STORIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS BY FILM-MAKERS, ARTISTS, AND WRITERS

PROVIDED BY THE OHCHR

Twenty-five of the world’s leading filmmakers and twelve writers, including five Nobel prize winners, have joined forces to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by contributing to a unique series of short films and a book produced under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and in partnership with ART for the World, an NGO based in Geneva and Milan.

As part of the project, an extraordinary array of award-winning film directors and video artists, originating from twenty-two different countries, have produced a series of threeminute movies related to six main themes arising out of the Universal Declaration: culture, development, dignity and justice, environment, gender and universal participation.

The movies, which will number twenty-two in all, have been shot in more than fifteen different languages. They will exist as standalone shorts, and will also be woven together into an eighty-minute feature film which will be subtitled in the six official languages of the UN – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish – and distributed in 35mm, DVD and HD versions.

After a preview in November at Servico Social do Comércio (SESC) in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the movie will be screened in various cities around the world on 10 December, the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration in 1948. Venues already decided include:

• Paris: Palais de Chaillot, where the Declaration was signed on 10 December 1948
• New York: The United Nations building in New York
• Geneva: the Festival of the International Film Forum on Human Rights.

Subsequently, both the short movies and the full-length film will be screened across the world, especially at film festivals, in noncommercial cinemas, and at schools, museums and cultural institutions.

An accompanying book contains contributions, based on the same six themes, by twelve of the world’s most prominent authors, namely Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Khaled Hosseini, Roberto Saviano, Naguib Mahfouz, Elfriede Jelinek, Ruth Ozeki, José Saramago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Assia Djebar, Nuruddin Farah, and Toni Morrison. The book also contains interviews with the directors and the artists, stills from the movies themselves and from the production sets. The book will be published by Electa.

The project has been made possible thanks to the generous support of the European Commission, the Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development in the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, and SESC in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The directors and artists involved in the project are: Marina Abramovi (The Netherlands), Hani Abu-Assad (Palestine), Armagan Ballantyne (New Zealand), Sergei Bodrov (Russia), Charles De Meaux (France), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia (France), Runa Islam (UK/Bangladesh), Francesco Jodice (Italy), Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (Israel), Zhang Ke Jia (China), Murali Nair (India), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Walter Salles and
Daniela Thomas (Brazil), Saman Salour (Iran), Sarkis (France), Bram Schouw (The Netherlands), Teresa Serrano (Mexico), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania), Pablo Trapero (Argentina), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Jasmila Zbanic (Bosnia).