7th Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival

The 7th Verzio finished 7 November, 2010. Close to 4000 interested viewers joined to watch a wide variety of creative documentaries and to discuss film and human rights in Budapest and Pécs.

Verzio 8 International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
November 8-12, 2011

Submit your film to Verzio FF
no entry fee, no restrictions on the production date, no resubmissions

Submission deadline: July 31, 2011

The 1500 euro Audience Award went to Roberto Hernandez & Geoffrey Smith's outstanding work Presumed Guilty. Congratulations!

Verzio Film Foundation offered a 100.000 HUF special prize to the Maria Takács's film Secret Years, the highest rated and most visited Hungarian documentary.

Duna TV has offered a special prize for outstanding achievement to Lixin Fan's documentary Last Train Home.

Our audience gave further high rating for Antonia Meszaros' film Denied, Sabine Lubbe Bakker & Ester Gould's Shout and Julie Bridgham's Sari Soldiers.

The team wishes to thank everyone who contributed: filmmakers, producers and the audience of course who joined us to see, think and talk about human rights and film.

See you next year!
Verzio team

Life in motion

From the moment of its birth cinema, the "moving image" has been all about movement. It has taken millions on virtual journeys across the world for over a century. Yet documentary cinema offers more than a voyeuristic exposure to the exotic and unknown: its stories are moving in a different sense too – bringing the remote closer and at the same time exposing the complexity of the world around us.

Our program this year focuses on movement in the most diverse senses. Verzio International Panorama includes films on macro-scale migratory movements seen through individual stories of families from China, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, Congo, Ethiopia, or Chechnya (Last Train Home, Long Distance Love, The Town of Badante Women, The Arrivals, Nowhere in Europe) and journeys through time, which question our constructs of the past and the present - in the context of the Holocaust and WWII, the troubled history of Yugoslavia, or Israeli-Palestinian relations approached unexpectedly through the history of Jaffa orange trade (A Film Unfinished, A Long Road Through Balkan History, Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork). A personal story about moving from one flat to another in St. Petersburg offers insights into the complex legacy of socialist communal living in the new capitalist context (pereSTROIKA). This year our festival guest is the Dutch festival Movies that Matter (the Hague). Together we show films that draw our attention to human rights and situations in which these rights are at stake – be it Nepal, the Middle East, or Tibet (Sari Soldiers, Shout, Tibet in Song). Human rights violations can be found closer home too, and Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) makes a video advocacy case by focusing on the situation of Roma in Hungary with the screening of the film Without Rights.

In cooperation with the Russian State Film and Photo Archive, Verzio presents a retrospective of early Soviet expedition films A Sixth Part of the World, named after a ground-breaking early work by Dziga Vertov. The panorama is intended to present the diversity of the short-lived genre of expedition cinema, oscillating between ethnography and propaganda. The films cover such diverse parts of the Soviet Union as Pamir, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East, and Jewish settlements in Crimea and Birobidzhan (Roof of the World, Dagestan, The Tungus, Bukhara, Jews on the Land, Birobidzhan). Another retrospective spotlights different parties' propaganda films from the period of 1945-49 and explores the contexts and uses of the documentary format for propaganda and political manipulation. Last, but not least, we open a Visual Laboratory envisioned as a multi-purpose space reserved for debate and "close reading" of films with the aim of enhancing critical thinking and visual literacy skills.

This year Verzio offers you an exciting roadmap of contemporary and historical documentaries; make your own itinerary and get going!

Oksana Sarkisova
Verzio Program Director