Human rights film festival

A human rights film festival is an activist film festival that screens films on human right related topics and hosts pre/post-screening events to promote awareness for human rights causes. Human rights film festivals fall beneath the category of topic specific film festivals. These festivals employ the use of universal human rights language, made popular by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, to convey the importance of the festivals' programmes to their audiences. The first human rights film festival to take place anywhere around the world was the New York City based Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF) in 1988. Since then many other human rights film festivals have formed around the world with the most notable festivals being One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Movies that Matter in The Hague, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Festival Internacional de Cine de Derechos Humanos (FICDH) in Buenos Aires, and Freedom Film Festival (FFF), organized in Kuala Lumpur. Movies that Matter has also created The Human Rights Film Network which aids in facilitating the creation of new human rights film festivals, while also allowing existing human rights film festivals membership to their network by agreeing to abide by their Charter. Although human rights film festivals are widely praised for their efforts to raise awareness on human rights issues they have also been subject to criticism surrounding issues of the "humanitarian gaze", NGOization, and commercialization.