(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – This year’s Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF) contains a mini-festival within the greater festival focusing on human rights, featuring screenings of six films that address issues of human rights and panel discussions on the subject. In partnership with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, BIFF presents three filmmakers and six documentaries, plus a panel discussion on human rights immediately following a screening of the award-winning film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator on Sunday, June 5 at 11:15 a.m. at the Triplex Cinema (theater #2).
From director Pamela Yates, Granito is part political thriller, part memoir. Yates transports us back in time through a riveting, haunting tale of genocide and returns to the present with a cast of characters joined by destiny and the quest to bring a malevolent dictator to justice. Granito will be screened on Friday, June 3 at 1:30 p.m. at the Triplex as well as Sunday, June 5 at 11:15 a,m.
The Green Wave is a memorial for those who believed in freedom and lost their lives in support of Iran’s Green Revolution. The film uses animation, interviews, blogs, tweets and cellphone footage to bring the audience into the streets with the protestors. It will be shown on Saturday, June 4 at 9:30 a.m. at the Triplex.
Patrick Reed directs The Team, which focuses on Kenyans as they scramble to produce a controversial TV soap opera about a soccer team, confronting their country’s troubled past and uncertain present. It will be shown on Saturday, June 4 at 11:30 a.m. at the Triplex.
You Don’t Like The Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo features a Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, who is the last citizen of a western power being held in Guantanamo, after the U.S. government has accused him of killing an American soldier. The film will be shown on Saturday, June 4 at 1 p.m., in the Daniel Arts Center on the Simon’s Rock campus in Great Barrington.
Youth Producing Change lends the cameras to teen filmmakers from around the globe who document their own struggles for human rights and invite audiences to experience the world as they do. It will be screened on Saturday, June 4 at 4:15 p.m. at the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield, Mass., as well as on Sunday, June 5 at 9:15 a.m. at the Triplex.
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. Kinyarwanda is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the Imams who opened their doors to give refuge to the Tutsi and to those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.
The story interweaves six different tales that together form one grand narrative, providing the most complex and real depiction yet presented of life and human resilience during the genocide.
Tickets are $10 and are available for purchase at the Triplex, the Beacon, and the BIFF website. Tickets may also be purchased by phone through Ovation Tickets at 866.811.4111. For more information about BIFF programs, please visit the BIFF website.