Celebrating the 75th anniversary of UN Declaration of Human Rights through film

The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH), is held annually in March in Geneva, parallel to the main session of the UN Human Rights Council.

However this year, FIFDH coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, when countries around the world gathered in the aftermath of World War II, to ensure that its horrors would never be repeated. 

This year the Festival has 36 films with 7 world premieres; 21 debates, 10 of which will be live-streamed and expects to host nearly 220 international guests.

"There are 3 axes this year for the festival,” says Irène Challand, director of the FIFDH, “the problems of migrations, nationalisms; the problems of conflicts and wars [and] the problems of global warming. We are really in the middle of a mutation of society, from all points of view: geopolitical, societal, individual."

One film which touches on issues of war and migration within the fiction competition of the festival is "The Land Within”. It’s a story of a Kosovar migrant in Switzerland who must return to his country to exhume the ghosts of his past and identify his relatives found in a mass grave.

"This kind of story, that is, bodies that are buried and come out of a mass grave, is something that has happened in many places, not only in Europe, but in other continents as well,” says Fisnik Maxville, the director of the film.

Within the context of the continuing war in Ukraine and the humanitarian disaster it has created, the festival didn’t shy away from discussing difficult issues.

Spurred on by the planned screening of ‘We Will Not Fade Away’, a powerful Ukrainian film that follows the fears and dreams of 5 teenagers in Donbas before the Russian invasion, a debate