GIHR Utilizes Cinema for Raising Awareness on Human Rights Issues
When GIHR announced the launch of its Arabic website on the 10th of Oct 2010, it commenced a media awareness project targeting Arabic speaking audience including human rights activists and practitioners based on GIHR’s vision of media in general and its website as a source of information and training vehicle which integrates and coincides with GIHR’s work on the ground in particular. Ever since, GIHR’s Arabic website assigned a section titled “Arts & the Human Rights” which is concerned with follow-up of news of related events.
With the start of 2011, GIHR confirmed it serious commitment to employ arts for serving human rights issues through launching its first short novel movie “Suspended”, which highlights sexual violence and discriminatory legal articles against women in the Arab region especially those articles which provides impunity to the rapist who marries his victim.
Today, we announce to all our Arabic speaking readers the launch of two new sections which confirm our utmost commitment to encourage all non-traditional methods of training and raising awareness of human rights issues since the objective is to disseminate human rights culture among wider audience through using the mode of expression with the greatest impact on societies “cinema”.
The first section, which we are pleased to introduce, is the “Guide to Human Rights Cinema”, where this window initially includes introduction of about 120 movies from all over the world, and in all cinematic formats (novel, documentary, long, short, cartoons ..), noting that the vast majority of movies is Egyptian production because of our intent to focus on Arabic movies during the initial phase, expanding, gradually, to cover the most important movie productions in this sphere regardless of language. The second section is “Human Rights Saturdays” which introduces the most important video clips used in human rights awareness-raising campaigns all over the globe.
We believe, at the GIHR, that dedicated movies are turning, day after day, into a collective human memory which unifies the misery and issues of contemporary human beings, and we hope that all those who concerned with human rights as well as human rights activists will cooperate with us in this sphere through making use of the new sections we made available recently, and through providing us with all suggestions and feedback that contribute to the international endeavors to disseminate and enact the values of citizenship and human rights culture.