The 11th Solidarity Festival for Cinema and Human Rights will be held this month in a special, shortened edition from December 24-31 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. In addition, for the first time, it will also take place at other sites around the country, including Jaffa, Pardess Hanna, and Nazareth.
The festival offers dozens of films, both from around the world and from Israel, that spotlight human-rights issues, in the broadest sense, with both feature films and documentaries that cover these issues from many different perspectives.
The opening night of the festival will present the screening of Power Alley, an award-winning Brazilian film that had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The movie is about a champion volleyball player whose life becomes complicated when she seeks an abortion and is targeted by a fundamentalist group.
The opening event will also include Faith, a short film by Yahav Winner, a director who was murdered by Hamas defending his wife and daughter on October 7 in Kfar Aza. Faith won first prize in the 2020 Solidarity Festival student film competition. This screening will be held in Winner’s memory, and will honor his commitment to cinema and human rights.
This year, the festival will include a special program of films about the Gaza border communities and the south of the country, alongside premieres of international films, most of them from leading international festivals such as the Cannes, the Berlin, Sundance, Hot Docs, and others, and Israeli films on human-rights issues. Solidarity Festival 2023 will also offer lectures, meetings and discussions with creators and activists.
International films reflect issues relevant to Israeli reality
The international films reflect issues relevant to the Israeli reality. These include movies about the struggles for freedom of expression and freedom of the press, such as Breaking the News, about a group of female and non-binary journalists’ struggle to create a journalism start-up devoted to covering the news differently.
A number of films deal with the preservation and development of democracies, such as In Ukraine, a look at daily life in that country since the Russian invasion in 2022. Rights of asylum seekers are also a festival focus, and the movie, The Hearing, is about four rejected asylum seekers in Europe.
La Maternal looks at issues facing young mothers and tells the story of a young woman who gives birth in foster care. The climate crisis, food insecurity, and social inequality are also issues covered by films at the festival.
The Israeli section features many new and recent films, among them Adar Shafran’s recently released Running on Sand, a comedy-drama about an Eritrean in Israel illegally who is mistaken for a Nigerian soccer star, and Erez Tadmor’s upcoming Children of Nobody, about a group home for troubled youth in south Tel Aviv that faces closure as the neighborhood around it becomes more upscale.
This year, the festival will include events in collaboration with the Civil Rights Association and other bodies, a competitive framework dedicated to movies about human rights by high-school film students from Israel, and short documentary and feature-film competitions on human rights issues by students and independent creators.
“The existence of a Solidarity Festival for cinema and human rights precisely now, after the heartbreaking events of October 7 and against the background of the ongoing war in Gaza, was done after much thought and out of a sense of commitment to the issues and design values of the festival,” said the founder and director of the festival, Danny Wilensky, and artistic director, Gidi Avivi, in a statement.
The Solidarity Festival was organized out of a desire to raise key socio-political issues into public discourse in Israel through the screening of groundbreaking films on human rights issues from Israel and the world, films that strive to promote peace, democracy, and human rights alongside equality and social justice.
“This is the 11th edition of the festival, and given the situation in Israel and the world, it seems to us that the need for its existence is clearer now than ever,” according to the organizers.
The 2023 Solidarity Festival was created in collaboration with Tel Aviv Cinematheque and is supported by the Culture and Sport Ministry, the Israel Film Council, Tel Aviv Municipality, Mazon, and other organizations from Israel and around the world.
For more information, go to the festival website at www.solidaritytlv.org