By Ruba Hattar
This year's 11th edition of the annual Karama Human Rights Film Festival session will go live from December 26th - January 7th. This edition's theme is the Memory of Being. The festival will display 14 documentaries, 4 long fiction films, 18 shorts and 4 animated films.
Karama Festival is film festival held in Amman, Jordan since 2010. After 10 editions of Karama Human Rights Film Festival, over 500 human rights films were screened over the course of 10 years of cinema activism and advocacy for human rights in Jordan and in the region. Around 8000 spectators from different fields come yearly to the event, attend, and participate in its diverse activities.
Managed and organized by Ma3mal 612 Think Factory, every year, the KHRFF event includes a number of interrelated activities: screening of films (feature, documentary and short) from different parts of the world; film discussions and debates with some of the films’ production teams; seminars & workshops; ‘MusiKarama’ which entails musical concerts and dance performances; the ‘Conscious of Art’ (Art and Photo Exhibition); Karama Atelier (an 8 week workshop that takes place before the Festival for the production of relevant films to be screened during the festival); and a series of mini conferences .
Karama seeks to promote screen arts that involve human rights issues as their subject matter, the organizers stress.
"Our purpose is to reach local and regional audiences, especially young people across Jordan and the Arab World, and to provide them with a platform to engage in global, cross-cultural discussions focused on human rights issues through film narratives and discourse."
After Karama’s launch in 2010, the festival gained the acknowledgement of many local, regional and international relevant stakeholders; official bodies, human rights organizations and activists, similar festivals, filmmakers and artists, donors, as well as the media.
The Karama team and packages were hosted by a great number of platforms both regionally and internationally, and have contributed largely to the establishment of five similar Human Rights Film Festivals in Tunis, Mauritania and Lebanon.
Moreover, along with a number of local partners, and under the management of Ashtar for Theater Production and Training, Karama has succeeded to jointly establish the Karama-Palestine HRFF (in December 2013), the Karama-Mauritania HRFF (March 2014), the Karama Beirut (July 2016), and the Karama Yemen (January 2019).
