Shi’ite family after the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq. It’s a great movie, a tale of hope, progress and sadness all wrapped into one that provides a perspective on Iraq not often seen by American audiences: that of the Iraqi people. Bracingly honest, those on both sides of the Iraq question will find something to enjoy here.
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