Aside from the papers, the exams and your occasional hangover, life at U.Va. is pretty comfortable.
In an environment where opportunities are numerous and resources are at our disposal, it is often easy to ignore or overlook the realities of life elsewhere. If you don't hear it from a professor, the leader of your student organization or the Facebook News Feed, sometimes you don't hear it at all.
When "it" is a global human rights issue, we're in bad shape.
In hopes of bringing awareness to Grounds, the Organization of African States, La Alianza, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine, the Afghan Student Association, Amnesty International and OFFScreen have all come together to host Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival at U.Va. Running Nov. 5 through Nov. 15, nine films that focus on human rights issues in different nations around the world are being shown at various locations on Grounds.
Carefully selected by the student organizations responsible for bringing the festival to U.Va., the nine films are part of a larger collection screened originally at Human Rights Watch Film Festivals in New York and London. Every year, Human Rights Watch licenses the films to any venue interested in showing them. Of course, hosting the Traveling Film Festival takes money and planning.
"All the organizations have come together to pool resources monetarily and physically to make this work," said Jason Moran, a member of Sustained Dialogue -- another organization that is supporting the overall festival.
In addition to managing the expenses required for the festival, the organizations have secured speakers to preface each film and to help mediate a dialogue after each screening. The speakers include various professors and other experts on the films' subjects.
"Education is the primary goal of [the festival] ... but also to spur action because you want people to talk about it and by talking about it, encourage people to do something about it," Erin Kim of Amnesty International on Grounds said. "We're having a lot of speakers give suggestions about what we can do."
Though it is a busy time in the semester, the hosts of this event hope for a good turnout.
"I think the student body could benefit in so many ways; everyone has the chance to be exposed to a reality that is existing right now in a place that they might not know about," Stephanie deWolfe of OAS said. "By having all these different locations around the world being covered we could draw in lots of different interest groups and make them sort of sit together and talk together -- so they will be interacting but they will also be learning."
The fundamental goal of the film festival is to get the University community thinking and talking about the issues presented. Selected on the basis of artistic merit and accuracy by Human Rights Watch, the films are expected to be both interesting and educational.
"The Human Rights Film Festival offers the opportunity to make yourself busy in a different sort of way. Instead of going out on a Friday night or sitting in Clemons not actually getting any work done on a Tuesday night, you can take the time to see one of these films," Moran said.
Moran also hopes that because the festival runs for two weeks, students will "set down their textbook or solo cup or whatever it is" to try to catch at least one film. As an added bonus, the festival is free.
The complete list of screenings for the Human Rights Traveling Film festival can be found at www.uvahumanrights.com.
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