One would be hard-pressed not to notice the difficult state of human rights around the world. But the increasing intensity of people working hard to change that situation is also quite noticeable. Documentary film plays an increasingly important role here, just as it continues to experience a certain renaissance. The number of film festivals concerning human rights, the size of their audiences, number of guests and volunteers all continue to grow. The human rights film festival formula continues to be extremely attractive and is, in fact, becoming a social movement of increasing reach. WATCH DOCS persists as one of the most long-standing fixtures on the global map of such events. It is a place for encounters between filmmakers and individuals involved in NGOs, a space where commentary and discussion accompany film to become a powerful inspirational thread that binds many levels of cooperation and new friendship.
Lessons learned over many years spent preparing the WATCH DOCS program induced us to slightly modify its repertoire structure. Though not without regret, we decided to not organize a short film competition in 2009. The WATCH DOCS competition will now be the festival's only competition. This year's record number of submissions has made that repertoire section incredibly impressive.
The festival's ninth edition will inaugurate a second permanent program section, "I Want to See," a title inspired by the excellent film of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Jorejge (WATCH DOCS 2008). It will include films on events and issues currently in the sights of human rights activists. Many excellent films of this kind were left out in previous years of the WATCH DOCS repertoire because festival themes limited the selections. Without taking our focus off the importance of form, we would like to reinforce the festival's informational value with a focus on human rights. "I Want to See" is a panorama that will present the best new films concerning the most important problems related to observance and, all too often, violations of individual rights.
By introducing "Close-up," another permanent section to the WATCH DOCS repertoire, we return to the great experiences of previous festival editions. This section will be devoted to human rights in a different region of the world each year. Festival retrospectives on Africa (2002, 2005), CIS (2002, 2006), USA (2003), Latin America (2004) and Asia (2006) were extremely popular among viewers. Focusing on a selected region provides a fuller context, with broader political and cultural perspective for the presented human rights issues and portraits of their defenders. The first edition of "Close-up" presents films about the post-Soviet sphere with Eastern European social documentary classics setting this broader context. Directors such as Kossakovsky, Dvortsevoy and Asliuk masterfully relate the social alienation of Russian intelligentsia or the passage of Belarusian village life into irretrievable history.
We continue two permanent repertoire sections, "Discreet Charm of Propaganda," and "New Polish Films," while this year's thematic retrospectives focus on ties between business, power and human rights violations ("Money Feels Fine"), underground documentaries made without permission of authorities ("Cinematic Resistance - documentary underground"), drug policy and 20 years of democracy in Central Europe ("V4 - Report on Democracy"). WATCH DOCS welcomes new partners, including the Powiększenie (Eng. - Blow-up) club, which is the perfect setting for screening two excellent music-related documentaries, about the famous Russian rock group "Leningrad," as well as Jakarta's Kantata Takwa concert that shook the Suharto regime.
As each year, after the international festival in Warsaw, WATCH DOCS will embark on a journey throughout Poland. Cooperation with dozens of partners throughout the country will allow the WATCH DOCS Traveling Film Festival to visit over 30 Polish cities and towns in 2010. Once again, support from the Civic Initiatives Fund, enabled us this year to establish WATCH DOCS video libraries in teens of Polish universities. Selected films from the festival's history will now serve the teaching staff in educating students of various departments.
WATCH DOCS is increasingly becoming a multi-vector project which annually culminates in, and therefore also begins anew through, December's Warsaw Festival. Please accept our sincere invitations to its many events, for the ninth year in a row!
Maciej Nowicki
Konrad Wirkowski
