WATCH DOCS is one of the major human rights film festivals worldwide. The festival’s creators aim to promote ambitious, socially engaged documentary films.

The agenda of the 7-day festival includes more than 60 films from all over the world. The screenings will be accompanied by meetings with filmmakers and characters appearing in presented films, debates with experts and human rights defenders, lectures and workshops. The Festival will conclude on Thursday 15 December.

The competition

Twelve outstanding documentaries from different parts of the world will compete for the WATCH DOCS Award this year. In addition to Jonathan Littell’s Wrong Elements, this section will feature such documentaries as Hooligan Sparrow, directed by Nanfu Wang, a portrayal of Ye Haiyan, a Chinese activist known for her unconventional ways of advancing the rights of sex workers, whose nickname made the film’s title. The protagonist departs to the Hainan province to protest in defense of six girls sexually abused by a local school’s headmaster. Nanfu Wang’s film was screened and won acclaim at Sundance, Hot Docs, One World and Movies That Matter, among others festivals.

The competition will also include Forever Pure, directed by Maya Zinshtein, a documentary about two special years in the history of Beitar Jerusalem, one of the most famous Israeli football clubs. Most of Beitar’s fans are orthodox Jews convinced that no Arab player should ever play in the club. However, the club’s owner, Russian oligarch Arkady Gaydamak, decides otherwise and puts two Muslim footballers on the team.

Another contender in the competition is A 157, the work of the Kurdish director Behrooz Nooranipoor, which is a heartbreaking depiction of the extreme hardship the Yazidis people under the ISIS rule. A 157 is the number of a tent in a refugee camp at the border between Iraq and Turkey, which shelters three single Yazidi women: Hailin, Roken and Soolaf.

DIY Country, by the British documentarian Anthony Butts, is another candidate for the WATCH DOCS Award. It presents an insider’s account of the birth of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine and reveals the Novorossiya leaders’ complicity in corruption, nepotism and electoral fraud.

Film sections

The program of this year’s WATCH DOCS festival consists of three permanent sections: "I Want to See," devoted to the most pressing problems related to human rights violations; "New Polish Films," a selection of the best Polish social documentaries; and the section of engaged short films "Watch Shorts."

"Reenactment. The Politics of Remembrance," another thematic section of the 16th IFF WATCH DOCS, will be devoted to the policy of remembrance and general historical policy. An important item on the Festival’s agenda will be the section "Populism. Reactivation," discussing the problem of the right-wing populism in Europe. The focus of another IFF section, "Microphone Check," will be freedom of speech.

Admission is free to all screenings and satellite events during the festival.