Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns to London in March

Taking place in various cinemas across London in March, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is a showcase of films that are concerned with, well, human rights issues.

The 15-strong collection of feature films and documentaries brings cinema from around the globe – with work from Palestine, Thailand, and Venezuela amongst other countries – and offers what the festival organisers describe as “critical insight into local and global human-rights concerns impacting people around the world today”.

Between 14-22 March 2019, split between screenings, talks, and panel discussions at Barbican, BFI Southbank, and the Regent Street Cinema, right-on enthusiasts of the silver screen can catch everything from Oscar-nominated, skate-related coming-of-age drama Mind the Gap to “poetic documentary” No Box for Me. An Intersex Story, which “exposes the limitations of binary gender definitions and the irreversible physical and psychological impact of non-consensual gender assignment surgery on intersex infants”.

Other films on show include The Trial of Ratko Mladic (a documentary about, yep, the trial of warlord Ratko Mladic), Roll Red Roll (which investigates sexual assault in the world of American football) and The Cleaners (a film we’re told raises “essential questions over internet control and the life-threatening erasure of entire resistance movements from the world’s sight”).

These are serious films for serious times. Likely to be watched by very serious people. If you’re one of them, you’re in luck.