Guest post by Alexandra Coțofană, Director, ILFF.
In 2017, the InLight Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (ILFF) is honored to partner with the IU Cinema, one of its most trusted partners every year. ILFF aims to promote and support the intersections of human rights and documentary film and to facilitate dialogue between those who make documentaries and our Bloomington community. ILFF was started by a group of graduate students interested in human rights and documentary film, in both theoretical and practical ways. ILFF was thus shaped by students for students and has two main pillars: 1) new and powerful documentaries; 2) academic events, meant to engage the undergraduate, graduate and faculty members at Indiana University Bloomington with professionals and scholars in the field of human rights documentary filmmaking.
As one of the few human rights documentary film festivals in the Midwest and one of the few in the world staffed solely by students and faculty, ILFF has a strong academic focus, meant not only to inform through films and debates, but to educate and train through scholarly roundtables and master classes. Documentary films have long been used as effective teaching aids and, at the same time, as tools for public debate on contemporary socio-political issues. By continuing our festival, we wish to create a bridge to facilitate dialogue between professionals in documentary film and scholars of all ages, and we thank the IU Cinema for supporting us every step of the way.
We started this festival because we believe it is vital for students to find out about human rights violations around the world. In doing so, we believe the presence of film directors, producers and protagonists is extremely important for our screenings, our Q&As, our roundtables and events. Time and again, we have seen young minds and hearts change through our festival, we have seen students talk to our guests and start on the journey of documentary filmmaking or activism themselves.
More than students, film festival organizers and instructors to young minds on campus, we at ILFF are migrants. Some of us are first generation migrants and are lucky enough to call Bloomington home, and a nest of knowledge from where to grow. Others of us are children and grandchildren of migrants, and have our heritage to thank for our work ethic, drive and will to help others.
This year, more than ever before, we want our students to engage with stories of refugees around the world and we believe that these stories would greatly benefit and unite our students and Bloomington community. As such, for the 2017 festival, we are putting together a special program called the ILFF Spotlight on the Refugee Crisis. We organize this as homage to our parents, professors and students who all came from elsewhere, as support to all of the recent statements of universities like IU Bloomington to protect our communities, and as an act of commitment that we stand by all who fear their otherness would be used against them.
Like every year, our work and initiatives have been generously supported by our many partners: the IU Cinema, the IU Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), CLACS, the Department of Anthropology, the Indiana University Funding Board, the School of Global and International Studies, the Center for the Study of Global Change, the Department of Political Sciences, the Borns Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of International Studies, the Department of Gender Studies, the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, the Sawyer Seminar, and Austen L. Parrish, Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law.
Special thanks go to our faculty advisor, Joshua Malitsky (Associate Professor in the Media School and Director of the Center for Documentary Research and Practice), and to Christiana Ochoa (Professor of Law and Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow; Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs; Associate Director, IU Center for Documentary Research and Practice), who have given us their full support in partnering with us through the Sawyer Seminar to organize the ILFF Spotlight on the Refugee Crisis.
InLight Human Rights Documentary Film Festival takes place at Wylie Hall and IU Cinema April 7 – 9, 2017.
Alexandra Coțofană is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology and Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar Doctoral Fellow for the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, within the Media School and Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington.