Between 6-11 November Verzio Human Rights Documentary Film Festival brings you an exciting selection of documentaries showing a variety of interpretations of today’s state of affairs. It presents categories such as Human Rights Competition, a Student & Debut Films Competition, Hungarian Panorama, as well as thematic blocks including the world of labour (Labour: Our Life), the entangled and contested memories (Shapes of Memory), and the state of our planet (Our Earth: Breaking Limits).

In the Hommage section you’ll be able to watch the last works of two extraordinary filmmakers, Claude Lanzmann and Michael Glawogger, while the section named Wapikoni’s Friends is also worth a check: it is a collection of short films shot by young, indigenous amateur filmmakers in Canada.

The program films present stories about today’s anxiety and hope. They lower the distance between us and people living in other countries or continents, and help us see and understand the world as an interconnected place whose survival and well-being is our shared responsibility. While these films are traces of the present, they are directed towards the future. Just like John Webster’s Little Yellow Boots – filmed as a cinematic letter to his future great-grandchild – every film is a time capsule, and the more people it reaches with its touching messages, the more its traces are going to last.

We are all carriers of multiple traces, from the inheritance of our genetic code to the physical and digital prints that we leave behind with each touch of the digital screen. This year’s festival program thus constitutes an intangible imprint; if we engage with the films and the questions they address, the course of the future might also change. For venues and the complete schedule, please check out the official website of Verzio Film Festival.

Plastic China – 15 November – 9.30 pm

Dreaming of attending school, 11-year-old Yi-Jie works alongside her family in a recycling facility in China. She learns about the outside world through the trash it produces: small packages of powder allow her to taste coffee; she learns English from discarded greeting cards; and broken Barbie dolls become her best friends. Her father drinks away her tuition fees. The owner of the plant works night and day to buy a fancy car, ignoring his and his family’s physical and mental health problems. He looks down on Yi-Jie’s family, but depends on them to do the dirty work. Will Yi-Jie break out of the cycle of poverty or succeed her parents as an illiterate laborer?

For more info, click HERE.

City of the Sun – 16 November – 6 pm

Chiatura, in western Georgia, once supplied nearly half of the world’s manganese, but today it resembles an apocalyptic ghost town. The film follows a few of its remaining inhabitants: Zurab, the music teacher, who dismantles concrete buildings and sells their iron girders to provide for his family; Archil, a miner whose real passion is amateur theatre; and two young, malnourished athletes stoically training for the next Olympic Games. Director Rati Oneli provides insight into a living environment whose bleak industrial ruins appear like a colossal film set; a city where electrical wires and aging cable cars flow like clogged arteries in an ailing organism. And yet, in a city where the sun never seems to shine, the inhabitants generate the most valuable of resources – humanity.

For more info, click HERE.

Brass Bandits – 17 November – 7.30 pm

This documentary follows a music program in a primary school in Miskolc, Hungary, between September 2014 and September 2016. We see the music learning process, family backgrounds, living and social conditions in this Roma populated area. The music program brings a huge change in quality of life for the students. While learning music they learn also perseverance, discipline and teach one another to pay attention and focus.

For more info, click HERE.

The War Show – 17 November – 9.30 pm

When the Arab Spring reached Syria in March 2011, Obaidah Zytoon (a radio DJ) and her friends decided to join the street protests against the Assad regime and film the dramatic events. The regime’s brutal response and harsh repression crushed the atmosphere of excitement and any hope for change, leading the country instead into a bloody civil war. Obaidah and her friends witnessed the birth of the armed resistance, which, due to the incompetence of the international community, soon fell victim to the rising tide of extremism. A deeply personal road movie, it captures the fate of Syria through the intimate lens of a small circle of friends.

For more info, click HERE.

Leave/Stay: Sweet Home – 18 November – 8 pm

Sweet Home is the fourth episode of LEAVE/STAY documentary series on migration, life experiences, and the dilemmas of contemporary Hungarian youth, also nicknamed the generation of New Mobility. The episode comprises three independent stories of families returning home and facing major challenges in the process. All homecoming stories are different: some return due to success, some due to failure. Some set off alone and returned with a family. Some were homesick, some saw an opportunity coming home. The question in each and every case remains the same: will the ones who come back find their home again?

For more info, click HERE.