- About Karama Human Rights Film Festival (HRFF)
Karama HRFF is the first international human rights film festival to be established in Jordan. Since the first edition in 2010, it has been at the eye-of-the-storm. Karama HRFF was close to the pulse of the most intense period of intellectual, moral, creative, and artistic creation in the Arab world and beyond.
Karama Human Rights Film Festival is usually a six-day international film festival held in Amman Jordan with a global partnership that aims to promote dialogue, engage in debate, build capacity, launch high-impact programs to address stressing topics concerning Human Rights issues in the Middle East, the North African region and beyond, through films, visual arts, music, seminars, forums, and art exhibitions.
During the past eleven years of Karama HRFF had more than 600 film screenings from 66 countries. In the genres of documentary, feature fiction, short fiction, and animation.
Through 11 seminars, 11 musical concerts, ten art exhibitions, and open-air wall screenings on old buildings (Cinema of the neighborhood), six youth forums, and 2 Networking Must Meet Meetings, Karama HRFF has established itself as a truly global platform from the Middle East.
It aims to advocate for human rights through film screenings, invite debate, encourage critical thinking and civic engagement, and open democratic dialogue about human rights issues among the various international, regional and local institutions and organizations and the wider public.
Main Screenings for the 12th edition
Karama Human Rights Film Festival will be held at the Royal Cultural Center from the 5th of December 2021 until the 10th of December 2021, at the main theatre and the round theatre halls implementing the safety procedures for physical screenings.
The virtual festival will take place on our online platform www.watch.eventive.org/karamafestival2020, which will start on the 5th of December 2021 until the 20th of December 2021.
Karama's Audience
Karama’s primary audience is the local general public, especially women and young people across Jordan. Furthermore, a good number of civil society activists and practitioners from direct relevant fields are also targeted and deliberately engage in the activities as being main stakeholders in this field. The festival also brings together many filmmakers, producers and other artists from Jordan, the region and the world. In addition to the main festival venues in Amman, screenings, discussions and workshops are also organized in schools and universities in Amman and other governorates; outreach screenings to date include: Zarqa, Irbid, Jarash, Ramtha, Ajloun, Karak, Jordan Valley, and Madaba.
In addition to the main festival venues in Amman, screenings, discussions and workshops are also other groups targeted by Karama are reached out through the Festival’s activities beyond its main event in December, and through the “KHRFF Package” which is disseminated to and shared with various festivals and similar relevant events in the region through ANHAR, the Arab Network for Human Rights Film Festivals.
Purpose of Karama HRFF:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Karama Human Rights Film Festival seeks to create a cross-cultural platform for artists, film-makers and the wider general public to engage in issues relating to human rights, in particular to the dignity of human beings, their sense of worth, belonging and spirit of common welfare among their communities and the wider national spectrum.
Our aim is to advocate for human rights, invite debate, encourage critical thinking and civic engagement, and open democratic dialogue about human rights issues among the various international, regional and local institutions and organizations, and the wider public.
Karama seeks to promote screen arts that involve human rights issues as their subject matter.
Our purpose is to reach local and regional audiences, especially young people across Jordan and the Arab World, and to provide them with a platform to engage in global, cross-cultural discussions focused on human rights issues through film narratives and discourse.
Karama HRFF aims to achieve the following:
- Direct understanding of issues around human rights violations that spectators will understand.
- More people to get engaged in the human rights discourse through film, art and the understanding of art as an act of resistance.
- Involve more youth through the outreach program as well as citizens of remote areas expected to assimilate a new knowledge towards the necessity of human rights as inherent rights.
- Networking and visibility of artists, human rights activists and filmmakers.
- Attract new human rights platform audiences through music and theatre performances and eventually involve them in the core related human rights screenings.