ONE WORLD FESTIVAL TO BEGIN THIS YEAR ON MARCH 1ST

The eighth year of the international documentary film festival of human rights, One World, organized by the People in Need Foundation in cooperation with Czech Television, will take place in Prague from March 1st to March 9th 2006. More info on: www.oneworld.cz

The Festival Center will be located at the Lucerna cinema (Stepanska 61, Prague 1). Other cinemas for the festival will include the Svetozor (2 screens), Evald, Mat and Ponrepo.

In addition to Prague, the One World festival will take place in 13 other cities throughout the Czech Republic:

In Brno (9.3.-16.3.), Ceske Budejovice (6.3.-9.3.), Hradec Kralove (13.3.-17.3), Melnik (15.3.-17.3.), Liberec (13.3.-17.3), Olomouc (20.3-24.3.), Opava (13.3.-17.3), Ostrava (6.3.-10.3.), Pardubice (6.3.-10.3.), Plzen (16.3-22.3), Roznov (13.3-15.3), Tabor (13.3.-17.3.) and Usti nad Labem (13.3.-18.3.).

The festival, in keeping with tradition, will be held under the auspices of Vaclav Havel. Organizers will also include the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Magistrate of the City of Prague. The festival is additionally held under the auspices of the Minister of Culture Vitezslav Jandak, the Lord Mayor of Prague Pavel Bem, as well as the mayors of the individual festival cities and the governors of the eleven regions.

The general partner of the festival will once again be Plzensky Prazdroj. The main partner will be Metrostav, whilst the main media partner will be Czech Television.

During the festival, over 110 documentary films from all over the world will be screened. The main themes of the festival will remain The Main Competition, The Short Forms Competition and the special category, The Right to Know Competition. One World will also present a number of thematic categories and retrospectives.

Similar to previous years, an essential part of the One World festival this year will be the screening of films for primary and secondary schools, which will take place in all of the festival cities.

The three international juries of the festival will include several leading contemporary film makers (The Main Jury), directors and playwrights from leading international film festivals and film institutes (The Mayor of Prague Jury) and human rights activists (The Rudolf Vrba Jury).

Among the most distinguished guests of the festival this year will be members of the Main Jury Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez (a talented Spanish documentary filmmaker working mainly in Central America), Swiss documentary filmmaker Antoine Cattin, experienced Lithuanian director Arunas Matelis and one of the leading contemporary documentary filmmakers in Central Europe Peter Forgacs, who will personally present a retrospective of his work during the festival. Members of the Rudolf Vrba Jury will include Ondrej Cakl, from the civic organization Tolerance- an organization which has long monitored neo-Nazi activity in the Czech Republic, and Debbie Stothard, who has worked for a number of years monitoring human rights in Burma.

The opening ceremony of the festival will take place on Wednesday, March 1st in the prestigious space of the Prague Crossroads, a deconsecrated gothic church in the former Anensky Convent in the Old Town in cooperation with the operators of the space, the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundatio Vize 97. Many distinguished individuals will attend the opening as well as the presentation of the Homo Homini Award for contribution to human rights in 2005. According to Vaclav Havel, “One World is not just a testimony of human suffering. It is also a message of the power of solidarity and the will to resist violence and injustice; it supports human dignity, faith and hope.”

Advertisement for the festival will be supported by the visual concept created by Krystof Kintera, a progressive artist renowned both in the public and artistic sphere. A high level of artistic quality is one of the priorities of the festival, a principle which is reflected in the choice of films and the accompanying events.

The Main Award of this year’s festival will, for the first time, be combined with a financial award for the author of the winning film to the amound of 50,000 CZK which will be awarded by the Minister of Culture.

Program of the Festival

Zentropa: The Dogma Manifesto in documentary film
Zentropa is the Danish production company founded by Lars von Trier. This company has produced a majority of the films made according to the Dogma Manifesto of von Trier or his colleagues, which have become a world-wide recognized film brand. One World would like to draw attention to the documentary films that have been produced by Zentropa, which despite being less well known than the feature films, are of course just as interesting.

Gender Montage: Paradigms in the post-Soviet space
In its world premiere, there will be screened a new collection of films from the project Gender Montage: Paradigms in Post-Soviet Space. These unique documentary films capture the difficult position of women in seven post-Soviet countries. The creators of the films will themselves be at the festival, and will be available for accompanying debates. The entire event will include extensive seminars in which participants will include the authors of the films, the initiators of the Gender Montage project and Czech and foreign experts.

Muslims in Europe: A cultural dialogue
One of the themes of this year’s festival is the co-existence of Europeans and Muslims. The main goal of the project, “Muslims in Europe: A Cultural Dialogue”, is the exchange of experiences and ideas regarding integration and co-existence of the majority population in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the Czech Republic with immigrants from Muslim countries and with their children born in Europe. Through films and debates with our guests, we hope to bring these issues closer to Czech audience members, allow them to recognise the existing social and cultural barriers to integration and bring about a deeper discussion of the problem. In addition to shorter debates with the creators of the films, the One World festival will also, after 5-6 themed screenings, hold a more extensive panel discussion with leading experts, filmmakers and representatives of the Muslim minorities.

Peter Forgacs: A Film History
Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs belongs among the most important documentary filmmakers in Central Europe. In his work, he has mostly concentrated on the modern history of Hungary, which is brought to life thanks to the use of personal amateur film that was taken in the last century. Forgacs‘ pictures are internationally recognized and he himself has received a number of awards. The exhibition of the works of Peter Forgacs and his personal participation in the One World Festival is the first complete tribute to this unique filmmaker. At the same time, as part of the film festival, it is also a unique attempt to present a subgenre of documentary filmmaking- the use of personal archives to capture specific events and the history of film itself. In connection to this theme, films will also be screened by the Austrian experimental filmmaker Gustav Deutsche (concerned with the legacy and meaning of variations of archived cinematography) and a film from the collection of Czech filmmaker Jan Sikl.

Public Service Announcements
In an extensive side-program entitled NonComm, a large amount of space will be dedicated to public service announcements. Short and funny public service announcements are not just a welcome treat for the audience, but at the same time a very interesting and useful means of communication which deserves our attention.

Pictures of Africa
The festival will dedicate an entire section to films on Africa. Key themes of these films will be the problem of African debt and development assistance, but also engaging stories from the daily lives of Africans which break down the worn-out stereotypes about Africa as a continent of poverty, hunger and illness. A large number of the films are made by directors of African origin. Another part of this section will be a discussion entitled the Depiction of Africa in Films, during which European and African filmmakers will debate together cultural stereotypes in documentary films.

At the invitation of the Jewish museum in Prague, One World has become a part of the yearlong Year with Jewish Culture and will present as a part of the festival several films dedicated to Jewish history and culture.

Accompanying Events

The center of the festival will be in the Lucerna cinema where, for a majority of the evenings after the ending of the film screenings, an accompanying musical program will be presentedin the Marble Auditorium, or in the Lucerna cafe. The program will be formed with ethnic music in a mixture of styles, all played by Czech artists and dealing with the cultures of different ethnicities and nations.

Another part of the program will be discussions with festival guests following the projections of the films, workshops, panel discussions, seminars, exhibitions and so on. One of the most important events will be the exhibition “The People in Need Foundation in Photography,” documenting primarily aspects of life of ordinary people in areas where the People in Need Foundation is active. The exhibition in the Prague Langhans Gallery will contain both works of professions photographers (Lubomir Kotek, Iva Zimova etc.), and those of employees of People in Need. A majority of the photos will be exhibited for the first time.

“The engagement of Czech diplomacy and individual Members of Parliament and senators in the field of support for human rights in Cuba, Burma and Belarus shows that “it pays” in the Czech Republic to actively intervene in the support for human rights and the promotion of democracy in the world. It gives the Czech Republic a clear identity in the international scene and a pioneering spot among other new members of the European Union. It is still, however, difficult to convince the wider public about the appropriateness of such activities. Films appear to be a very effective communication channel. One World has a significant potential to communicate with the public of the Czech Republic about what is going on in the world, and what a fundamental challenge the international society is facing and must meet,” states the founder of the festival, Igor Blazevic, about the festival’s significance and meaning at the current time.