Abstract
This essay argues that the consistent association of human rights film with historical accuracy as a means of raising awareness has led human rights education to focus on filmic content, with fiction films being used primarily as case studies about particular atrocities or as opportunities to discuss more general ethical issues. While the subject matter of human rights films is certainly a major component of human rights education, I maintain that this singular focus prohibits students from examining how a film is situated within a specific matrix of geopolitical power relations and cultural presuppositions. This presumption of truth thus normalizes a westernized worldview, obscuring its ideological foundations and the geopolitical structures that give human rights discourse its universality and function. Using Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower as a teaching case study, this essay demonstrates how an attention to stylistic and generic conventions helps us understand how a film may educate about a particular human rights issue while at the same time propagate the very logics of geopolitical inequality that are implicated in its emergence.
Highlights
The founding of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in 1988 firmly established film as a principle medium for human rights advocacy and as an avenue for the broad dissemination of the values and ideals of human rights discourse
Lucas highlights the narrative capacities of film to animate human rights; can it help engage audiences by particularizing and humanizing an abstract, universal right, it can, as Elizabeth Goldberg argues, provide the necessary context for audiences to develop a deep understanding of the issue and to potentially act in response to it (12)
Our perceptions of the world are shaped as much by art and media as by our experiences, and many of our base assumptions are founded on the impressions we
Summary
The founding of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in 1988 firmly established film as a principle medium for human rights advocacy and as an avenue for the broad dissemination of the values and ideals of human rights discourse. Documentaries and feature films are appearing with increasing frequency on high school and college syllabi and, following in the footsteps of major human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Witness, and Human Rights Watch, campus advocacy groups hold regular film screenings as one of their primary methods of engaging the larger student body in human rights-related activism. Such an emphasis on accuracy and truthfulness is bound up with a belief in the transformative potential of cinema: in exposing human rights violations film has the power to instigate action for change.
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