There are five days and seventeen screenings to go until the end of London’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016
From ‘accidental activist’ the Frackman to China’s ‘fake-marriage fairs’ – where gay Chinese men and women meet members of the opposite sex to form marriage deals that satisfy the expectations of Chinese society – there should be something in this year’s festival for anyone interested in human rights.
The screenings are taking place at some of London’s top venues the Barbican, Curzon Soho, Picturehouse Central, Ritzy Brixton, and even the British Museum. The stand-out themes of this year’s festival are censorship and freedom in China, migration, and empowered, personal film-making.
Most viewings host the filmmakers involved for an in-depth discussion following the film. In some instances, the filmmaker will be joined by a researcher from Human Rights Watch that has been involved in frontline investigations of the human rights abuses that arise in the feature.
RightsInfo attended Sunday’s screening of The Hard Stop by talented filmmaker George Amponsah. This documentary explores the events that followed the police’s fatal shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, London in 2011, which sparked off the London riots. The Q&A after the film featured the film-maker George Amponsah and the documentary’s protagonists and Mark Duggan’s friends, Marcus and Kurtis, and their defence lawyer in relation to the charges against them of instigating the 2011 London riots.
