The Impact Days of the Geneva-based 21st International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) kicks off March 12 with a stated mission to channel the power of documentary film as a tool for concrete social and policy change. Over the course of three days, documentary creatives will unite with NGOs, governmental organisations and philanthropists, and other interested parties, to determine the impact strategies that will help effect meaningful change both in societal and policy terms.
“We deliver the voices of the artists and filmmakers that allow people to understand the discriminations and violations that people suffer,” underlines Impact Days Head Laura Longobardi of her event’s raison d’etre. “Film has this power to bring us to places where we would never go and discover things we would neither think of nor even know about. And we bring that point of view and that power of storytelling to an already very active ecosystem of different synergies that are working towards the protection and the advancement of human rights.”
2023 sees the 5th edition of Impact Days, following its launch in 2019. The core component of this year’s edition is the presentation of sixteen Impact Lab projects that address a soberingly wide range of human rights and social justice issues. As the event notes underline, these range “from violence against women in Turkey to human trafficking in Bangladesh, from Indigenous rights in Jordan to asylum procedures in Switzerland, from child soldiers in Yemen to reproductive rights in the Dominican Republic, from illegal industrialized fishing in West African waters to the ongoing violence of extractive industries in Peru, and more.”
The common goal of the Lab producers and the Impact professionals they will meet in Geneva is to address the root causes of the difficulties that each and all of the protagonists within these films suffer, and to devise subsequent Impact strategies to effect real change.
“We needed to bring them together,” Longobardi remembers the establishing ethos of her event back in 2019. “They needed to talk, because there were not many places where filmmakers could actually meet the NGOs and the activists to say, ‘We have this film, you have this campaign. We have this story, you have these goals. Let’s work together.’ And that’s really how it started.”
Longobardi underlines the obvious point that effective Impact needs extra funding, and this isn’t to be found within the documentary’s production coffers. “They [filmmakers] develop extra activity around the films. Maybe they will produce pedagogical material. Maybe they will produce a shorter version of the documentary that can go onto different platforms. Maybe they want to do screenings in remote areas. Maybe they need to rent a mobile cinema. It’s extra activities which are not commercial activities…and that has a cost.”
As Longobardi underlines, Impact Days exists to help filmmakers meet these extra costs. “What we are trying to do is to professionalize it, structure it and finance it in a way that it’s sustainable, and show that it’s not just something that you do in your free time. It’s actually a way to structure the film sustainably so that it can really grow in terms of impact.”
Longobardi further reminds how some European public funders are finally recognizing the need to support Impact. “We have this very strong and well-established system of public funding for production, development, production and distribution, and now there is also a possibility that some of these stakeholders will engage with impact. There was a recent announcement that the CNC in France will actually support the funding of impact because they realize that it’s a different way for films to travel, to find new audiences, to live longer.”
Highlights of the 2023 FIFDH Impact Days include three case studies on March 13 (including one on the Ukrainian film Peace for Nina, which illustrates the necessity for Impact in times of war). On the same day there will be a presentation by Don Edkins and Tiny Mungwe (STEPS, South Africa) on approaches to Impact on the African continent, as well as an afternoon session where filmmakers can meet potential global Impact partners.
In addition to the Impact Lab presentation of projects, March 14 will feature the launch of the #JeSuisNoires global campaign as part of the programme’s Swiss Focus, and an afternoon of one-to-one Impact meetings. The day is rounded off by a screening of Nick Read and Ayse Toprak’s My Name Is Happy, followed by a Q&A.
For the first time, Impact Days will offer a CHF10,000 francs award to boost the Impact campaign of one of the Lab selections. Longobardi further reveals that the programme will also be launching in 2023 a database of all the films selected for past Impact Days in order to date and track their progress.
“Maybe there is a film that was with us two years ago when still a project, and now maybe they’re finishing the film and ready to launch their Impact campaign, so we can reactivate the connections with the potential collaborations with the NGOs. We are really trying to be a platform throughout the year to facilitate the connection between filmmakers that need to launch campaigns on their films, and NGOs and organizations that are looking for the right films to collaborate on,” Longobardi ends.
