HRFF - News | Art-kino Croatia

Seven award-winning films as a part of the seventeenth edition of the prestigious Human Rights Film Festival arrive at Art-kino, promoting openness, multiculturalism, tolerance and freedom of choice. Admission to the programs under the HRFF at Art-kino is free of charge for all visitors.

The seventeenth edition of the Human Rights Film Festival  in Rijeka is being held as part of the program entitled Age of Power, which is a part of the project Rijeka 2020 - European Capital of Culture. A total of seven titles which premiered at prestigious world festivals (Berlinale, Cannes, Locarno, Mostra, Rotterdam and Sundance) will be shown on the big screen of Art-Kino, most of which were awarded. This year's edition of the festival also brings with it a discursive program.

Promoting human rights, the new Human Rights Film Festival brings three documentaries and four feature films, and it opens with a new masterful film by the great Portuguese director Pedro Costa, a docu-fiction drama awarded at the Locarno Film Festival named Vitalina Varela about a Cape Verde widow coming to Portugal for the first time after the death of her husband who had lived there for almost thirty years in search of a better life. It will be followed by Oliver Laxe's third feature film named O que arde, winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes, a humane study of the social stigma and emotional burden carried by ex-convicts, and a critical commentary on the neglect and extinction of the Galician villages in which the author placed the protagonists.

On Saturday, December 7th, the program opens with Martin Eden, an adaptation of Jack London's semi-autobiographical novel from the year 1909. bearing the same name, whose storyline the award-winning director Pietro Marcello transposes from Oakland to an idyllic, unnamed Italian port in the undetermined years of the 20th century. The following is a discursive program by filmmakers Nikica Gilic, Boris Ruzic and Sasa Stanic about thematic preoccupations with Martin Eden. The evening concludes with Present.Perfect of Chinese documentary filmmaker Shengze Zhu, an impressive two-hour portrait of a contemporary generation whose online and offline worlds are closely intertwined. Afterwards we're having a discursive program by filmologists Boris Ružić, Saša Stanić and Nikica Gilić on Martin Eden's thematic preoccupations. The evening concludes with Present.Perfect made by the Chinese documentary filmmaker Shengze Zhu, an impressive two-hour portrait of a contemporary generation whose online and offline worlds are closely intertwined. 

The last day of the festival brings three movie treats in a row in this order: Terminal Sud, a tense Franco-Algerian drama about a doctor abducted in the midst of an Algerian civil war, forced to care for a rebel leader; Honeyland, a fascinating documentary about ancient beekeeping in the ramshackle mountainous regions of Macedonia which won multiple awards at the Sundance Festival, and Stieg Larsson - The Man Who Played with Fire, a lesser-known journalistic portrait of the author of the Millennium book trilogy, Henrik Georgsson, who lost his life in his mission of exposing white supremacists, right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi gangs. Admission to all screenings and programs within the Human Rights Film Festival is free of charge for all visitors.

Human Rights Film Festival (HRFF) - The Human Rights Film Festival is a non-profit project of two prominent independent culture organizations - the Multimedia Institute and the Association for Cultural Development "URK", launched in 2002. to improve the visibility of various human rights topics in the film medium which, from its inception, seeks to shape the substance of the festival with programs that promote openness, multiculturalism, tolerance and freedom of choice. Since 2009, the festival has been held in Zagreb and Rijeka simultaneously.

Tickets can be booked by email (ulaznice@art-kino.org) and at the Art-kino box office every day from 4pm to 8:30 pm.