Documentary Film Festival “Ukrainian Context” is to continue

The planned end to the festival season of Days of Documentary Human Rghts Films “Ukrainian Context” in Kharkiv has been postponed due to requests from other regions in Ukraine to show the films there.

The film festival which began in Kyiv and was supposed to finish this week in Kharkiv will be extended into next year in order to meet demand (for example, from Lviv and Donetsk).

72 documentaries from 22 countries are presented at the film festival The subject matter is dictated by life, and the Festival does not lobby any particular interests. Films made on commission are not included. The jury for the Festival is made up of human rights defenders, with the  criterion being how successfully the films have presented human rights issues.

The Festival’s director Gennady Kaufman explains the name “Ukrainian Context” as due to the fact that the program includes those films which “are seen through the spectrum of problems in Ukraine”. “The main feature of the films is their artistic merits”.

Yevhen Zakharov, Head of the Board of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union which is one of the founders of the Festival is convinced that it is not dry facts, statistics and reports which best speak of human rights, but works of art, competitions of posters, music and, of course, film.

Documentaries present enormous possibilities, he says, and “the rise in popularity of this festival demonstrates that the choice was correct.