Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 12th & DELAWARE opens the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
June 10-24
Tickets: $12, five-film pass $50
212-875-5601
www.hrw.org
www.filmlinc.com
When it comes right down to it, most film festivals are really unnecessary. Sure, it’s fun for a bunch of cineastes, us included, to catch the latest indie flick or foreign epic, but it’s also often an excuse for the glitterati to look fabulous and attend ultrahip after-parties. But there’s at least one film festival that is not only necessary but also essential: the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which begins June 10 at Lincoln Center with a benefit screening of Robert Connolly’s THE BALIBO CONSPIRACY, set in 1975 East Timor, and continues through June 24, showing seventeen features and several shorts. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 12th & DELAWARE, about the battle between an abortion clinic and a pro-life center across the street from each other, opens the festival on June 10, while Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith’s PRESUMED GUILTY, a harrowing tale of wrongful imprisonment in Mexico, closes things out on June 24. Raoul Peck’s MOLOCH TROPICAL, a political drama about his native Haiti, is the centerpiece selection. Other works examine the Angola 3, the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, same-sex marriage, disappearances during the Khmer Rouge siege of Cambodia, immigration reform, the farmer suicide epidemic in India, and other conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, and the halls of Congress. For more than two decades, the HRWFF has been presenting fiction and nonfiction films that, together, form a kind of shocking world news report, sharing unbelievable stories that we should be reading about in newspapers and on the Internet and watching on the news instead of waiting for these films each year. Many of the screenings are followed by panel discussions or Q&As with the filmmakers and participants. (Keep watching twi-ny for upcoming reviews of several festival films.)