How to start a human rights film festival: Expertise, training and collective media activism

Abstract

In this article, I examine how stakeholders in the Human Rights Film Network (the Network) support and mentor activists around the world in how to start a human rights film festival. I focus on the role that international human rights film festival (HRFF) training workshops and the Network’s handbook play in connecting and offering guidance to media activists around the world, in turn expanding the global reach of human rights media activism. I draw on participant-observation I conducted during the ‘Cinema Without Borders’ workshop (The Hague, The Netherlands) as well as in-depth interviews with HRFF organizers. I connect those observations to a discursive textual analysis of two editions of the Network’s free online handbook. HRFF training workshop leaders and participants come together around a shared ideal (human rights) and a shared aspiration (to put together human rights–centered film events in their local communities). Yet, participants can reshape the human rights universal in their own media activism in markedly different ways based on local meanings and lived experiences. Such differences emerged through interactions I witnessed and were most clear in moments of misunderstanding, disagreement, concern or even just curiosity. My work is an ethnography of global connections: I approach HRFF training workshops as sites of what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing terms ‘friction’ – sites that connect stakeholders whose relationship to human rights are quite different and provide fertile ground for interactions defined by their ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities’. Though defined by uneven flows of knowledge and power, I argue that HRFF training workshops provide an important case study for how activist collaboration can work productively in an era defined by the global circulation of cultural forms and practices. They are sites of global exchange where the meanings of human rights media activism are co-produced and co-created. Finally, I offer a vision for how media activist pedagogy can approach inevitable friction and, in turn, facilitate more ethical, equitable collective activism.