(Toronto, January 13, 2010) – Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan’s award-winning documentary, Last Train Home (2009), opens the seventh annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, co-presented with TIFF Cinematheque, on February 24.
Last Train Home draws us into the fractured lives of a family caught up in one of the world’s largest annual migrations. Over 130 million Chinese work in the booming factories on the coast. Each year countless millions of them attempt to return home to their villages for Chinese New Year which falls on Feb. 14 this year. Fan will be at the screening, co-presented with the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and will talk about his film.
This year’s festival, running until March 6, features 10 documentary and feature films that focus on survivors and activists from around the world who are fighting to restore freedom, justice and a sense of community in their home countries.
“The collapse of social and economic systems around the world has led to serious human rights abuses in the first decade of this century,” said Helga Stephenson, chairperson of the festival. “These films about people fighting for their freedom and dignity, along with appearances by the filmmakers and guest speakers and thoughtful conversation send a message that personal commitment can make a very real difference.”
Three of the films focus on the desperate plight of women in Africa. Gabriela and Sally Gutiérrez Dewar’s Tapologo (2008) shows how HIV-infected women in South Africa are transforming their own experience into a source of help for others, while Anne Aghion’s My Neighbor, My Killer (2009), about the genocide in Rwanda, and Lisa F. Jackson’s The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007) present honest, graphic, and powerful testimony about the killing and rape in those countries.
Three feature films are included in this year’s lineup. Triage (2009), by the Academy Award®-winning director Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land) stars Colin Farrell as an Irish war photographer in the late 1980’s dealing with post traumatic stress after covering the conflict in the Kurdish region of Iraq. Welcome (2009,) winner of the LUX 2009 film prize, by the French director Philippe Lioret, is set in Calais and focuses on a swimming instructor trying to help an illegal Kurdish immigrant from Iraq swim across the English Channel from France to England and a new life. Carlos Carrera’s Backyard (2009), is a gritty drama about the ongoing murders of young Mexican women in the US-Mexican border town of Juárez.
Tanaz Eshaghian’s Be Like Others (2008) is an intimate and unflinching documentary about life in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death and some gay young people are choosing legal sex change operations in the hope of escaping persecution. Italian directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini’s Back Home, Tomorrow (2008), meanwhile, examines the silent aftermath of war as it follows two wounded children in two different hospitals: one in Sudan, the other in Afghanistan.
Geoffrey Smith and Roberto Hernandez’s Presumed Guilty (2009) will close the festival on March 6. The film is the story of a young Mexican man wrongfully convicted of murder and the efforts of two lawyers to set him free.
An Opening Reception at McKinsey & Co. (110 Charles Street West), will follow the screening of Last Train Home on February 24 (Tickets are $100). The Toronto Network will host a Closing Reception at 6 p.m. on March 6 at the Moose Factory Gallery, 22 Grange Avenue. Tickets are $30. To purchase tickets for either reception, please call the Human Rights Watch office, 416-322-8448.
The opening-night screening will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West, Toronto. All other films will be shown at TIFF Cinematheque, in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall (317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, McCaul Street entrance.)
Advance tickets for the festival can be purchased online at tiff.net/cinematheque, by phone at 416-968-FILM or toll-free 1-877-968-FILM or in person at the TIFFG Box Office, 2 Carlton Street, West Mezzanine level (College subway station), from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Monday through Friday). Tickets cost $10.90 for adults; $6.45 for students and seniors, plus handling charges. Tickets for Cinematheque members are $6.45.
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For more information and/or press interviews, please contact:
Human Rights Watch Canada Committee:
Anne Wright-Howard
Tel: 416-922-2665
E-mail: anne_wright_howard@yahoo.ca
TIFF Cinematheque:
Lina Rodriguez
Tel: 416-934-3207
E-mail: lrodriguez@tiff.net
