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FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

The One World international human rights film festival is organized by the People in Need Foundation under the auspices of the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel and the Mayor of Prague Jan Kasl.

Main partners: European Commission, NROS, Open Society Fund, the Czech-German Future Fund, and Czech Television. Our main sponsor is NRG Energy, Inc.

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PROGRAM SECTIONS

This year the Festival will present 129 documentaries, a selection made from 720 film titles sent to Prague by filmmakers from around the world.

Festival categories: Main Competition, Ecce Homo, Short Docs, Images of the World, Claude Lanzmann Retrospective, Dutch Documentary: Three Generations, Masterpieces from Film History, Films of Jury Members, Aired on Czech TV

The main themes of this year's Festival are: In the Grip of War, Global Economy, In a Woman's Voice, Something about Terrorism, Down by Law, Legacy of the Past, Generation Next, The Others, Power of the Powerless, and Rituals and Traditions

Regions in focus are: Middle East, former Yugoslavia, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Russia and NIS.

For the first time the Festival will show several retrospectives: The Claude Lanzmann retrospective will screen Shoah, Tsaha, A Visitor from the Living, and will also present his latest film documentary, Sobibor.

Dutch Documentary: Three Generations will screen the most important works directed by Joris Ivens, Johan van der Keuken, and Heddy Honigmann. With support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Ms. Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Joris Ivens Foundation, and Ideale Audience Int´l..

The Masterpieces from Film History retrospective, organized in cooperation with the National Film Archives, screens several classics of documentary film (Jutzi, Bunuel, Flaherty, Jennings, Resnais, Rogosin, Bossak, Romm, Godard, Depardon, Marker).

This year's Festival also includes a new category, Short Human Rights Spots (none longer than one minute). These short spots are also screened on the Internet.

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VENUES, TICKETS

The Archa Theatre serves as the main Festival center, with two screening rooms, guest and press services, a videothéque with more than 1,200 human rights documentaries, 24-hour internet service, and a café bar.

Festival films will also be screened at the Evald, Ponrepo, Roxy-NOD, Atlas, and City Library movie theaters. Festival highlights and awarded films will be screened April 18-20, at the Aero cinema.

All documentaries are screened with Czech subtitles. Films in English will be screened in the small hall of the Archa Theater and at Roxy - NOD.

The ticket price for films is 50 Kc. Beginning April 1, Festival admission passes will be sold at the Archa theatre for 150 Kc. With this pass, tickets for film screenings are 25 Kc.

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JURIES AND AWARDS

The Special Award for the film with the most outstanding contribution to human rights awareness will be personally presented by President Václav Havel.

The Main Jury awards the Best Film Award and Best Director Award. Jury members are the widely respected filmmakers Drahomíra Vihanová (Czech Republic), Fiona Murch (Great Britain), Ewa Borzęcka (Poland), Jean-Marie Téno (Cameroon), and Yury Khashchavatski (Belarus).

The Rudolf Vrba Award, in the Ecce homo category, will be awarded by people who have fought against repression, violence, and injustice in Burma, South Africa, Nepal, and the Czech Republic.

The Special Jury, whose members are Ella Davletshina (Russia), Vít Janeček (Czech Republic), Maciej Nowicki (Poland), and Matthias Fetzer (Germany), will award the Mayor of Prague Award for the best short documentary.

The Special Citation of Czech Radio will be awarded for the creative use of music and sound in documentary film.

Festival-goers themselves decide who will win the Audience Award.

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EVENTS

On April 10, at 7:00 pm, a concert featuring the bands Support Lesbiens, November 2nd, and Radium.NFO will open the 2002 One World Film Festival at the Archa Theatre.

On the occasion of the opening of the One World festival, the 2001 Homo Homini Award will be presented to Zackie Achmat of South Africa. The Homo Homini Award is granted annually by the People in Need Foundation to an individual who has made a significant personal contribution to the struggle for democracy and human rights. By awarding Zackie Achmat the Homo Homini Award for 2001, PINF seeks to highlight his efforts and those of his organization, the Treatment Action Campaign, to make anti-retroviral medicines available to HIV-positive inhabitants of developing countries.

From April 11-30, the People in Need Foundation will organize the "Made Black" exhibition on the life of Romas in the Czech Republic. Photographers participating in the exhibition include: Karel Cudlín, Milan Jaroš, Maria Kracíková, Petr Sikula, Evžen Sobek, Vít Šimánek, Jindřich Štreit, Karel Tůma and Iva Zímová. The show opens on April 10 at 5:00 pm in the Archa Theatre foyer.

Parallel to the Festival, the People in Need Foundation organizes the NetWork seminar (April 13-17) at Galerie Černa Labut, which will create a platform for a number of discussions among various representatives of NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans engaged in human rights issues, humanitarian aid, and the democratization of society.

In cooperation with local non-profit organizations, the Festival will also take place in 15 cities and towns across the Czech Republic from April 22 - May 19 ( Brno, České Budějovice, Hradec Králové, Jihlava, Kutná Hora, Liberec, Olomouc, Opava, Ostrava, Pardubice, Plzeň, Teplice, Uherské Hradiště, Ústí nad Labem and Rožnov pod Radhoštěm).

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STATEMENT OF ONE WORLD DIRECTOR

Somewhere deep in space… so many things are happening. Year after year, when selecting films with my colleagues for the One World festival, I am constantly surprised how it is possible that we know so little about what is really happening "out there." It is true that in our small global village we watch the TV news and read newspapers every day, and from this point of view we are quite well informed. And, on the surface, it seems that the stories breaking the news and the subjects of the documentaries screened at One World 2002 are the same - the places and names and topics sound familiar. But after watching these documentaries, it seems as if their stories are coming from a completely different planet. Power and those who wield it from the ranks of politics, economics, the military, and image-making - as well as bad guys from whatever background - hold some kind of irresistible, fatal attraction for the media and the global news coverage industry. And because of this, the stories and monologues we usually hear come from those talking heads. One World offers the stories you cannot find in the news, told by those who may be powerless but who to us are much more real - real people whose very lives are often caught up in the grip of events described briefly on the evening news. One World wants to shake the complacency of global villagers who feel confident that the events of our world are well covered. We want to bridge the abyss between our perception of world events and the reality of what is actually happening. This year we again offer a powerful program of films, selected from 720 entries by filmmakers from around the world. It is my belief that the documentaries screened at One World 2002 will help you to see certain things differently than you might have seen them before.

Igor Blazevic
One World director

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