International Human Rights Film Festival Albania

 

A year ago, all of us were dreaming to open all together the fourth edition of the International Human Rights Film Festival at the Open-Air Theater, located in the green public garden of the “MARUBI” Academy of Film and Multimedia.  

Unfortunately, on February 26th, 2009, the open-air theater set by a tremendous amount of efforts by the “MARUBI” Academy of Film and Multimedia, was brutally destroyed by particular segments of the Albanian state, thus violating a number of educational and cultural rights, related to the Albanian Constitution and the Law of High Education, the Civilian and Penal Codes, as well as their relevant proceedings.  

These state segments, conducted by the former Minister of Culture Ylli Pango, ignored the justice agencies and degraded police machinery elements into the use of violence against the students, the academic and the IHRFFA’s staff, who gave their all to protect the open-air theater and IHRFFA, planned to be held in April 2009 and not to be cancelled.   

Compelled by this violent event, which is now marked as a bad memory of a sacked minister of culture, we decided to postpone IHRFFA, to come to these autumn days, and again, all of us together shall experience the human pain and revolts caused by repressive and dictatorial systems, structures or individuals from all over the world.  

In this edition, as well as before, we have tried in cooperation with the Selection Committee of IHRFFA, to select and bring to you topics and subjects, which even though they refer to other countries they shed light over the reality and different phenomena of Albanian society.   

The films show shocking views of anxiousness, dilemmas and taboos from the everyday life of our planet where moral, ethic and spiritual values are put into question marks, where individuals, social groups and different countries have lost every kind of perspective and hope towards their future. They have submitted themselves to their foretold and unchangeable fate, as if it was an eternal sentence for life.

Sold children, raped women, glorification of tyrants crimes and dictators, bribery, brain washing, given as a model of living, feudal oligarchies and nuclear polluters, who constrain the people to choose between poison and poverty, ethnic, religious and homophobic intolerance, these are some of the shocking frescos which shall accompany us during the days of the fourth International Festival of Human Rights in the premises of the Academy of Film and Multimedia “MARUBI”. 

If all of us, still believe that the truth is the meaning and the shelter of freedom, then it is time that we should state it first altogether, starting from oneself to the other and altogether we can spread the voice all over the global world, in order to release ourselves from the daily slavery yoke of violence, crime and manipulation. 

Allow me to thank you all and express my deepest gratitude to the IHRFFA Selection Committee and its partners, the staff and all the students, in particular those of the “MARUBI” Academy whose resistance enabled the fourth edition of IHRFFA.