Solidarity Film Festival chronicles human rights struggles at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque

Amid the ongoing war with Hamas, the upcoming 12th Solidarity and Human Rights Film Festival will shine a light on human rights issues both locally and around the world. The festival will be held at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, as well as in Nazareth and Sakhnin, from December 3-10.

“The Solidarity Film and Human Rights Festival is being held in late 2024, when the heartbreaking events of October 7 are present in Israeli reality, as well as the ongoing regional war in Gaza and the North... with all its tangible threats to human rights and free cinematic creation,” said festival founder and director, Danny Wilensky, and artistic director, Gidi Avivi, in a statement. 

“The festival was organized out of a sense of commitment to the themes and values ​​that shape the festival and a desire to bring key socio-political issues into public discourse in Israel right now through the screening of groundbreaking films on human rights issues from Israel and around the world, films that strive to promote peace, democracy, and human rights alongside equality and social justice,” they continued.

“Given the situation in Israel and the world, it seems to us that the need for its existence this year at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and in Arab society is more essential than ever.”

The opening night film will be Ellbogen by Asli Ozarslan, about a teenager from a Turkish family in Berlin who becomes discouraged by her constant rejection in the job market and is pushed to commit an impulsive and desperate act.

The closing night movie will be Joy Sela’s The Other, a look at Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and how they continue their mission to encourage people to look at humanity on both sides of the conflict. 

The movie, which is also the opening night film in the Other Israel Film Festival in New York, features in-depth portraits and interviews with several activists who have continued their work in the face of the ongoing war with Hamas. These include people on both sides whose family members have been killed, among them Robi Damelin and Osama Elewat. Sela will attend the festival and will participate in a discussion at the screening. 

What the festival includes

The festival includes feature films, documentaries, short films, and student films from Israel and around the world. The festival will present the Emil Grunzweig Award, which is given by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel to individuals and organizations that have made an outstanding contribution to advance human rights in Israel. Susanne Rostock’s film Following Harry, a portrait of the late Jamaican-American singer and activist Harry Belafonte, will be shown at the ceremony. 

There will also be several prizes awarded in competitions. 

The festival will include several short documentaries by residents from the Gaza border region that focus on how they rebuilding their lives and communities. Hanan Al-Sanah, a movie by Yael Kipper and Ronen Zaretsky, is a portrait of a Bedouin lawyer who started the first Jewish-Bedouin help center in the wake of October 7; the center helps women feed their families and cope with the losses of relatives in Israel and Gaza. 

The struggle against ISIS is the subject of Hasan Oswald’s documentary Mediha, about a teen Yazidi girl who was kidnapped along with other family members by the Islamic extremist group and forced into sexual slavery. After her release, Oswald gave her a camera to document her recovery. The movie, which has won prizes around the world, shows how she copes with her trauma while she awaits the safe return of her family. 

Agnieszka Holland’s latest film, The Green Border, is a drama about a family of Syrian refugees, an English teacher from Afghanistan, and a border guard who meet on the Polish-Belarus border during a humanitarian crisis in Belarus. 

For the full program, go to www.cinema.co.il