International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) Director General Isabelle Gattiker was moved to work on human rights after she lived in Bogota between 1989 to 1993 and witnessed firsthand the civil war and loss of innocent lives.

Since then, she produced feature films and films on human rights. She is also a visiting faculty member at the Lausanne School of Arts and the University of Art and Design in Geneva. Dawn sat down with Ms Gattiker during her recent visit to Islamabad.

Q: What criteria does the FIFDH follow when choosing films?

A: We have a big panel of experts and jury members who screen all the films. Forty films are shortlisted and then we organise debate sessions for each film. Subject, script and cinematography are all important areas judged very minutely.

All these films are related to human rights subjects and sent to us from all over the world. Plus we also choose some of the films presented in the Cannes Film Festival in France or Sundance films and others.

Q: How do you categorise and prioritise the subjects of the films you choose for the festival?

A: We don’t have any particular category as we believe that human rights violations can be in every field of life. To us, all human rights violations are serious; there is no high or low category.

We have selected films related to human rights violation in banks, in prisons, in the telecom industry, the labour industry, migration and many other subjects that we feel strongly about. So it’s not only subjects like violence against women or atrocities in Yemen or child rape in Myanmar or the South Sudan conflict; even in Switzerland we feel there are many areas where human rights are being violated.

Q: What is the demographic breakdown of the films that are selected every year?

A: I would say 40pc are from non-Western countries and the rest are from Europe, the United States, Canada and other developed countries.

For example, a few years back we chose a film that was made on Edward Snowden. It focuses on the violation of privacy rights in the US and we believed during the debate that it needs to be highlighted otherwise, with the world changing, many other countries can follow suit. Similarly many Malaysians were working with Swiss banks to open accounts to hide their ill-gotten wealth and many Swiss companies inject money in those foreign countries involved in grave human rights crimes. Financial human rights violations by these high-profile profit making business entities are also brought to light through the films.

Q: How does your organisation encourage producers and directors of films to make more such films when there are so many restrictions and a lack of funding?

A: We invite them over to Geneva for these 10 days of festivity. We connect them to different forums and also organisations working on human rights to find ways of working together.

Last year we screened their productions in more than 40 venues; museums, refugee centres, old homes, hospitals, cafés and even prisons. These individuals feel very important when they are interviewed on different channels, asked questions and encouraged by different international bodies. Over a period of time we have also been working and convincing NGOs to invest in films on human rights issues. They have big funding and instead of spending €30,000 to €50,000 on workshops and seminars, investing in a 60-90 minute feature film on a human rights violation issue will give them a larger audience, rather an international audience, and the impact will be phenomenal.

This is the best platform for them to do advocacy and spread the message. The message will be received loud and clear around the globe in a much better way.

Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2017