The 15th edition of the Movies that Matter Festival, the yearly film festival with human rights at its core, has announced its full programme.
From 24 March to 1 April, the festival will present over 90 films – including 14 world premieres, 1 European and 29 Dutch premieres – in The Hague and in cities across the Netherlands. The festival will be opened by Gunay Uslu, State Secretary for Culture and Media, and kicks off with the world premiere of Waves of War by Daan van Citters, in which Citters and actor Joenoes Polnaya retrace the footsteps of their grandfathers during the Indonesian Independence War.
Waves of War (original title: Kleinkinderen van de Oost) screens as part of the Grand Jury Documentary Award, which, together with the Grand Jury Fiction Award, is one of the two international competitions of the festival. The Movies that Matter Festival also features three thematic competitions: the Activist Competition, featuring eight documentaries about the work of human rights activists; Camera Justitia, which zooms in on the importance of the rule of law and the fight against impunity; and Dutch Movies Matter celebrating films from the Netherlands that broaden views on human rights. Twenty-five international shorts will compete in the Shorts Competition and a student jury from Leiden University will pick their Students’ Choice.
This year, the festival also focuses on Iran and invites three Iranian filmmakers as main guests: Nafiss Nia, Maryam Ebrahimi and Ali Asgari. Part of the festival’s Specials, the Iranian Classics programme pays tribute to Iranian cinema, with screenings of A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011), Taxi Teheran (Jafar Panahi, 2015) and Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi, 2007).
Margje de Koning, artistic director of the Movies that Matter Festival, comments: “This year’s focus is on Iran, a country where human rights are routinely violated, demonstrations for women’s rights are the order of the day and dissent is often still brutally suppressed. This focus does not mean that the festival closes its eyes to other subjects. The world is on fire. A brutal war in Ukraine rages on, there is famine in Yemen, there are floods due to climate change, and freedom of expression is under pressure worldwide. Movies that Matter obviously cannot and will not shirk this. We have a rock-solid film selection on all of these topics, so they will not go unseen and undiscussed.”
As part of the Movies that Matter Industry Days (25 – 29 March), the three Iranian filmmakers are also leading the Take on Iran on Saturday, 25 March.
Another highlight of the industry programme is the Women at Risk on Sunday 26 March with speakers Sigal Yehuda of independent international NGO Close-Up; Ukrainian director and screenwriter Zhanna Maksymenko Dovhych; festival programmer, distributor, and producer of Iranian cinema Elaheh Nobakht; UK-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin Zainab Al-hariri; Rintu Thomas, director and producer of Writing With Fire; and Swedish-Iranian documentary filmmaker Maryam Ebrahimi.
On Monday 27 March, the Take on Film & Impact programme will feature a keynote by South African based scriptwriter and producer Anita Khanna and the panel Ukraine Testifies: the Power of Film in the Court of Law. A group of 12 projects have been selected for the Take on Film & Impact Lab, a two-day training programme with coaching sessions led by experienced impact producers and strategists to (further) develop their impact goals and strategies for their films.
Eight projects are taking part in the festival’s third edition of the Rough Cut Service, and twelve starting and more experienced film festival professionals from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe will come together for the five-day workshop and networking programme Cinema without Borders.A special double feature of the shorts La Última Ascensiòn (Kevin Osepa, winner Golden Calf 2022, Best Short Film) and We Are All Equal (Catrien Ariëns) on 31 March in collaboration with Black Achievement Month as part of the Slavery Memorial Year in the Netherlands, is another highlight of the festival’s Specials. Dagmar Oudshoorn, director of Amnesty Netherlands and chair of the advisory committee of the Dialogue group on the History of Slavery opens the evening. The screening is followed by a panel discussion.
