Showing posts with label
Human Rights & Arts Film Festival.
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Showing posts with label
Human Rights & Arts Film Festival.
Show all posts
Follow the link below to listen to a conference paper I delivered back in December 2012 on the issue of whether docufictions (hybrid forms of documentary and fiction) pose any challenges for Human Rights film festivals. The paper was delivered as part of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand 16th Biennial Conference.
Between Spring 2010 and April 2012 I worked as a Features Film Programmer with the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival. In the paper I address some of the issues involved in making selections for the festival. I particularly focus on the challenges faced by the programming team in respect of how to approach the new-wave of docufictions currently being made. These include Pawel Kloc's Phnom Penn Lullaby (2011) and Danfung Dennis' Hell and Back Again (2010).
While such films have human rights related content they also employ hyper-stylisations and other fictional film techniques to the point that they invite the spectator to receive reality as fiction. This raises the issue of whether or not these films can be accepted as appropriate forms of representation in the context of a human rights festival that has an educative and sociopolitical role. I examine how these films challenge a number of widely held assumptions about what constitutes a human rights documentary film by encouraging the spectator to re-think about the special position documentary cinema has traditionally been seen to occupy in relation to the actuality of the social and historical world.
A presentation given at the 2012 Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand 16th Biennial Conference.
I examine what is meant by human rights cinema, particularly in the context of the wave of docufiction films that are currently being made at the moment, films such as Danfung Dennis' Hell and Back Again (2011) and Pawel Kloc's Phnom Penh Lullaby (2011). These docufictions creatively combine 'fictional' and 'non-fiction' film techniques in a way that not only allows spectators to become critically engaged with the tension between what is real and what is staged but to also enter an ethically uneasy space. I draw on my own experiences programming for the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival and discuss how Hell and Back Again can be classed as a human rights film.
You can listen to the presentation here:
https://soundcloud.com/t-w-music/docufictions-and-the-human
