Oppression, flight and ‘wall rabbits’

The Vienna Film Festival for Human Rights, ‘this human world’, is being held for the second time. From 3 to 13 December, about 130 films are on the programme. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain forms an important focal point this year.

Aiming to stimulate debate, not shock into silence

“The festival’s programme is designed to make it possible for a wide audience to use the films, discussions and other connected events to tackle the subject of human rights,” says Zora Bachmann, the programme director of ‘this human world’. “The festival doesn’t only concentrate on cinematic enjoyment, but also focuses on content. However, the aim is not to shock people into silence, but rather to give them the opportunity to discuss, think about and engage with the subject of human rights.”

There is a wide range of themes being addressed at the festival, just like last year. They range from the depiction of the discrimination faced by homosexuals around the world to the fate of refugees and women – from genital mutilation to the murders in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez. The focus is always as much on individual cases as on collective experience.

“1989-2009 Everything remains different”

A major focal point this year is the programme strand entitled “1989-2009 Alles bleibt anders” (Everything remains different). Using 30 films, the festival investigates the changes that have taken place since the fall of the Berlin Wall. “20 years on, true democracy and the implementation of human rights are still lacking, just now in a different way. Desolate rural areas, high unemployment, living on the fringe, corruption and factions characterise the lives of those who had hoped for something other than life in a corset,” point out the curators of this part of the festival, Petra Popovic and Manja Nickel.

Among the films being shown are documentaries and movies, as well as experimental films and cartoons. The latter genre, represented by Rabbit à la Berlin by Bartek Konopka and Esterhazy by Izabela Plucinska, is devoted to the rabbits of the Berlin Wall. Unlike refugees, the rabbits were protected by the border guards and were not allowed to be shot. The Czech director Jan Švankmajer is equally bound to the tradition of animated films. In his film The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia, he casts a critical eye over the history of Czechoslovakia after 1945.

Karoline Kleinert’s film Punkmusik und Spassperformance (Punk music and fun performance) gives an insight into the subculture of the GDR. Spur der Steine (The Trace of Stones) by Frank Beyer is also on the programme. The film fell victim to the censors in the GDR and Beyer was banned from his job for life, since he refused to distance himself from his film.

‘1989-2009 Everything remains different’ will be opened on 4 December with the film The Goat by the Bulgarian director Georgi Djulgerov. It is about the encounter between an American woman who is keen on Bulgarian folk music and a Bulgarian nationalist, with the two coming to get on with one another due to their love of music. The narrator is a mysterious billy goat, the one referred to in the title, and which also guards some treasure. The film is a little cinematic gem from the bizarre mountain world of Bulgaria.

Major items on the programme

A film by the Austrian director Katharina Rohrer is responsible for opening the whole festival on 3 December. Fatal Promises sets off on the track of human trafficking – the world’s second largest criminal industry – from Ukraine to the USA. Tracking down human rights abuse and torture is also part of the job description of Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. The film My Brother’s Keeper will be shown on one of the four evenings organised together with Vienna’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institut.

In addition to all this, a school project will be taking place for the first time this year, for which pupils from Rahlgasse secondary school were invited to create films themselves about human rights abuse. The premiere is on 12 December, just two days after the international Human Rights Day on 10 December.