Today marks the start of the 11^th Human Rights Film Festival hosted by Ditshwanelo which is the Botswana Centre for Human Rights.

Ditshwanelo was established in 1993 and is to date the only organisation which advocates for the promotion and protection of human rights in Botswana society. They seek to educate, research, counsel and mediate on matters of human rights, with unambiguous consideration of those considered insignificant and those who are disempowered.

In pursuit of this mission, the Ditshwanelo organises this Film Festival in order to raise awareness and provide education on human rights.

The films will be held at the Audio-Visual Centre at Maru a Pula School.

TICKETS = P25.00

FREE ENTRY FOR ALL STUDENTS

Thursday, 24 March 2011

The Day My God Died is a feature-length documentary that presents the stories of young girls whose lives have been shattered by the child sex trade. They describe the day they were abducted from their village and sold into sexual servitude as, “The Day My God Died.”

The film provides actual footage from the brothels of Bombay, known even to tourists as “The Cages,” captured with “spy camera” technology. It weaves the stories of girls, and their stolen hopes and dreams, into an unforgettable examination of the growing plague of child sex slavery.

Through the film we come to know victims such as Gina, sold into sex slavery at age 7 and beaten with sticks and aluminum rods. Anita, lured by a friend then drugged and sold at age 12, was beaten and threatened that she would be buried alive. Girls are gang-raped, beaten and forced to service up to 20 clients a day as they are held in perpetual sexual servitude.

The film also introduces us to the heroes of the movement to abolish child sex slavery – non-profit organizations which rescue and care for former sex slaves. Some victims have emerged to form their own underground railway out of slavery. Maili, trafficked at 19 along with her infant daughter, risks her life to help other girls. We see Jyoti, sold at age12, lead a raid on a brothel resulting in the rescue of seven girls and the arrest of two brothel owners.

Children are the commodity consumed by the voracious and sophisticated international sex trade. Recruiters capture them, smugglers transport them, brothel owners enslave them, corrupt police betray them and customers rape and infect them. Every person in the chain profits except for the girls, who pay the price with their lives. Sexual servitude is a virtual death sentence. During the making of the film, in Bombay alone, 90 new cases of HIV are reported every hour and the girls suffer up to an 80% HIV/AIDS infection rate.

The Day My God Died documents the tragedy of child sexual slavery and profiles the courageous abolitionists that need our support.

Friday, 25 March 2011

DON’T SHOOT

Riaan Cruywagen has been reading the news on television since it arrived in South Africa in 1976. He prides himself in the nickname “The face of news in South Africa” and his record of the longest serving Afrikaans news reader in the world. In the context of South Africa’s spectacular transformation to democracy, Riaan explains how his professional ethics have kept him in the news reader’s seat.

THE CRADOCK FOUR

Matthew Goniwe was a popular schoolteacher in a small South African rural town. His inspirational community leadership in resisting Apartheid resulted in the government secretly ordering his “permanent removal from society”.

As the Eastern Cape region “went up in flames” a secret police death squad abducted Matthew with three colleagues and brutally murdered them.

Goniwe produced excellent results as a teacher, and he introduced discipline. He had been politicised by the death in a guerrilla skirmish of his elder brother Jacques, who had returned to fight Apartheid. Matthew had also spent four years in jail for possessing banned communist literature, feared by the regime as “the Red Danger”.

In the small farming town of Cradock, in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, Matthew turned community outrage with high rents and bad roads into an effective Cradock Residents’ Association (Cradora). But the Security Police connived to transfer the troublesome teacher out of town. When he refused, he was suspended.

This resulted in a schools boycott, which spread countrywide. Matthew was also organising for the United Democratic Front, a grouping of more than 500 organisations opposed to Apartheid, and he was working underground for both the communist party and the armed wing of the banned African National Congress.

Matthew’s contribution was to set up alternative structures in the “townships”, creating, in effect, a “liberated zone”. This was known as the “G Plan” and would become a model throughout South Africa, and help lead to the demise of Apartheid.

But the generals had decided that Matthew was too dangerous. Late on the winter night of 27 June 1985, South Africa’s Security Forces set up a roadblock near Port Elizabeth, and abducted Matthew and three other activists, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli. They murdered them in cold blood, then burnt the bodies. “The Cradock Four”, as they came to be known, were later found near the Port Elizabeth suburb of Bluewater Bay.

The film shows the oppressive climate of the sombre racist regime in the seventies and early eighties. It shows how the system broke the freedom, and the lives, of four young men. Using compelling archive materials, incisive interviews and dramatic recreations, the film reveals the ideals which led Matthew and his friends to support the liberation struggle, The assassinations signalled the “Beginning of the End” of the racist Apartheid regime. Within five years Nelson Mandela would walk free, and later lead the country to liberation in 1994

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Filmmaker Byron Hurt, a life-long hip-hop fan, was watching rap music videos on BET when he realized that each video was nearly identical. Guys in fancy cars threw money at the camera while scantily clad women danced in the background. As he discovered how stereotypical rap videos had become, Hurt, a former college quarterback turned activist, decided to make a film about the gender politics of hip-hop, the music and the culture that he grew up with. “The more I grew and the more I learned about sexism and violence and homophobia, the more those lyrics became unacceptable to me,” he says. “And I began to become more conflicted about the music that I loved.” The result is HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a riveting documentary that tackles issues of masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today’s hip-hop culture. The film includes interviews with famous rappers such as Mos Def, Fat Joe, Chuck D and Jadakiss and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons; along with commentary from Michael Eric Dyson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kevin Powell and Sarah Jones and interviews with young women at Spelman College, a historically black school and one of the nation’s leading liberal arts institutions.

Old man Peter Sengepov is the last surviving Shaman of the Kazym River, who lives alone in the depths of the Siberian taiga. The region of the Khanty people is the basic source of oil recovery in Russia. About 70 percent of all Russian oil is extracted here. The oil companies actively buy huge territories in the North ofSiberia. Indigenous people are compelled to leave these places, their own patrimonial territories, and so a modern civilization gradually absorbs an ancient culture.

A film about how the local population of Tanzania has been evicted to make way for the creation of the world’s most famous nature reserves. Set in the spectacular Serengeti Park and the Ngorongoro crater, the film explores how the parks came to be and how Western perceptions about nature radically altered east African landscape and society. The film focuses on the people who “shouldn’t be there” not only because their voices are rarely heard but also because they are still being antagonised and excluded, while the tourist industry is rapidly depleting the area’s natural resources.

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Interviews with prominent leaders, celebrities, intellectuals and everyday people

Could you ever forgive the people who slaughtered your family? In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus were incited to wipe out the country’s Tutsi minority. From the crowded capital to the smallest village, local ‘patrols’ massacred lifelong friends and family members, most often with machetes and improvised weapons. Announced in 2001, and ending this year, the government put in place the Gacaca Tribunals—open-air hearings with citizen-judges meant to try their neighbors and rebuild the nation. As part of this experiment in reconciliation, confessed genocide killers are sent home from prison, while traumatized survivors are asked to forgive them and resume living side-by-side. Filming for close to a decade in a tiny hamlet, award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion has charted the impact of Gacaca on survivors and perpetrators alike. Through their fear and anger, accusations and defenses, blurry truths, inconsolable sadness, and hope for life renewed, she captures the emotional journey to coexistence.

Monday, 28 March 2011

Coming Of Age takes us through the development of Kenyan democracy through the eyes of a young Kenyan girl. The naïve post-independence euphoria is reflected in an innocent young girl’s outlook; Moi’s oppressive regime is narrated through her teenage turmoil; and a more mature narrator comes of age with the election President Kibaki. But after disputed election results in December 2007, we are left to wonder if democracy ever truly comes of age.

Interviews with prominent leaders, celebrities, intellectuals and everyday people.

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar, Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before, during, and after the controversial 2007 Presidential Election in Senegal, and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet, the full length feature documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film-making, and it explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

NO SCREENING

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

Shot on location in Nairobi, Los Angeles, Mexico City and St. Petersburg. It follows the lives of 4 main characters on a journey across four continents and finds them exploring emotion and sexuality in a candid and gripping way. In Kenya, Matthew finds inspiration by diving into Nairobi’s burgeoning hip-hop culture. In Los Angeles, Asha discovers that the man of her dreams has been cheating on her. In Mexico City, Champinon struggles to find himself a girlfriend and in St. Petersberg, Tatjana dreams of escaping the city.

Transit was made as part of MTV’s Staying Alive campaign, which aims to raise HIV awareness and reduce discrimination against HIV positive individuals.

Staying Alive is a partnership between MTV Networks International, YouthNet spear- headed by Family Health International, the Kaiser Family Foundation, USAID, UNAIDS, UNFPA, The World Bank, DFID, SIDA and other organisations. Transit is Staying Alive’s first TV film which premiered on World Aids Day (December 1) 2005.

Transit was made as part of MTV’s Staying Alive campaign, which aims to raise HIV awareness and reduce discrimination against HIV positive individuals.

Thursday, 31 March 2011

Interviews with prominent leaders, celebrities, intellectuals and everyday people.

The Yes Men are anti-corporate troublemakers who get themselves invited to high-level corporate conferences and onto television, where they hilariously unmask global injustice. They care less about changing consciousness than changing policy. Announcing, as spokespeople for Dow Chemical, that they will at last take full financial responsibility for the victims of the Bhopal disaster, they create a media sensation that embarrasses the real powers that be. Outfitted in their wacky “Survivaball” getups, they address a room full of straight-laced suits who don’t think there’s anything funny about going to insane lengths to assure one’s personal safety in the event of any and all climate calamities. The Yes Men collaborated on the entirely fake issue of The New York Times, originally printed in fall 2008, to the great amusement of many. They don’t exactly speak truth to power – but their lies are just as powerful and very, very funny.[Synopsis courtesy of Film Forum]