Variety found at Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Still photo from “Fruits of Labor.”

The Museum of Photographic Arts is hosting its 12th annual virtual Human Rights Watch Film Festival from Feb. 2-8, featuring critically acclaimed films with topics including reproductive rights, the lives of foster youth, indigenous rights, poverty, inequality, and immigration reform issues. The festival serves to empower, educate and mobilize audiences throughout the country.

“The next generation of human rights advocates are leading the charge,” said Jennifer Nedbalsky, deputy director at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in a press release.

“This year’s edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival shines a spotlight on committed young leaders from Los Angeles to Texas to Karachi who are coming together to protect their reproductive rights, their communities and their future. This year’s lineup of films will spark conversations on issues that are happening in our own communities, including access to health care, the importance of supporting foster youth as they work towards their goals, the need for immigration reform and the power of indigenous voices.”

Films in this year’s festival include “On the Divide,” which addresses a small town on the U.S./Mexico border that is home to the last abortion clinic in the Rio Grande Valley, following three Latinx community members confronting death threats and social pressure navigating the impact of new public policies in the reproductive rights battle.

“Possible Shelves” is firsthand experiences of foster youth, a first documentary on lived experiences of foster youth rather than the foster youth system.

“The Stained Dawn” follows Karachi’s feminists who organize a woman’s march, coming up against Pakistan’s radical religious rights, following the Aurat March, but the act of political organizing in the hopes of spurring a revolution.

“Daughter of a Lost Bird” follows an adult Native adoptee as she reconnects with her birth family discovering her Lummi heritage and confronts issues of her own identity. Her story echoes many affected by the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Indian Adoption Project.

“Fruits of Labor” follows Ashley, a Mexican-American teenager in central California with dreams of graduating and going to college, and the challenges that she and her family face as a documented and undocumented family living in fear of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids threaten her family.

Ashley is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights at a food processing company. In a post-film pre-recorded Q&A featuring the director, producer and cinematographer, Emily Cohen Ibañez and the film subject and co-writer Ashley S. Pavon; Jen Nedbalsky, deputy director at Human Rights Watch Film Festival; and Vicki Guabeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, a national coalition convened by Alliance San Diego talk about the making of this film and its impact.

Pavon said she met Ibañez in 2014/15 while she was in a group Youth Growing Justice and said though she was used to being behind the scenes, she was a bit nervous about being in front of the camera.

“I knew this was something needed for my community because you never really see the reality of what is really going on, what the real obstacles are out there,” she said. “It was important to me to show the reality of what living under the shadow means and to advocate for the youth involved in the migrant families and the realities of what we are going through.”

Ibañez said she had been involved in the Strawberry Campaigns in Watsonville, California where the story takes place in the 1990s as a college student working with the United Farm Workers.

“Especially women, looking at the sexual harassment and her long time passion of working with labor organizing and being involved in the movement,” she said. “I got to know Ashley and she really stood out because at a very young age, not only was she looking for a better life for herself, but her community.”

Ibañez said after the 2016 election there was a developing narrative that the election of Trump was primarily because of working class, primarily male and white, felt alienated.

“That might have been a small piece of the story,” she said. “But that was not my experience in the representation of what I know of the working class in America. In towns like Watsonville, and there are towns like this across the country, the working class is brown. I wanted to challenge that dominate narrative. And what was happening when you move away from the border. The border actually follows people, and what it meant with the terror of ICE.”

She said this produced a gap in the labor in the strawberry fields because undocumented adults were extremely fearful to go to the fields and factories.

“It was children like Ashley who filled in the gap,” she said. “I did not see this story being told, so I felt that this needs to be told. And here I had this wonderful, articulate, passionate woman going through her last year in high school. I wanted it to be a coming of age story and wanted to see a woman, Ashley, coming into her own. There is a dearth of this type of information in coming of age stories.”

“We need to have these stories,” she continued. “We need to have these representations. When you look at a lot of dominant media, Latinos are cast as drug dealers, gang members, but we do not get a wider breadth of what the Latino experience is.”
Several films have prerecorded Q&A sessions to watch along with the films. To learn more about the Human Rights Festival visit www.ff.hrw.org.